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The author of this article is making terrible mistakes in the other direction. He attributes failures of entire technologies to single issues. ATM wasn't killed

by hueving 11y ago

The author of this article is making terrible mistakes in the other direction. He attributes failures of entire technologies to single issues. ATM wasn't killed just because of design failures, it was killed in large part because of being crushed by Cisco. Ethernet fabrics were fucked up by Juniper's poor execution, not because they are a bad design. This thought process leads to unoriginal and restrictive thinking. Take the following bullet point: "Central Controller = single failure domain". When you see that he wants you to think designs with controllers are crap. However, Google's network uses a central controller to distribute policy and make QoS optimizations. If all of it's members go down (it's also a distributed system) it doesn't take down the network, you just lose some optimizations. This gets them much better utilization >90% than the run-of-the-mill BGP folded clos junk that 'experienced network engineers' churn out today. Sorry for venting, but I see this guy's attitude very frequently in the network engineering community. "Oh, someone tried something like that once, and it didn't work, so we are going to refuse to do anything that has an overlapping concept." It's no wonder we still use command-lines and have to script SSH sessions to configure things. This industry is stagnant as hell.

guelo 11y ago
> script SSH sessions Using TCL?
Gibbon1 11y ago
I sort of remember ATM from descriptions back in the early 90's. Seemed like just the thing if you were a Telco wanting to efficiently send voice packets coast to coast and over-charge the customer for each and every bit. As a protocol for sending cat pictures and porn, not so good. Friend of mine in industry referred to the conversion between IP packets and ATM packets and back as a meat grinder. As in your packets get chopped into bits sent over the wire and if you are lucky all bits make it through and you get a fully assembled packet on the other side. If not you get to retry the whole packet again. And of course you get charged for ATM packets even though you couldn't use them. I think Cisco added an option where if you were using their equipment on both sides you could turn off the IP to ATM packet conversion. Which everyone immediately did. Sayonara ATM.
cbd1984 11y ago
You know what would be nice? If there were a good place to learn which technologies were dead, dying, or had gone niche instead of becoming mainstream. Your rant implies ATM is in one of those categories, but it's surprisingly hard to find places which actually say that instead of being all polite (or whatever concept is in play here) and pretending that it's just as mainstream as DOCSIS or Ethernet. Maybe it's too much to ask for. Maybe there's always going to be too much bias and... I don't know... hurt feelings?... for something like that to exist. It certainly wouldn't be a nice thing to have if you were in the business of selling ATM "Solutions".
- fulafel 11y ago
  ADSL is ATM, so not entirely dead yet.

by hueving 11y ago

guelo 11y ago

> script SSH sessions Using TCL?

Gibbon1 11y ago

I sort of remember ATM from descriptions back in the early 90's. Seemed like just the thing if you were a Telco wanting to efficiently send voice packets coast to coast and over-charge the customer for each and every bit. As a protocol for sending cat pictures and porn, not so good. Friend of mine in industry referred to the conversion between IP packets and ATM packets and back as a meat grinder. As in your packets get chopped into bits sent over the wire and if you are lucky all bits make it through and you get a fully assembled packet on the other side. If not you get to retry the whole packet again. And of course you get charged for ATM packets even though you couldn't use them. I think Cisco added an option where if you were using their equipment on both sides you could turn off the IP to ATM packet conversion. Which everyone immediately did. Sayonara ATM.

cbd1984 11y ago

You know what would be nice? If there were a good place to learn which technologies were dead, dying, or had gone niche instead of becoming mainstream. Your rant implies ATM is in one of those categories, but it's surprisingly hard to find places which actually say that instead of being all polite (or whatever concept is in play here) and pretending that it's just as mainstream as DOCSIS or Ethernet. Maybe it's too much to ask for. Maybe there's always going to be too much bias and... I don't know... hurt feelings?... for something like that to exist. It certainly wouldn't be a nice thing to have if you were in the business of selling ATM "Solutions".

fulafel 11y ago
ADSL is ATM, so not entirely dead yet.