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"The internet routes around failure" hasn't been true for a long time. It refers to the original topography which has been replaced with a hub and spoke model.
by fredophile 5y ago
"The internet routes around failure" hasn't been true for a long time. It refers to the original topography which has been replaced with a hub and spoke model. Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet.
- Iv 5y agoDisabled? Throttled down the speed by half? Yes. But to disconnect whole regions, you have to do conscious sabotage and even Mubarak did not manage to switch off Egypt when he wanted to and gave orders to.
- paxys 5y agoWhat original topology are you talking about? There was never a time when your end consumer device could be used as even a semi-reliable web server.
- Teever 5y ago> There was never a time when your end consumer device could be used as even a semi-reliable web server. I dunno man, My used T420 laptop is serving several sites over a residential symmetrical fiber connection just fine.
- fabianhjr 5y agoMore P2P between research centers on the time of ARPANet; though it wasn't widely used or available back then.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y agoIf you have a cable connection today, you can serve reliably just fine. Throughput isn’t the best and there are other minor issues, but it’s reliable enough for most people’s purposes.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoCoaxial cable connections in the US have such meager upload bandwidth that cable ISPs do not even bother advertising or specifying a minimum upload bandwidth.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y agoYeah, but I’ve been able to stream music from my desktop to my phone while driving and run a web server with reasonable performance on one.
- doubled112 5y agoIt's more than adequate for personal use. I've also been serving myself and a few friends for years. Download being 300Mpbs but upload 20Mbps IS kind of irritating though. When did 100Mbps become popular for home LANs even?
- lotsofpulp 5y agoCovid lockdowns helped with video calls, but ever since FaceTime came out, lack of upload became way more noticeable Also, smartphone proliferation made streaming from home NAS very convenient, as well as home security cameras and smart home features. I disagree that current upload capacities are adequate. With 1Gbps+ upload connections standard, we might actually see privacy forward solutions that do not require us to depend on cloud services.
- ScaleneTriangle 5y agoHere in Canada all the modem/router combo units from large providers are gigabit for LAN. In pretty sure that it's been that way for at least 5 years. I'm pretty sure new PCs and laptops have had gigabit standard for probably about 10 years. Enthusiast and prosumer motherboards are now coming with 2.5 gigabit networking.
- h2odragon 5y agohttps://thecrow.uk/A-Gov.uk-site-dedicated-to-porn-Absolutely/ https://thecrow.uk/A-Gov.uk-site-dedicated-to-porn-Absolutel... From yesterday. Note the bit about being on a Pi. Stood up quite admirably to an HN hug. From 1998 to 2004 I served a fairly large amount of traffic out of my homebuilt pentium in a trailer out in the woods with an ISDN line. We stood up to several media mentions OK.
- denton-scratch 5y ago> Stood up quite admirably to an HN hug. It was down when I tried it yesterday.
- cgriswald 5y ago> There was never a time when your end consumer device could be used as even a semi-reliable web server. Since about 1999 I have never NOT been running a server of some kind off my home connection. I wouldn't run a business off of it that way, but it's reliable enough to count on it which has to meet any sane definition of semi-reliable. The two biggest problems I've had have been essentially unrelated to the internet. The first is when I've been violating TOS of the ISP or the power was unreliable in the place I lived.
- rabbits77 5y agoI worked at a small ISP/web host in the late 90s. A very common web server at the time was a cheap white box PC running Windows NT and IIS. We had many of these systems on this interesting “rack” that was more like a multi level table or three d chess board. These systems could handle a ton of traffic very reliably. Consider that there was very little dynamic content and what there was barely taxed the CPU at all (e.g. a Perl CGI script to query and display some tiny amount of data from (LOL!) an Access database.
- justinjlynn 5y agoIf it works well and works reliably, even when it needs to be changed quickly - it's not a bad solution, unless it costs too much.
- ip26 5y agoIf by “remove a few hubs” you mean level a few major colo’s then ok, but as far as I can tell there is not any single strand of glass or single switch or single server that can take everything down with it.
- toast0 5y agoThe DNS root is pretty well distributed. There's 13 different IPs run by several different organizations, and AFAIK they're all running anycast these days. And anyway, the root zone is tiny, changes infrequently and could really be AXFRed a couple times a month and you wouldn't miss much. The larger tlds aren't quite as diversely hosted and certainly aren't amenable to long term caching, but it should take a major f up to break those too. Some of the minor tlds, even the more popular ones do screw up from time to time though.
- throw0101a 5y ago> As of 11/26/2021 10:53 p.m., the root server system consists of 1477 instances operated by the 12 independent root server operators. * https://root-servers.org https://root-servers.org * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server
- dylan604 5y agoYou don't need to level the colos, you just need someone to make a typo in a router config that gets deployed live so the whole colo is unreachable. How many times have we seen an AWS/CloudFlare/otherLargeProvider have this happen to them?
- toast0 5y agoBack in the 90s when I got on, so much of traffic was exchanged at MAE-West or MAE-East, and a backhoe in Iowa could make nearly all the cross-US traffic go through Europe and Asia instead. These days, there are lively public internet exchanges up and down both coasts, in texas and chicago and elsewhere. A well placed backhoe can still make a big mess, many 'redundant fibers' are in the same strand, and last mile is fragile, but if my ISP network is up to the local internet exchange, there are many distinct routes to the other coast and a fiber cut is unlikely to route my traffic around the world.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kingcharles 5y agoGod, this would happen all the time in the mid-90s. You joke about a backhoe in Iowa, but I'm pretty certain it was a backhoe in Iowa one time. Then the whole of the UK's traffic to the USA West Coast would be routed through an ISDN connection in Korea for three days. Your goat porn downloads from Usenet would drop from their high of 0.5Kb/sec and you'd be left with your dick in your hand. Or something.
- h2odragon 5y agoKids today will never know how we suffered in the Before Times
- peoplefromibiza 5y agoback in the 90s all the Internet traffic in Italy was routed around two big hubs, hosted in two public universities (it was mainly one, in Rome). Internet is much more reliable now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GARR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GARR I studied CS in Rome at "La Sapienza" and I was merely 10 steps away from INFN (national institute for nuclear physics) where GARR phisically resided. I spent more time there than in my class. That's how I got involved in this new "internet thing".
- throw0101a 5y ago> Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet. "A few hubs"? Just Hurricane Electric has presence in many, many IXPs, and they're not even the largest transit provider: * https://bgp.he.net/AS6939#_ix https://bgp.he.net/AS6939#_ix AT&T, the largest transit provider, has a ridiculous number of peers: * https://bgp.he.net/AS7018#_peers https://bgp.he.net/AS7018#_peers And there are several different major global providers: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network A lot of the Big Tech companies are also building their own private fibre networks so they don't even have to worry about sharing infrastructure with the telcos: * https://www.submarinecablemap.com https://www.submarinecablemap.com
- unethical_ban 5y agoI didn't RTFM but I could see the argument that the SPOFs of the Internet are AWS, Cloudflare and Google, not the cables and routers in an IXP.
- throw0101a 5y agoThe article is about BGP and Internet Routing Registry (IRR): routing.
- xwolfi 5y agoYou alread listed 3 single points of failure. I get what you mean: the entry point search engine, the global cache and the global backend/storage/compute. But look I live in Hong Kong, I dont feel that way: there are other backends, we could survive without the caching for a while and Google is forbidden for 1.4bn people who get on with it very well... Depends what you call the internet. Yes, facebook and whatsapp are gone the minute one of those 3 companies screwed up.
- rdp36 5y agoOK, you think 1.4 billion people without the freedom to search is ok? LOL.
- Ekaros 5y agoAnd hub here could refer to entity like Level3... One day, no more money. Just turn of the power on everything and start liquidating... Or someone isn't there anymore to fix stuff when it breaks or changes are needed...
- tialaramex 5y agoBob Metcalfe repeatedly predicted a "gigalapse" which he defined as a loss of one billion hours of Internet connectivity. Bob would say look at how fragile this all is, and his point wasn't (although at the time it would too often be portrayed this way) "the Internet will fail" because Bob isn't actually an idiot, but it also shows a substantial lack of foresight anyway. Of course ~everybody will have the Network, the Internet is the Network, and so then normal sleep is an order of magnitude worse than a "gigalapse" yet happens every day and we don't even care. The "gigalapse" seemed like a big deal because proportionally a billion user hours in 1995 is everything doesn't work for days, or most things don't work for several weeks... but today of course it could also be everybody in the world is inconvenienced for about long enough to make breakfast. Oh no.
- fragmede 5y agoIf a Gigalapse is about 12 minutes these days (given 4.66 billion people on the Internet), a Teralapse would be about 9 days of no Internet for all of us.
- redisman 5y agoWhat a fascinating experiment that would be. I’d imagine the majority of people would have no idea what to do without the internet for days. Does my remote job e been exist? It would be surreal