HL: Does it Work?

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Worth Reading: Negative vibes on the ICANN transition

It’s an unspoken truth that the reason it has taken 10 years longer than originally anticipated for the US government to hand over control of the “IANA functions” to ICANN is because the govt agency in charge – the National Technology and Information Administration (NTIA) – has always been mildly despairing of how its experiment in representational democracy has turned out. Far from creating an organization that was able to reflect the extraordinary collective effort that made the internet possible, ICANN has become an unwieldy monster: riven with politics, brimming with self-importance, driven almost entirely by status and insider concerns, and never looking outside its own bubble unless under threat. via the register

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Worth Reading: The changing mobile landscape

Rather than a large pool of potential suppliers who are strongly motivated to compete with each other by building to the specifications provided by the cellular access providers, the concentration of supply has lead to a different dynamic where the platform providers are able to effectively dictate their terms and conditions to the mobile access network operators. Interestingly this, in turn, has emboldened some of the larger application providers to flex their market muscles and in turn set forth in their own direction. via circle id

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Intellectual virtue and the engineer

On the 19th of January in 2009, Captain “Sully” Sullenberger glided an Airbus A320 into the Hudson River just after takeoff from LaGuardia airport in New York City. Both engines failed due to multiple bird strikes, so the ditching was undertaken with no power, in a highly populated area. Captain Sullenberger could have attempted to land on one of several large highways, but all of these tend to have heavy traffic patterns; he could not make it to any airport with the power he had remaining, so he ditched the plane in the river. Out of the 155 passengers on board, only one needed overnight hospitalization.

There are a number of interesting things about this story, but there is one crucial point that applies directly to life at large, and engineering in detail. Here’s a simple question that exposes the issue at hand—

Do you think the Captain had time to read the manual while the plane was gliding along in the air after losing both engines? Or do you think he just knew what to do?

Way back in the mists of time, a man named Aristotle struggled over the concept of ethics. Not only was he trying to Continue reading

Worth Reading: Anycast TCP

But recently, some popular CDNs have also started using anycast for HTTP traffic. This gave us hope, because their TCP connection with end users would last for a similar duration as LinkedIn’s TCP connection to our end users. A Nanog presentation in 2006 claimed that anycast works. So, to validate the assumption that TCP over anycast in the modern internet is no longer a problem, we ran a few synthetic tests. -via catchpoint

Continue reading

Worth Reading: The FCC defends ‘net neutrality

The FCC’s latest legal brief defending its Open Internet Order, will represent the FCC’s “strongest possible” legal arguments for its Title II net neutrality case – a vainglorious legal fortress. In reality, the FCC’s legal case is closer to a magnificent beach sandcastle. via somewhat reasonable

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QOTW: Genius

“Genius is long patience,” but it must be organized and intelligent patience. One does not need extraordinary gifts to carry some work through; average superiority suffices; the rest depends on energy and wise application of energy. It is as with a conscientious workman, careful and steady…
Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

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Worth Reading: An EIGRP Scaling Puzzle

What’s more interesting than simply asking about scale, though, is to ask the “why” question… via packet pushers

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Worth Reading: Breach Presumption

The hipster view of data loss seems to be a shrug of the shoulders these days. As a society, we give up financial data to people that steal it so often that we barely care. We shrug our shoulders, sigh at the inconvenience, set up a new account or two, and move on. Yes, sometimes the damage is more serious than unauthorized charges on our Visa cards, but that’s rare enough to avoid societal outrage. Rather, we’ve simply gotten used to the breaches. via ethan banks

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Highlight: Jack of All Trades

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Worth Reading: How the IETF is fixing its open standards process

A number of changes have been put in place in the last year to improve the speed at which the IETF can operate. This final post in my series on open standards and open source models examines these changes, along with the tradeoffs. via network computing

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Reaction: Interoperate or Die

Ethan has an excellent post up on Interoperate or Die. Herewith, a few thoughts in response.

From my perspective, the importance of open standards in the world of network engineering can hardly be overstated. As networks become more complicated (or complex, depending on what word you want to use), having consistent interfaces will become increasingly important. Think of the old IP model — every transport runs on top of IP, and IP runs on top of every physical/link layer. Using IP as a “choke point” built a “wasp waist,” a single API everyone on both sides of the narrow point in the protocol layer could talk to.

in recent years, we’ve forgotten the wasp waist. We’ve built everything over HTTP, and everything over Ethernet over IP, and everything over GRE over IP, and… The entire stack, above IP, is a hornet’s nest of convoluted caverns and side halls pointing, apparently, everywhere at once (like the guy from the forest in The Point, above).

If you think of IP as an API (which is really what it is), the point is to have a single layer API between any two interacting systems. This creates a clean interaction surface that helps you to Continue reading

Worth Reading: Energy Prices and the Data Center

Energy is the biggest expense for data centers, and although efficiency improvements can help by reducing consumption, cost remains a critical factor in determining operating budgets. The recent crash in oil prices raises a number of questions about demand, but there’s more to the picture—especially for such a politically charged topic. via the data center journal

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Asteroid Mickey

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Highlight: Own the Problem

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Out with the old: Make removing old technology part of your culture

Friday afternoon, late, and the new system is finally up. Users are logged in, getting their work done, and you’ve just received an email from the CTO (your boss’ boss’ boss’ boss, probably), saying what a good job the team did in getting things up and running so quickly. For once, in fact, the system went in perfectly. There was no close to team breakups over which technology or vendor to use; there were very few unexpected items that crept into the budget, the delays were minimal, and you even learned a couple of new skills to top it all off.

Wonderful, right? The perfect unicorn project.

But before you break open that bottle of bubbly (or whatever cold beverage is your choice), or maybe pop up a bowl of popcorn and sit down to a long deserved break binge watching the shows you missed pulling this thing together, you need to ask one more question:

Did you strip and sand first? Or did you just paint right on top?

Or don’t you remember the time you tried to paint that old trailer that had been sitting in your back yard for ages? Sure, it was covered in rust, dirt, Continue reading

Worth Reading: A map of the Internet in the US

The complexity and enormous costs of installing new long-haul fiber-optic infrastructure has led to a significant amount of infrastructure sharing in previously installed conduits. In this paper, we study the characteristics and implications of infrastructure sharing by analyzing the long-haul fiber-optic network in the US. via university of wisconsin

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Sign up for the Rule 11 Reader

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Worth Reading: SD-WAN and MPLS Networks

To hear the press tell it, the MPLS network is all but dead. The Internet is the future of wide area networks (WANs) in what’s been called a software-defined WAN (SD-WAN). The reality, though, is a bit more complex to say the least. via mpls-experts

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QOTW: Brilliance

Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.Thomas Sowell

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