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Nick Rout wrote:

>On Tue, 21 Jun 2005 09:51:46 +1200
>Paul Swafford wrote:
>
>  
>
>>First .. this list has been a bit quiet lately..
>>
>>Second .. As it seems Telecom is not directly responsible for this 
>>"massive" outage, who is? More importantly what level of public 
>>liability are they accountable for?
>>
>>Third .. why isn't there another Internet access method - heck even bi 
>>directional satellite would serve.
>>    
>>
The original arpnet wasn't the modern internet either. Back in the day 
I  used to connect to it via fido net which was a string of computers, 
connectd to modems which dialled each other and passed information 
around. The idea was you called your neighbours who called their 
neighbours who called ... and eventually information travelled. I could 
get an email from chch to the USA and back in 24 hours, all via modem 
and local phone calls routing information.

Back in the day miltiary / educational / govt facilitys had their own 
cables for their lans but they still connected via telephone between 
different LANS. There wasn't much backbone network cabling (inter lan / 
wan / man type cabling) other than telephone cabling then.  These users 
could use some satellite, radio packet, line of site technologies but 
they were pretty sparse as well and tended to be on a similar machine to 
radio, tv traffic ... with differing degrees of latency and availablity.

Arpnet was designed to alloow routing to happen in various ways when 
routers, computers and switches ... went down. The reason the Internet 
didn't re-route the other day is that we are not paying our ISPs to be 
part of the internet but we are paying them to be our gateway to the 
internet. The reason your internet connection broke is that your node 
(ie computer) only has a single connection to the major part of the 
internet. In order for you to get arpnet like access and failover to the 
internet your node must have multiple connections to the internet. ISPs 
dont cooperate together. If they did, then telcom traffic would have 
failed over to telstras lines and headed out the door to the big wide 
world. Alternatively we could have failed over to ihugs satellite, 
vodaphone satelites, tv nz satellites, military satelites, .... and so 
on and so on and so on. This fail over can still happen, if the ISPs 
bury their pride and co-operate. If my xtra ADSL line fail I have  dial 
up to paradise, line of sight to telstras backbone via point to point 
receivers on the hills, a link to a satellite dish via phoning a friend 
on the telephone, ... and I am still in business.

The arpnet system did not, and does not, guarentee instantaneous fail 
over in every case. It definitely does not guarentee bandwidth. Routes 
take time to reset from what was working to finding an alternative. 
Different transmission methods have different latencys and when 
bandwidth is reduced by hardware failure then higher prioirty traffic 
will block out lower priority traffic as more pressure is put on the 
remaining connections.

<tongue in cheek>
<sly question>My question is this .... what failed? The internet or your 
node on the internet? </sly question>
If the answer is your node on the internet then what are you doing to 
continue to allow your node to be a productive part of the internet and 
allow arpnet like ability to failover?
</ tongue in cheek>

Thus endith the old mans lesson for the day.





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