Westnet and Utah outage

Thu Nov 23 16:08:01 UTC 1995

>Question: Which RFC should I consult to determine acceptable delay and packet 
>loss?

RFCs are the result of IETF activities. The IETF is essentially a
protocol standardization group, not an operations group. I don't think
you perceive the IETF as "running" your network, or? There may not be
much of an alternative, though, which to a large extend is the issue at
hand. Nobody is responsible (individually or as a consortium or
whatever) of this anarchically organized and largely uncoordinated (at
a systemic level) global operational environment. While IETF/RFCs could
be utilized somehow, this is not really an issue of theirs. I sure
would not blame the IETF for not delivering here, is this is not their
mandate.

In other email I saw it seems that the important issues are hard to
understand for some. I (and I suspect several others) don't really care
much about a specific tactical issue (be it an outage or whatever).
The issue is how to make the system work with predictable performance
and a fate sharing attitude at a global level, in a commercial and
competitive environment that is still extremely young at that, and
attempts to accomodate everything from mom'n'pop shops to multi-billion
dollar industry. And exhibits exponential usage and ubiquity growth,
without the resources to upgrade quickly to satisfy all the demands.
And no control over in-flows, and major disparities across the
applications. And TCP flow control not working that well, as the
aggregation of transactions is very heavy, and the
packet-per-transaction count is so low on average that TCP may not be
all that much better to the network than UDP (in terms of adjusting to
jitter in available resources). Not to mention this age-old problem
with routing table sizes and routing table updates.