NSP ... New Information

Larry Vaden vaden at texoma.net
Mon Jun 9 15:26:45 UTC 1997


At 07:10 AM 6/9/97 -0700, Bill Manning wrote:
>> 
>> At 09:47 PM 6/8/97 PDT, Randy Bush wrote:
>> >Folk are trying to keep core routers
>> >from falling over.
>> 
>> To repeat an earlier unanswered question, what and whose legacy hardware
>> and software is causing the problem?
>
>proteon, ibm, cisco, bay, 3com to name a few,
>and, to my limited understanding, every implementation 
>of an IP stack. Of course if you are willing to slow down
>everything and commit to a global network that runs at
>no greater than 64Kb. (and get everyone else to do the same)
>then you might be able to get by with the next generation of
>hardware.
>
>--bill

One of the newbies (Livingston) has BGP in alpha using < 8MB for a full
view and a 486 processor without stress.  While this won't make a core
router, it seems to offer something to consider, even learn from.

One of my projects 25 years ago was to reduce the time to calculate the
square root on a Seymour Cray machine by a factor of 20 to avoid spending
$8 million on a second machine.  The revised square root code performed in
about the same time scale as the machine's hardware divide function.  The
clue came from one of the national laboratories and was published in
Nuclear Science Abstracts.  It took about 6 weeks to do the code and 18
months for the solution to be politically accepted.  The original vendor
does not always produce sacrosanct stuff.

We just went through the process of acquiring our first significant router;
 one of our main concerns was a router which would allow school districts,
libraries and hospitals to benefit from Texas HB2128, which offers distance
insensitive T1s and DS3s and was co-authored by our telecomm lobbyist, W.
Scott McCollough in Austin.

I was somewhat dismayed at the memory limitations of current stuff compared
to what I was hearing about the memory requirements.  Jonah has more memory
on his texas.net usenet news server than you can put on many core routers.

Is there anyone working on alternative implementations of software which
could possibly solve some of the problems using extant hardware?

Will IP multicast help with the usenet stuff?

Do we want to continue seeing cams at universities display the local tower
while the institution doesn't meet RFC2050 guidelines with respect to
utilization of their Class B while the rural areas can't get /19s to
support diversity and redundancy?

Does Congress need to pass "must carry" legislation similar to the "any
willing provider" medical legislation?  IMHO, it would be better that some
old dogmas and implementations die and be replaced with efficient, robust
code and a rather less limiting view of the future.


Larry Vaden, founder and CEO               help-desk 903-813-4500
Internet Texoma, Inc. <http://www.texoma.net> direct 903-870-0365
bringing the real Internet to rural Texomaland   fax 903-868-8551
Member ISP/C, TISPA and USIPA                  pager 903-867-6571



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