remember the "diameter of the internet"?

Tue Jun 18 18:52:41 UTC 2002

Er... back then it took 2 months to learn everything a backbone engineer
had to know.  Nowadays it's an alphabet soup of stupid techniques to
achieve the same result - i.e. to deliver a packet from place A to place
B.  Blame greeeeedy vendors (OFRV, particularly, and don't forget
hellcore) who sell FUD instead of making their products easy to use.  
Given their dominant position on the market, everyone else has to be
"compatible" with the zillion little features just to stay afloat.

Regarding the diameter of the Internet - I'm still trying to figure out 
why the hell anyone would want to have "edge" routers (instead of dumb 
TDMs) if not for inability of IOS to support large numbers of virtual 
interfaces.  Same story goes for "clusters" of backbone routers.

--vadim

On 18 Jun 2002, Jeff Harper wrote:

> 
> On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 12:34, brett watson wrote:
>  
> > no, just lamenting the passing of an era.  an era where we engineers 
> > cooperated, and "just fixed" the problems as they occured.  and we didn't 
> > do things like this.
> 
> Keep in mind the reason why the era passed.  During that era, you had
> top level, blue sky engineers.  Now the field has been saturated by a
> lot of less than desirable "engineers" out there (not calling you one at
> all) that ruined it for us all...
> 
> 
> 
> 