IP address fee??

Joe Abley jabley at automagic.org
Fri Sep 6 20:48:47 UTC 2002



On Friday, September 6, 2002, at 04:04  PM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> On Fri, 6 Sep 2002, Joe Abley wrote:
>
>> How many people learn about networks from certification courses or
>> in school, anyway? It was always my impression that people learnt
>> mainly by listening to other people.
>
> Well, maybe, if you define "listening to people" as "reading what 
> people
> write".

That too, in the context of written discussions, rather than books or 
manuals.

>> If networking on the front lines is an informal oral tradition more
>> than it is a taught science, then perhaps it's natural for obsolete
>> terminology to continue to be "taught" long after it stopped having
>> any relevance.
>
> Actually, I would assume it to be the other way around: if you only
> communicate with people who are active in the field who are aware of 
> all
> the new tricks, how are you going to learn about obsolete stuff?

I think there is often a directed graph of information flow for 
particular subjects. There will be nodes in the graph which correspond 
to people who have done research, and who speak with some accuracy. 
There are other nodes which listen selectively to the interpretations 
of others, derive rules of thumb and pass their filtered wisdom onto 
other nodes, but do no research from sources that might be considered 
authoritative.

The effectiveness of this information-sharing network is hampered by 
the unreliability of individual nodes to filter information they 
receive, the inconsistent manner in which the information is processed, 
the near-complete absense of filters on information passed to other 
nodes, and the ad-hoc summarisation that happens throughout the network 
regardless of the intentions of the origin nodes. Sounds almost eerily 
familiar.

Many ISPs provide a fertile learning environment for people who are 
able and willing to learn, regardless (in spite of!) of initial 
training and qualification.

However, I seem to think that there are lots of people in organisations 
that run IP networks who don't have the opportunity to learn how to do 
lots of different things, and many of them don't have the time, ability 
or inclination to go research questions from the bottom up. Rules of 
thumb and networking myths abound in that environment. The people who 
are most able to appreciate finer technical points are also those who 
are most likely to get bored and go find a more interesting job 
somewhere else, etc, etc.

   "ICMP is a security risk."
   "You can't use the first and last subnets."

Education is hard.


Joe




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