Nuclear survivability (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

Thu Oct 6 21:38:33 UTC 2005

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, Steven Champeon wrote:

>
> on Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 03:25:54PM -0500, John Kristoff wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 6 Oct 2005 11:54:34 +0100
>> Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com wrote:
>>
>>>> While I realize that the "nuke survivable" thing is probably an old
>>>> wives tale, it seems ridiculous that "the Internet" can't adjust by
>> [...]
>>> It's not a myth. If the Internet were running RIP instead of BGP
>>
>> For the Internet, I believe it was indeed a myth.  I wasn't there,
>> but according to someone who was:
>>
>>   <http://www.postel.org/pipermail/end2end-interest/2004-April/003940.html>
>
> I believe the mental->mythical sequence went something like:
>
> - some people (Paul Baran among them) were interested in ways to build
>   communications networks that could survive lots of damage, and came
>   up with the idea of distributed networks that could route through
>   multiple redundant nodes

Read the paper here:

http://www.rand.org/publications/RM/baran.list.html

Redundant is probably the wrong word, failure-tolerant is probably more 
accurate.

> - the US was in a cold war and nuclear arms race
>
> - a nuclear attack could inflict lots of damage to communications
>   networks
>
> - the Internet was eventually, to some extent, built as a distributed
>   network with routing through multiple redundant nodes (if nothing
>   else, the protocols that ran it were capable of such)
>
>
> - the Internet was therefore built to survive a nuclear attack

Roughly modeled after something designed to continue to route packets 
following the loss of a few nodes.

> QED, HTH, HAND
>
>

-- 
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Joel Jaeggli  	       Unix Consulting 	       joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu
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