Richard Bennett, NANOG posting, and Integrity

Mon Jul 28 16:52:07 UTC 2014

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Bill Woodcock" <woody at pch.net>

> On Jul 28, 2014, at 9:28 AM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:
> > The data set suffers three flaws:
> 
> Depending on your point of view, a lot more than three, undoubtedly.
> 
> > 1. It is not representative of the actual traffic flows on the
> > Internet.
> 
> There are an infinite number of things it’s not representative of, but
> it also doesn’t claim to be representative of them. Traffic flows on
> the Internet is a different survey of a different thing, but if
> someone can figure out how to do it well, I would be very supportive
> of their effort. It's a _much_ more difficult survey to do, since it
> requires getting people to pony up their unanonymized netflow data,
> which they’re a lot less likely to do, en masse, than their peering
> data. We’ve been trying to figure out a way to do it on a large and
> representative enough scale to matter for twenty years, without too
> much headway. The larger the Internet gets, the more difficult it is
> to survey well, so the problem gets harder with time, rather than
> easier.

I think you're over-specifizing Bill's assertion, Woody.

He didn't mean "TCP Flows", I don't think; he was simply -- as I 
understood him -- talking about the 40,000ft view of connections between
pieces of the Internet.

I don't expect your dataset to have flow-level data, and I don't think
he did either; it isn't really germane to the conversation we're having.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
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