Your opinion on network analysis in the presence of uncertain events

Thu Jan 17 10:24:34 UTC 2019

On Tue, 15 Jan 2019 at 19:01, Vanbever Laurent <lvanbever at ethz.ch> wrote:
>
> Hi NANOG,
>
> Networks evolve in uncertain environments. Links and devices randomly fail; external BGP announcements unpredictably appear/disappear leading to unforeseen traffic shifts; traffic demands vary, etc. Reasoning about network behaviors under such uncertainties is hard and yet essential to ensure Service Level Agreements.
>
> We're reaching out to the NANOG community as we (researchers) are trying to better understand the practical requirements behind "probabilistic" network reasoning. Some of our questions include: Are uncertain behaviors problematic? Do you care about such things at all? Are you already using tools to ensure the compliance of your network design under uncertainty? Are there any good?
>
> We designed a short anonymous survey to collect operators answers. It is composed of 14 optional questions, most of which (13/14) are closed-ended. It should take less than 10 minutes to complete. We expect the findings to help the research community in designing more powerful network analysis tools. Among others, we intend to present the aggregate results in a scientific article later this year.
>
> It would be *terrific* if you could help us out!
>
> Survey URL: https://goo.gl/forms/HdYNp3DkKkeEcexs2
>
> Thanks much!
>
> Laurent Vanbever, ETH Zürich
>
>
> PS: It goes without saying that we would also be extremely grateful if you could forward this email to any operator you know and who may not read NANOG.

Hi Laurent,

I have filled out the survey however, I would just like to request
that in the future you don't use a URL shortner like goo.gl; many
people don't like those because we can't see were you're sending us
until we click that link. Some people also block them because they are
a security issue (our corporate proxy does, I have to drop off the VPN
or use a URL expander to retrieve the original URL).

Also have you seen Batfish? I looks like you guys want to write a tool
that has some overlap with Batfish. Batfish can ingest the configs
from my network and answer questions such as "can host A can reach
host B?" or "will prefix advertisement P from host A will be
filtered/accepted by host B?", "if I ping from this source IP who has
a return route and can respond?" etc.

Kind regards,
James.