Re: Nuclear survivability (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[Joel Jaeggli <joelja () darkwing uoregon edu>]

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 () 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 () darkwing uoregon edu
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