
What we found when we simulated the backbone of the Internet - jordigg
http://improbable.io/2016/03/24/what-we-found-when-we-simulated-the-backbone-of-the-entire-internet-on-spatialos
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jlgaddis
I read the article but apparently I still missed what they found.

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bronson
It sounds like they found an advertisement for SpatialOS.

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jlgaddis
Indeed.

After reading the article, the network engineer in me's first thought was that
there's no way they could "simulate" the Internet in any way that even
remotely resembled reality since they have no insight or knowledge into all of
the private interconnections that occur. I work for an ISP and have many more
"private peerings" that an outsider would not be aware of at all.

There are various web sites where one can see what ASNs are connected
together, but even those are missing all of this (and a lot more) detail.

Then, my next thought was, _" Oh, wait. What did they find out?"_ and I
realized the answer was, apparently, "nothing".

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chillaxtian
"In our simulation, every AS is running simultaneously and independently, so
storing the full routing table for each AS requires many terabytes of RAM by
itself."

i must be missing something - why do the tables consume terabytes of memory?

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RKearney
A single BGP routing table does not. A full table, multiplied by the number of
unique autonomous systems however, can quickly reach that size.

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bitdivision
It looks like a full table can often be stored in around 150MB.

So 60 000 AS would give around 9TB

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chillaxtian
thanks folks, that makes more sense.

do you have a source for the ~150MB figure?

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ryanlm
Has a country wide Internet outage happened in the US? I'm 25 and have never
experienced it.

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beachstartup
not that i recall, but in the 90s, construction crews would routinely cut
backhaul fiber lines and large areas of the country would go offline for most
of a day while they fixed it, literally by stitching the cables back together.
i think that's when they started putting markers by all the cables, because it
was becoming a real problem. "call before you dig!"

or, more commonly, entire sites would be unavailable for a day or two, because
everyone ran their servers on insanely expensive and unreliable T1 (or even
crappier leased line) connections that were also prone to getting cut. that's
when the colo / datacenter / hosting business really took off, because imagine
running something that makes you money and relying on your local shitbox CLEC
telco to deliver it for you. untenable at best.

for example, i remember a guy who ran a small gaming server outfit on a set of
56k leased lines running out of his garage. if you ran a clan, you could pay
him for low-latency practice space. that was considered a legitimate internet
business, cutting edge and visionary, even. i think it was a side business,
and took off when the industry matured a little more and he could actually
deliver decent solutions at consumer prices.

aside from basic nostalgia, those were not the good ol days. in fact, it
pretty much sucked. flakey hardware, buggy software, slow-as-shit networking,
no wifi ... the struggle was real.

these days, everything that comes out blows your fucking mind at how fast,
reliable, high quality, and cheap it is. imagine waiting years for an
incremental improvement in bandwidth instead of ridiculous shit like google
fiber replacing your good-enough 100 megabit cable ISP. it's much better now
in absolute terms, no matter how much people complain. and i'm only in my
early 30s, i got an early start, but to someone in their 50s it must be mind-
bending how much progress has been made.

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nickpsecurity
I heard it was more fun when it was the military's fiber they cut. Resulted in
uncomfortable situations.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
I've heard a couple stories about telecom companies having good results buying
defunct natural gas rights-of-way and leaving up the old signs that say
"Warning: underground gas pipe"...

~~~
nickpsecurity
That's a friggin great idea! Thanks for mentioning it. I know a few people who
will appreciate the suggestion.

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dang
Also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11359155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11359155).

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homero
Spam

