All reports from Louisiana indicate that power outages as a result of Gustav are extensive and ongoing, with over a million customers still without service and with potentially very long waits ahead of them. The extent of the power outages can be seen in regularly updated maps provided by the state. (A comprehensive list of utilities by region does not seem to be available.) We've even heard from state officials that the power problems are worse now than they were after Katrina. So it would be natural to assume that the ISPs in the state were similarly impacted, but that is not the case. Internet connectivity is alive and well in Louisiana and the other Gulf states, with all major providers operational, via either conventional or backup power. End users should have connectivity once power is restored to their homes. We'll review the past three days from an Internet perspective in what follows.
ISPs Learn from Katrina, Survive Gustav
As the world waited for Gustav to hit the US, at Renesys we wondered how the Internet would fare this time around. Would we see the large scale, long term outages we observed during Katrina? Or would the critical communications infrastructure of the region stand fast? As of 19:00 UTC on date of Gustav's landfall, the score so far is Internet 1, Gustav 0. Connectivity in the region is very good and outages are sporadic. Either we got lucky or we've learned some valuable lessons.
Continue reading "ISPs Learn from Katrina, Survive Gustav" »
Georgia on my mind
We've been keeping an eye on Georgia all week. It's rather hard not to as the media keeps calling, looking for a juicy story. (It's amusing how the questions can seem designed solely to confirm a story that has already been partially written.) Not being schooled in this "art", we haven't been able to invent any interesting "facts", as the network infrastructure of Georgia has been relatively stable all week. But then today, we did see about one third of the country go away again for an extended period. Since it wasn't the entire country, we didn't rush out and buy oil futures. And since the outaged networks did come back, we're assuming this event was due to a temporary (although perhaps extensive) power outage.
Georgia Clings to the 'Net
As the world watches events unfold in Georgia, all eyes are on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, a major source of European oil that is not under Russian control and is projected to carry 1 million barrels a day by 2009. (See this link for a map of oil pipelines in the area.) What many people don't realize is that the cyber world is often built alongside the physical one. That is, those fiber optic cables that carry Internet traffic tend to follow the world's pipelines, bridges, and railroad tracks. Loss of Internet connectivity can therefore imply the physical destruction of vital pathways for trade. And so it is with some interest that we monitored Georgian Internet connectivity over the weekend as hostilities with Russia escalated. This blog takes a quick look at how Georgia connects to the 'net and what has been happening over the last three days.
Internet Matchmaking
Sigh. I had been meaning to write this for a long time. Where did the summer go? Anyway, since you are reading this, you've probably heard something along these lines before: "Oh, you work on the Internet?! You must be rich. The Internet is paved with gold!" Right? The fact is that the Internet can be paved with gold for the content providers (e.g., Google, gambling and porn sites), but for the rest of us, it isn't. Not even close. The truth of this is no more evident than in the Internet transit business, namely, those folks who move all the bits around that ultimately build fortunes for the content providers. It's a commodity business with ferocious competition, whose quality of service is difficult for the average person to gauge. When was the last time you volunteered to pay more for electrical service to your house? Or sewer service for that matter? Or even gave it a second thought? In this environment, the transit providers are under tremendous pricing pressure and have only two options: grow or die. To grow, they can enter new markets and/or buy up the competition. Sometimes they purchase licenses to Renesys' Market Intelligence to help them explore the marketplace. To die, all they need to do is stand still.
This blog entry is motivated by France Telecom's recent failed bid to purchase TeliaSonera, and explores the characteristics of both companies and what they would have looked like as a combined entity. Mergers in the industry are never good for Renesys (fewer potential customers), but we do have the data to consider some of the implications. Let's get started.
Cogent Becomes Transit-Free
Cogent (AS174) has established a direct connection to the America Online Transit Data Network (ATDN) (AS1668). This long-awaited connection completes Cogent's effort to directly connect with every transit-free network in the world and qualifies them, for the first time, as being transit-free.
In one sense, this is an unsurprising event. ATDN has been shrinking its transit network for some time in order to focus on their revenue-producing ad business. AOL/Time Warner has been selling off their European access networks since 2006. At the same time, Cogent has been adding customers and growing and peering. So that these two networks would eventually connect (re-connect) is unsurprising.
But the history between these two organizations is textured and murky. This connection is particularly interesting in part because of this history. It's also interesting because of how different these two networks are, in almost every respect: history, revenues, business model, culture, brand. I'll take a look at where Cogent is, the history between Cogent and AOL, and what this all might mean for the Internet.
Root Reprise: More Questions than Answers
When we wrote about the issues surrounding the management of the L root, four questions came to mind immediately, which we will review here as way of a concluding blog on this topic. We also presented this work and our questions at NANOG 43 and OARC 2008 DNS-Operators Workshop. Unfortunately, we don't have many answers and welcome clarification from anyone in the know. The questions are
- Why wasn't ICANN using their own IP space?
- Why the change after 10 years?
- Why wasn't the old space simply given to ICANN?
- Why all the bogus L root servers?
We will summarize what we know about these issues.
Continue reading "Root Reprise: More Questions than Answers" »
Securing the Root
Our blog on the L root server received quite a few comments, both at our site and others (e.g, Slashdot, CircleID, CircleID, and various DNS newsgroups). Negative responses tended to follow a "no harm, no foul" line of reasoning, which sadly completely misses the point. So we'll restate the central issue here again and talk about safeguards you can take today if you operate a DNS server or BGP-enabled router.
Identity Theft Hits the Root Name Servers
There have been a number of attacks on the root name servers over the years, and much written on the topic. (A few references are here, here and here.) Even if you don't know exactly what these servers do, you can't help but figure they're important when the US government says it is prepared to launch a military counterattack in response to cyber-attacks on them.
This posting is about an attack on one such root name server. Actually, "attack" isn't really an appropriate term. It was not really an attack or a hijack or even identity theft. For one thing, these terms imply the existence of both a victim and a villain. In this story, the villains are not obvious and there might not have been any victims. And as we will see, you can't really steal something you own. All we can say for certain is that many of you, if not most, probably used an unauthorized root name server over the past few months and were blissfully unaware of it. These bogus servers may have acted just like a normal root server, providing the correct answers to your queries without logging your requests. But since these servers are now shut down, we can no longer investigate what they were doing. And we can only guess at the motivations of those who set them up.
Continue reading "Identity Theft Hits the Root Name Servers" »
Tragedies not affecting the Internet
Here at Renesys, we've almost come to expect that natural disasters will be immediately reflected in changes to Internet routing. We've certainly seen that in events such as Hurricane Katrina and the Taiwanese earthquakes. So it was with some surprise that neither the earthquakes in Sichuan province in central China or the Myanmar cyclone registered so much as a blip on our Internet radar.
We currently geo-locate 3 networks (prefixes) to Myanmar and over 2000 to Sichuan province. Over the course of these unfortunate tragedies, we have seen only a normal level of network instability or outages. In the case of China, since the large providers into the country tend to do a good job aggregating prefixes, visibility into the behavior of smaller prefixes only comes from having in-country sources of data. But even our Chinese peers show nothing abnormal with respect to Sichuan networks. Hopefully the apparent lack of damage to the communications infrastructure in these areas will help speed relief efforts.
