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Comment by buster | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if this is really appropriate, it's only showing a very small part of "Internet" namely TCP/IP and a little bit of routing.

Once you delve into the more low-level stuff (BGP, routing, AS, peerings, RIPE and all that kind of stuff) you get to know that there is soooo much more advanced, deeply technical stuff going on. It's just so much more then tcp/ip, dns and http.. You just typically never have to care about that kind of stuff if you don't happen to work in that area.

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And the further you get into that stuff, the more you figure out that under everything is legal, contractual, and in many cases, purely personal relationships that keep the thing running.

Some folks say that's 'Layer 8' on the OSI model, I think it's more appropriately Layer 0...

Indeed.

It's questionable how complete an explanation of the internet is, with little mention of peering agreements and transit relationships.

Perhaps the title should be 'A simple animation to show novices how the internet works'. It's a great place to start that explanation.

True, but BGP, AS, etc are largely there to deal with issues that come from the separate networks we've built the internet out of not a fundamental need, if that makes any sense. Basically we /could/ build an internet without BGP, AS's, and a lot of the protocols that deal with interconnecting regional networks, but TCP/IP, DNS, and HTTP are the basic building blocks of the internet as we know it.

Sure, but as you said: The internet is not only TCP/IP. I'd expect that in a link titled "How does the Internet work?". The link doesn't come close to how the internet _really_ works, in my opinion. The link merely shows how my LAN works.

ARP is missing for a truer match to LANs. It's a decent primer on the high level details of how the internet works.

I partly disagree. I think the concept separate independent networks is very fundamental to internet, and as such BGP etc are fundamental part of the internet.

It's fundamental to how it's set up currently but not required for the concept as a whole. Given a global telecom operator BGP could be eliminated, so it's a 'lower' level of fundamental than TCP.

If there was a global telecom operating "the internet", it wouldn't be a internetwork of independent networks, which I consider fundamental concept for the internet.

It'd still be an interconnected network of machines. But this is really just coming down to the dividing line between a network and the internet, kind of like the heap of sand paradox. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

> BGP, routing, AS, peerings, RIPE and all that kind of stuff

I have good application development and systems administration skills, I run a variety of server daemons including DNS, I maintain an OpenWRT-based home network on a Linksys WRT54GL (I really should upgrade to N, but the upstream pipe isn't big enough to need it and I don't do a lot of LAN transfers). I've written TCP and UDP applications in the past, and I've never had to worry about any of that -- from an application's perspective, you just put bits in one end of the pipe and they come out the other end (well, if you use UDP, there's some degree of luck involved).

I've only heard those acronyms in passing and don't really know how those things work (well, maybe in a vague theoretical sense).

Does anyone know of good resources for learning those things? For example, how to set up a bunch of VM's which speak BGP and do routing and peering?

Google for CCNA Module 1 through 3. Those acronyms mostly relate to ISP and configuration and running mode of enterprise networks.

BGP is so broken. So many unfiltered prefixes

BGP works very well for it's main purpose. Things like uRPF and explosive table growth aren't BGPs fault. That being said, take a look at LISP (Loc/ID Separation Protocol) if you're interested in such topics.

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