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Comment by dudus | Hacker News Reader

It amazes me how little I know about overral internet traffic infraestructures

That's why it's frustrating for those who have a network arch/eng background when we run across the sensationalized pieces. Or when all of the sec-only wonks make this out to be something to combat with a firewall, and put out pieces that never mention BGP, but are somehow helpful.

End rant, but at least there's more of an awareness of good network folk with things related to this sort of story. Not that it's the ideal path, but still.

Who is guilty of the sensationalized piece? My impression was that it was cloudflare itself.

The New York Times and BBC took their account at face value and published it as fact.

I avoid most articles by John Markoff (nytimes) as he is prone to exaggerating, but he showed up on the radio talking about this story.

It seems the way now that press releases can turn into articles.

Cloudflare can toot its own horn all day long. That's just marketing. If journalists take that marketing and reprint it without incorporating other sources then you have a "puff piece" rather than quality journalism. The onus is on the journalists to do a better job investigating.

Welcome to modern media… it's got very little to do with "journalism"…

One of my local major media outlets has sacked ~600 writers and editors recently, all the while advertising voraciously for tech staff for its real estate and travel websites…

Same here. Can anyone point to a good starting point for someone who understands TCP/IP to start understanding the Internet topology?

You might want to check out the NANOG mailing list. There is also a list of Internet exchange points [1], these pages are packed with details about how many of them function.

TCP/IP and Internet topology are different things. Think of it this way, internet topology is the highway, and TCP/IP is a vehicle that travels the highway (along with UDP, ICMP, etc).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_point...

I think it's worth mentioning that if you say TCP/IP you should also say UDP/IP etc and as such it's IP where you really where you want to focus on. Because, a router can generally ignore if something is a TCP or UDP packet.

TCP/IP stands for "Internet Protocol Suite" in general.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite

Just please don't post to NANOG when your cablemodem/DSL stops working. sigh

I had to post a response to this:

LOL for 1 minute...

Also: don't post if your business DSL stops working. Or your ISP. But maybe if you find your BGP from your upstream is poisoned/severely b0rken.

I would NOT advise the NANOG mailing list as a starting point. It starts to go off-tangent very quickly. NANOG presentations, and wikipedia might be a good place.

drpeering.net

I like his map of US peering as well:

http://drpeering.net/white-papers/shared_images/USInterconne...

Ars Technica had a pretty good article about peering and transit: http://arstechnica.com/features/2008/09/peering-and-transit/

don't know if that is what you were looking for but it does a pretty good job explaining that part.

I'd start with the slides from a powerpoint by ras on traceroute: http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog47/presentations/Sunday/R...

He really gets into how, with traceroute, you can get a glimpse of how everything fits together, beyond just "oh, this hop and now that hop". Also, Andrew Blum's book Tubes is a good casual look into how the world of data centers, IXPs, carriers, etc all fit together.

For humor, there's always http://www.routergod.com/ Sadly, it hasn't really been updated in a while, but it was technically fairly accurate.

Lol, opposite reaction here. He said pretty much what I thought of this and what I've been telling some others on other places. And in the last few paragraphs he said something that announced the coming of the really juicy stuff, but then it was about the exchanges which I already knew about :(

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