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Comment by kilovoltaire | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

drpeering.net

I like his map of US peering as well:

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

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.

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