Comments on: Why are networks so hard to build?

By: Violet

Violet — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:55:44 +0000

I find it very interesting to compare-and-contrast this idea with the state of routing in real-time video. There, you basically always have one big router, as big as you can afford, and it is the heart of your entire video/audio infrastructure, and is horrendously complex to setup. Perhaps this reflects the fact that long-distance real-time video (at broadcast levels of quality) is still so expensive that you only have a very few of these external links, and organise your schedule around their availability, so most of the complex routing is local.

By: alaric

alaric — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:45:42 +0000

Yeah, doing it in an open-source UNIX would be a good start! The bridging-with-fast-path-routing would need a bit of light kernel hackery (as the effective per-subnet router IP would need to be present, with the same MAC, on every gadget carrying that subnet, so we'd need to be able to do that - without ARP battles occuring).

The rest can be in userland.

By: Faré

Faré — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 07:11:04 +0000

Or rather, start by modifying the NetBSD and Linux kernels to allow any old multiport device to function like a "gadget". Then bring in the hardware hackers to make cheap gadget devices with some off-the-shelf component, ASIC, FPGA or something in between.

By: Faré

Faré — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 06:55:49 +0000

OK. So we need to find the hardware guys and we're ready to launch the startup...

By: David Cantrell

David Cantrell — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:45:52 +0000

Reliability is normally measured against scheduled uptime, not just against time. So a three hour planned outage for maintenance that your users have been notified of in advance is Just Fine and won't prevent you hitting your 99.999% target.

By: Jamesb

Jamesb — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:13:42 +0000

Al! You're totally linked to from Hacker News! Nice one. Also, my eMail web interface is still getting worse Any ideas yet? SSH problematic from my workplace.