Issue 3, 4th December 1995: Netocracy
There's trouble down at t'Net (continued). I was describing in the previous issue how the various gentlemen's agreements in the Internet are demonstrating that some of the Internet's new participants are not gentlefolk at all. This has the side-effect that what might otherwise be the best technical solutions for the Internet turn out not to be the best politically because you cannot trust the other participants, and I don't just mean hackers... IPng will probably be with us by the turn of the decade, and built into its addressing structure is an assumption that as a user you will be happy to be allocated a block of addresses out of the range allocated to your supplier. Which is fine and dandy from a technical viewpoint; this change should enormously reduce the amount and volatility of routing information coursing around the Internet. Potentially, when one of ExNet's leased-line connections to an upstream provider fails, every major Internet router in the world has to be told about it in under a minute. As the number of users, and thus failing links, goes up, a greater slice of Internet bandwidth and router CPU time (etc) is taken up with such nonsense. Consolidating IP addresses by supplier or major geographical grouping is a good idea and vastly reduces such routing effort, since potentially only your supplier need know your link is out, and no routing information need be propagated elsewhere at all. One problem with the new address scheme is that it seems to assume a fairly shallow netocracy of suppliers, ie that the smaller ones will be squeezed out. Secondly, when a customer gets disgruntled with a supplier and goes elsewhere, the customer has to renumber all its machines (which might be in the thousands for a large organisation) and propagate new address mappings through DNS (etc) very carefully if it is not to lose connectivity for hours or days. Machine renumbering is painful, and so suppliers seem to have an unfair hold over their customers. Unless, of course, customers use local internal addresses and remap them to external addresses at their gateways into the Internet---which will help reduce the presure on the existing IP numbering space if we start applying such policies now. Yours truly will be thinking carefully about renumbering schemes over the next few months.
In the next issue I'll take a look at VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) technology, and see if it'll do the same to RISC as RISC has done to CISC.
Damon Hart-Davis, Computing Editor
dhd@exnet.com.
'' may prove unreliable.)
(multimedia resources and news),
PC Explore
(Intel's home PC magazine),
SunWorld OnLine
(excellent Sun UNIX magazine;
Sun-related links),
UNIX News
(weekly update).
),
ICL
(UK company, UNIX, vertical markets),
Informix
(databases),
Intel
(semiconductors, x86 CPUs;
P6 info),
NSCA
(Web server and
Mosaic Web browser),
Netscape
(Web browsers and servers),
Novell
(PCs, networking, UNIXWare),
Oracle
(databases;
UK),
SCO
(PC UNIX),
Sequent
(parallel UNIX),
Silicon Graphics
(UNIX with visualisation slant, MIPS CPUs).
Sun
(largest UNIX vendor;
Sun-related links,
SunExpress),
Sybase
(databases),
Tandem
(fault-tolerant systems),
Teknekron
(financial, distributed systems),
Texas Instruments
(semiconductors such as SPARC CPU),
Unisys
(software),
X/Open
(UNIX standards body).
'' are of particular interest.
Links marked ``'' may prove unreliable.
4--8, San Diego, CA, USA. Supercomputing '95.
Internet World International Winter
'95, as part of Online
Information '95.
8, San Francisco, CA, USA. WWW Security Beyond the Basics.
17--18, London, UK. Accessing the Internet. Tel: +44 171 610 4533.
22--26, San Diego, CA, USA.
USENIX 1996:
Annual Technical Conference.
Everything you wanted to know about UNIX from all your UNIX heros!
22--23, Dublin, Ireland. Accessing the Internet. Tel: +44 171 610 4533.
24--26, Braga, Portugal. EUROMICRO: Fourth EUROMICRO Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Processing.
15--19, Honolulu, Hawaii. HiNet '96: Second International Workshop On High-speed Network Computing. IPPS '96: Tenth International Parallel Processing Symposium.
6--9, San Jose, CA, USA. ATM '96.
13--16, Budapest, Hungary. JENC7: 7th Joint European Networking Conference.
23--24, Antwerpen, Belgium. Third International Workshop On Community Networking.
27--28, Philadelphia, PA, USA. IOPADS: Fourth Annual Workshop on I/O in Parallel and Distributed Systems.
12--14, L'Aquila, Italy. Eigth Euromicro Workshop on Real-time Systems. (Mail for more info.)
17--22, Boston, MA, USA. ED-MEDIA '96, ED-TELECOM '96: World Conference on Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia and World Conference on Educational Telecommunications. (Mail AACE.)
:
Graphics, Virtual Reality, Graphics Highways.
2--4, Connemara, Ireland.
Seventh ACM SIGOPS
European Workshop: Systems Support for Worldwide Applications.
In the past, each computer had its own users and jobs. The task of
the operating system was to allocate resources among competing
users. With the advent of LANs and the Internet, multiple computers
could collaborate to perform specialized tasks for a modest number of
sophisticated users. In the future, most computers will be connected
to what is often called the ``Information Superhighway.'' This
as-yet-unbuilt system will allow hundreds of millions of ordinary
citizens to access global information and participate in applications
of unprecedented scale.
3--6, Boulder, CO, USA. VL '96: IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages.
16--20, Berlin, Germany.
PARCELLA '96:
Seventh International Workshop on Parallel Processing by Cellular
Automata and Arrays
16--20, Cambridge, MA, USA.
CSCW '96:
Cooperating Communities.
15--19 April 1996, Honolulu, Hawaii. HiNet '96: Second International Workshop On High-speed Network Computing.
6--9 May 1996. ATM '96. Send proposals to the Technology Transfer Institute.
10--13 July 1996, Monterey, CA, USA. Fourth Tcl/Tk workshop.
2--4 September 1996, Connemara, Ireland. Seventh ACM SIGOPS European Workshop: Systems Support for Worldwide Applications.
16--20 September 1996, Berlin, Germany. PARCELLA '96: Seventh International Workshop on Parallel Processing by Cellular Automata and Arrays.
16--20 November 1996, Cambridge, MA, USA. CSCW '96: Cooperating Communities. (Mail Mark Klein.)