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Why is the Internet still online?

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The Internet seems to be a strong, independent, and indestructible structure. In theory, the strength of the network is enough to survive a nuclear explosion. All because the Internet is a heap of contradictions, vulnerabilities, errors, and videos about cats. The basis of the Internet - BGP - contains a bunch of problems. Amazingly, he is still breathing. In addition to errors on the Internet itself, everyone else is breaking it: big Internet providers, corporations, states, and DDoS attacks. What to do with it and how to live with it?

 

The answer is known by Alexei Uchakin (Night_Snake) Is the leader of the team of network engineers at IQ Option. Its main task is the accessibility of the platform for users. In the end - a couple of tips on how to survive all this.

 

BGP and its problems

 

The BGP protocol - Border Gateway Protocol, was first described in 1989 by two engineers from IBM and Cisco Systems on three "napkins" - A4 sheets. These "napkins" still lie at the Cisco Systems headquarters in San Francisco as a relic of the networking world.

 

The protocol is based on the interaction of autonomous systems - Autonomous Systems or in abbreviated form - AS. An autonomous system is just some ID that IP networks are assigned to in the public registry. A router with this ID can announce these networks to the world. Accordingly, any route on the Internet can be represented as a vector called AS Path. A vector consists of autonomous system numbers that must be completed to reach a destination network.

 

So what are the problems of BGP?

 

BGP is a trust protocol

 

BGP protocol - trust-based. This means that by default we trust our neighbor. This is a feature of many protocols that were developed at the dawn of the Internet. Let's figure out what "trust" means.

 

There is no filtering. BGP has filters and they are described, but they are not used or are used incorrectly. I will explain why later.

 

It is very simple to establish a neighborhood. Neighborhood settings in the BGP protocol on almost any router - a couple of lines of config.

 

 

 

https://teleinternetoffers.com/

 

Large Internet Service Providers

 

Consider the example of a CenturyLink internet provider. This is the third-largest US provider, which serves 37 states and has 15 data centers.

 

In December 2018, CenturyLink was in the US market for 50 hours. During the incident, there were problems with the operation of ATMs in two states; 911 did not work for several hours in five states. Idaho lottery was torn to pieces. The US Telecommunications Commission is currently investigating this incident.

 

The reason for the tragedy is in one network card in one data center. The card failed, sent incorrect packets and all 15 provider data centers went down.

 

 This idea does not work at all. You can take any major player and put some trifle. In the US, everything is still good with connectedness. CenturyLink prices for the customers are very economical. Then alternative operators complained about the overload of their links.

 

If the conditional Kazakhtelecom lies, the whole country will be left without the Internet.

 

Corporations

Likely on Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other corporations the Internet are supported? No, they break it too.

 

In 2017 in St. Petersburg at the ENOG13 conference, Jeff Houston of APNIC presented the report "Death of Transit". It says that we are used to the fact that interaction, cash flows, and Internet traffic are vertical. We have small providers that pay for connectivity to larger ones, and those already paying for connectivity to global transit.

 

Now we have such a vertically oriented structure. Everything would be fine, but the world is changing - large players are building their transoceanic cables to build their backbones.

 

conclusions

 

Do not have illusions - the Internet will break. Your task is to notice the problems as early as possible. At least no later than your user. Not only should you notice, always keep "Plan B" in stock. A plan is a separate checklist by which you check the work of everything. The plan should work without the involvement of network engineers because there are usually few of them and they want to sleep.

 

That's all. I wish you high availability and green monitoring.