Consider yourself warned, dear Internet user.
Due to some highly esoteric computer-engineering-related reasons, which I can’t and won’t try to explain because I myself don’t understand it, Internet users may be in for a rough spell with possible outages next week.
Why, you ask?
That’s where this thing gets a little messy. Let’s start with a brief excerpt from the blog item this week from Renesys.
What’s Renesys, you ask?
According to Renesys itself, it’s: “the Internet Intelligence Authority” and it “provides network performance management for the Internet, enabling enterprises and network service providers worldwide to see beyond their firewalls.”
OK.
Now to that post about the coming “annoyance,” starting with the headline, which is fairly straightforward:
“Internet Touches Half Million Routes: Outages Possible Next Week.”
That’s clear enough. Now to the first paragraph of the post:
There was minor consternation in Internet engineering circles today, as the number of IPv4 networks worldwide briefly touched another magic “power of 2″³ size limit. As it turns out, 512K (524,288 to be exact, or 2-to-the-19th power) is the maximum number of routes supported by the on certain aging hardware platforms.
I have no idea what most of that means, but I do know that “consternation in Internet engineering circles” doesn’t sound good.
Here’s another excerpt, on the off-chance that you actually understand this stuff:
The problem is real, and we still haven’t seen the full effects, because most of the Internet hasn’t yet experienced the conditions that could cause problems for underprovisioned equipment. Everyone on the Internet has a slightly different idea of how big the global routing table is, thanks to slightly different local business rules about peering and aggregation (the merging of very similar routes to close-by parts of the Internet address space). Everyone has a slightly different perspective, but the consensus estimate is indeed just under 512K, and marching higher with time.
The real test, when large providers commonly believe that the Internet contains 512K routes, and pass that along to all their customers as a consensus representation of Internet structure, will start later this week, and will be felt nearly everywhere by the end of next week.
Well, at least that gives the simple-minded among us a simple time frame in which to expect that aforementioned “annoyance.”
Read the post and judge for yourself just how scary this thing actually will be. But the way I read it, it looks like we’re not quite facing the end of the world as we know it.
Not yet.
PUTTING THIS EVENT IN PERSPECTIVE: DON’T PANIC
It’s important to put this all in proper perspective (and yes, friends from the media who cover Internet infrastructure issues, I’m especially hoping you read down to this paragraph).
This situation is more of an annoyance than a real Internet-wide threat. Most routers in use today at midsize to large service providers, and certainly all of the routers that operate the core infrastructure of the Internet, have plenty of room to deal with the Internet’s current span, because they were provisioned that way by sensible network operators.
Affected boxes cause local connectivity problems for the network service providers who still run them, so they will be identified quickly and upgraded as we pass the threshold. Their instability in turn causes some minor additional load on adjacent routers.
But the overall stability of the global routing system should be In terms of a threat, this isn’t nearly in the same class as we’ve which combine router failure with contagion dynamics.
Now everyone can calm down and go back to your computers.
Credit: Engadget.com
