[ih] Speaking of layering and gateways

[Greg Skinner]

On Apr 17, 2024, at 8:36 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Thanks, Greg - I agree that there's lots of tools, papers, and information within the communities of network operators about today's experiences in operating parts of the Internet.  A year or so ago, I even gave a keynote talk at one of their conferences - APRICOT2022.
> 
> What I was seeking was more of the history of network operations, ideally from people who have actually been involved in operating such networks.   Not just today's practices, procedures, tools and techniques, but also past practices in operating the Internet, and how they might have evolved over the 40+ years on Internet operations.

OK … I did a bit more googling, and came up with a name you (and others) might remember, Charles Eldridge.  At the first post-GADS IETF meeting in 1986, he gave a presentation about applying Multi-Objective Optimization to (Inter)networking. [1] He also gave a presentation at an INARC meeting in 1989 on the pros and cons of stateful gateways. [2] Is he the type of person you’re thinking of, who would be considered a peer of the mathematicians at BBN who employed OR to do network capacity planning, etc.?

You might also look through some of Geoff Huston’s reports from the 1990s.  One, ``The Architecture and Design of the Network’’, [3] has a section on network operations that might interest you.

> So, for the sake of history, I was hoping that perhaps there were other people lurking on this list who may have been involved over the last 3 decades or so in operating some piece of the Internet or corporate net using the same technology, and could comment on their experience - how they made decisions, how they collected data to inform such decisions, what tools were used, etc.
> 
> There's been a lot of discussion on this list of the history of the technology as captured in things like RFCs, algorithms, and protocols.   But there's often a huge gap between documentations and specifications and actual practice in the field.  I haven't seen much discussion of the operations aspect of the Internet and how it has changed over the years.
> 
> Jack Haverty

It occurred to me that there are people on the list such as Ross Callon who might also have some input on this topic, but might be having trouble sending mail to the list due to the problems you and others have discussed recently.

--gregbo

[1] https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/01.pdf 
[2] https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/database/papers/inarc.pdf
[3] https://www.potaroo.net/papers/1994-6-wkshp/wkshp7.html