Unsung heroes of the Internet
Dec 16, 2011
Every day across North America, a band of network and computer volunteers ensure that the Internet backbone is online and functioning. Their involvement enables us to run our companies, post our tweets, send Facebook updates, and buy that last minute Christmas present online.
The North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) is a special group of techies devoted to making the Internet great. They meet tri-annually at ever-changing locations, determined by each meeting’s top sponsor, or "Host." Both obscure startups and giant, well-known companies are equally likely to host a meeting, with the host company and location adding a unique character to each meeting. Between these mega-mind-melds, the NANOG mailing list supports the exchange of timely, highly-technical opeartor information--a place where implementation issues that require community cooperation are discussed and resolved
Did you know that the original purpose of the internet wasn’t related to commercial purposes or entertainment at all? It was developed during the 1960’s "Cold War" era -- the hope was that the US military could maintain command and control after a nuclear attack with a reliable, re-configurable network. The project was termed "ARPANET," and it was such a success that it ultimately allowed government and research institutions to share information more efficiently than ever before. Of course, a new innovation (especially one this profoundly different) was often greeted with ill-regard and derision by the engineering establishment--and the ARPANET was no exception
Besides allowing a message on a network to find its way to its destination via any route available, the early ARPANET also permitted computers to more easily share scarce, low-bandwidth network resources more efficiently than other types of networks. Perhaps the most significant outcomes of this work was the TCP/IP suite of protocols, or Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol. It is TCP/IP that moves the lions share of data over the Internet we know and love today.
“The Internet runs surprisingly well, most of the time” says Tony Kapela, 5NINES Chief Technology Officer. “Considering the original purpose of the Internet was simply to communicate during an emergency, the protocols have become very stable, remained open, and yet have only been loosely monitored, mostly by its own administrators.”
Kapela, a frequent NANOG participant and presenter, is one of hundreds of the unsung heroes who monitor the Internet and swing into action when something goes awry. Consider the case in 2008 when Youtube.com was knocked of the entire internet for a few hours. It was members of NANOG who identified the cause of the outage as a change to IP routing tables by Pakistan Telecom who were trying to block that service within their country. Unfortunately – they not only blocked access to Pakistanis, but also accidentally caused a problem for the entire world, too. Since then, significant work has been done to build rapid and real-time alerting systems, so that network engineers world-wide can get a better view of what's happening between their and others' networks.