Analysis of 9/11 impact on the net

Jaap Akkerhuis from the .nl TLD registry made an analysis of the impact of the events of September 11th on the net which he presented at the ICANN general meeting mid-November.

Slides of the presentation (PDF)
Extensive archives of the ICANN meeting (but hard to find specific information)

Impact of Code Red and Nimda

The Renesys Corporation has published a preliminary report indicating that the Code Red II and Nimda worms caused a somewhat alarming instability in global routing. Remarkably, this instability lasted much longer than those caused by (even quite large) outages. When important links go down, BGP converges within minutes and remains stable after that. The worms on the other hand made the interdomain routing system less stable for many hours.

Global Routing Instabilities during Code Red II and Nimda Worm Propagation (original link is broken, so though archive.org)

Net still growing

Internet Still Growing Dramatically, says Lawrence Roberts, one of the pioneers of the ARPANET.

1500+ byte MTU for exchange points

Between August 20 and 26 an interesting subject came up on the NANOG list: when using Gigabit Ethernet for exchange points, there can be a nice performance gain if a larger MTU than the standard 1500 byte one is used. However, this will only work if all attached layer 3 devices agree on the MTU. This can be accomplished by having several VLANs and setting the MTU for each subinterface if a single MTU can't be agreed upon.

Slowing down worms

During the week from September 17 to 23, the main topic of NANOG was the new worm called Nimda. There was some discussion whether it is useful to try to slow worms down using "tar pits" such as LaBrea.

Multihoming scalability

An article on the Network World Fusion site was posted and caused heated debate on the future of multihoming on the NANOG list.