Tuesday at SIGCOMM 2008
The routing session ranged from uninteresting to embarrassing. One paper in particular was a notable disaster, rediscovering the decade+ wisdom that route distribution between protocols is dangerous. Maybe the authors should google “7007 incident.” They claimed to have analyzed router configurations from 1,600 networks and found redistribution in almost all of them. I’ll bet a good diner that, among their other massive lack of clue, they did not know that we all nail up our eBGP prefixes by redistributing special statics into BGP. And it contained not one bit of computer science.
And too many control plane researchers have only studied the one particular large ISP who has wide-scale control plane disasters twice a year, maybe more often than they have management reorgs, hard as that is to believe. And guess what their solution to all these failures is, add more complexity and control to the network. Rinse, repeat, … I wish all my competitors did this.
Things got better in the data center session. One in particular, DCell: A Scalable and Fault-Tolerant Network Structure for Data Centers, a non-hierarchic connection topology, was both interesting operationally and had done the actual formal analysis. OMG, computer science!
What’s Going On? Learning Communication Rules In Edge Networks was a good tool-set for correlation of traffic within a network to understand what traffic flows are related to what others, and how to reveal unexpected and/or anomalous behavior.