I frequently disagree with the perspective, but Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis is an informative blog. An interesting graph recently caught my attention:

Jobs Decrease by 54,000, Rise by 60,000 Excluding Census; Unemployment Rises Slightly to 9.6%; A Look Beneath the Surface

Unemployment in Historical Recessions is a post from: Benson Schliesser

My work as part of the ARIN NomCom this year has concluded, and I’m happy to see that the final slate of candidates was announced today:

Elections for two (2) seats on the ARIN Board of Trustees and five (5)
seats on the ARIN Advisory Council will be held online 6-16 October.

The following candidates have agreed to run for office:

Board of Trustees:
* Vinton Cerf, Google, Inc.
* Lee Howard, Time Warner Cable
* Aaron Hughes, 6connect, Inc
* Paul Vixie, Internet Systems Consortium

Advisory Council:
* Cathy Aronson, Cascadeo Corporation
* Jim Deleskie, Tata
* Owen DeLong, Hurricane Electric
* David Divins, Carpathia Hosting
* Wes George, Sprint
* Gary Giesen, Advanced Knowledge Networks
* Chris Grundemann, TW Telecom
* Martin Hannigan, Akamai Technologies, Inc.
* William Herrin, ITT
* Scott Leibrand, Internap
* Andrew Mentges, Jumpline Inc
* John Springer, Inland Telephone
* Tom Zeller, Indiana University

Many of the candidates will address the membership on 6 October at
ARIN’s Public Policy and Members Meeting in Atlanta. These speeches,
brief biographies and a form to voice support for candidates can be
found online at ARIN Election Headquarters:

https://www.arin.net/app/election/

Good luck to all of the candidates, and thank you for your offer of service to the ARIN community.

ARIN 2010 Election Candidates Announced is a post from: Benson Schliesser

I don’t normally post directly work-related stuff here. As my personal blog, the content here reflects only my individual views and/or thoughts; I am not a spokesperson and nothing posted here represents Savvis. However…

I’m hiring two IP Address Engineers and need to fill the positions quickly.

The IP Address Engineer is accountable for the assignment, recovery, and ongoing management of IP Addresses at Savvis. Responsibilities include updating internal systems to reflect assigned IPs, updating relevant external Regional Internet Registry (RIR) and/or Internet Routing Registry (IRR) databases, and ensuring a timely response to any outstanding tickets and/or email requests.

Please see http://tinyurl.com/svvsIPadmin for the complete job description and application link.

If you’re an IPAM expert with years of service provider experience working with RIRs and customers, you’d be perfect.  If you only know the fundamentals of IP addressing, subnet masks / CIDR notation, etc, then you’re still probably a good fit for the job. We can teach you everything else you’ll need to know. Alternatively if you know a little about databases, data modeling and analysis, Perl or Java or any other programming language, then I’ll happily teach you about IP addressing.

Entry-level candidates are fine.  I’d prefer people in St. Louis, MO, but would consider any other locations where Savvis has an office (such as Cary, NC, Reston, VA, and Santa Clara, CA).

Feel free to contact me with questions and/or recommendations.

Hiring at Savvis: IP Address Engineer is a post from: Benson Schliesser

POTD 26.Aug.2010 – Hummingbird Moment is a post from: Benson Schliesser

There’s a new IETF document published today, RFC 5952 “A Recommendation for IPv6 Address Text Representation”. It does us the favor of standardizing the text representation of IPv6 addresses, which is otherwise subject to various syntactically-correct yet inconsistent shorthands. To summarize the recommendation:

• Handling Leading Zeros in a 16-Bit Field – Leading zeros MUST be suppressed.
• Shorten as Much as Possible – The use of the symbol “::” MUST be used to its maximum capability.
• Handling One 16-Bit 0 Field – The symbol “::” MUST NOT be used to shorten just one 16-bit 0 field.
• Choice in Placement of “::”
  • When there is an alternative choice in the placement of a “::”, the longest run of consecutive 16-bit 0 fields MUST be shortened.
  • When the length of the consecutive 16-bit 0 fields are equal, the first sequence of zero bits MUST be shortened.
• Lowercase – The characters “a”, “b”, “c”, “d”, “e”, and “f” in an IPv6 address MUST be represented in lowercase.

RFC 5952: Recommended IPv6 Representation is a post from: Benson Schliesser

There’s a great post today on a statistics blog I read, entitled Some things are just really hard to believe: more on choosing your facts. You should read this for yourself, but from my preconceived anti-ideological worldview the truth of it is almost self-evident. Here’s an excerpt:

Of course, it makes sense that people with different judgment of the facts would have different views on policies: if you think carbon dioxide doesn’t cause substantial global warming, you’ll be on the opposite side of the global warming debate from someone who thinks it does. But often the causality runs the other way: instead of choosing a policy that matches the facts, people choose to believe the facts that back up their values-driven policies. The issue about Obama’s birth country is an extreme example: it’s clear that people did not first decide whether Obama was born in the U.S., and then decide whether to vote Republican or Democratic. They are choosing their fact based on their values, not the other way around. Perhaps it is helpful to think of people as having an inappropriate prior distribution that makes them more likely to believe things that are aligned with their desires.

Ideologically Derived Facts is a post from: Benson Schliesser

An email I received this afternoon contained a forwarded link to an article entitled “Conflating broadband speed with Internet speed is misleading“. The article makes a valid point that access capacity (“Broadband speed”) isn’t the same thing as end-to-end throughput (“Internet speed”). Clearly this difference is valuable for consumers to understand, and is a critically important distinction in the Network Neutrality debate.

Which is why I’m disappointed in the article; sadly, it oversimplifies the issue to the point of covering up critical details.  The comparison to fax technology is imperfect, maybe even flawed. It conjures an incorrect conclusion in the mind of a reader. And the material result of this is to avoid a discussion of provider responsibility for effective bandwidth.

To be clear, end-to-end throughput across a network is affected by everything in between the two hosts (computers) that are communicating. It is affected by the equipment, configurations, and interconnects. It is also affected by the capability of the transport protocols, round-trip latency, packet overhead, and more. In this regard, the article is correct to say that effective bandwidth shouldn’t be compared directly to broadband access capacity. But likewise, to compare the effective bandwidth to the coding rates of fax machines is a vast oversimplification.

Looking at the factors that might affect end-to-end performance, a number of those are directly in the hands of the network provider.  The access link (i.e. broadband connection) to the customer is just the first component.  It terminates in an edge / aggregation network that is probably oversubscribed.  The edge networks may be interconnected across a backbone, with its own bandwidth constraints and physical distance inefficiency.  And Internet connectivity, to the backbone or to the edge network directly, is enabled by a number of peering and/or transit connections that are not necessarily equal.  This isn’t even considering the possibility of NAT, security, or bandwidth management devices that might constrain effective throughput.

When all is accounted for, there may be a considerable oversubscription rate.  Not that oversubscription is inherently bad; most users aren’t using 100% of their bandwidth at the same moment in time, allowing the provider to time-multiplex their users without causing negative performance.  And this oversubscription allows the provider to make money in an otherwise low-margin business.  But because it’s hard to determine how oversubscribed a provider is, they’re often tempted to push costs lower by oversubscribing more.  (Which is evident when providers get irritated by increasing usage, such as P2P traffic, by their customers.)  Further, the Internet transit connections might be acquired on-the-cheap, offering lower quality network paths (read: more oversubscription, more latency).  And the effect of these choices directly accrues against end-to-end performance.

Now, to be clear, I’m not advocating regulation of how service providers build their networks.  It should be up to each business to determine for themselves what is an effective network topology, interconnect strategy, oversubscription rates, etc.  But to focus the entire network debate on the access connections while ignoring the complex network that interconnects those to the Internet is misleading.

Broadband vs. Internet Speed: Not So Fast is a post from: Benson Schliesser

I’m happy to see a post from @swardley about Private versus Public cloud terminology. I’ve never considered the issue settled clearly, so I’m glad to read in Private vs Public clouds:

I thought this argument has been settled a long time ago, seems not. So, once more dear friends I will put on my best impression of a stuck record.

Better to sound like a stuck record than delusional. He goes on to note two dimensions of cloud definition: private vs. public, and internal vs. external

First what is the difference between a public and a private cloud?

• A public cloud (the clue is in the name) is open to the public.
• A private cloud (the clue is in the name) is private to some set of people.

…

There is another side to this which is your relationship to the provider. It is either :

• external to you and therefore controlled, operated and run by another party.
• internal to you which means it is controlled, operated and run by yourself.

Unfortunately, this definition seems to be the commonly accepted one. I say “unfortunately” because it fails to recognize an important dimension: connectivity. Let me just accept the terminology here, rather than fight it, and suggest a new term to describe the nature of network connectivity:

• Global – cloud resources are connected (directly or via firewall and/or NAT) to the Internet
• Local – cloud resources are connected to a private network, such as a VPN or other internal network environment

Now, I wouldn’t have picked these terms if I could have just used Public/Private or Internal/External instead. But since people have been stuck on yesterday’s way of thinking, that “Cloud” == “Internet Connected”, the good terms got used to describe control and ownership instead. But it is an important distinction, because a cloud isn’t any good without network connectivity and the nature of that network connectivity defines the baseline audience of users. Further it suggests a security paradigm, QoS domain, etc.

The choice of “global” and “local” mirrors terminology used to describe IP addresses, which might be “globally unique” or “locally unique”. (Of course, most people refer to the latter category as “private”, but I digress…)  If you can think of a better term for the dimension of cloud connectivity, please let me know. But whatever you do please don’t forget that the nature of network connectivity is an important distinction for cloud usability, especially in enterprise organizations.

Private vs. Public Clouds is a post from: Benson Schliesser

I’m pleased to be serving on the Nomination Committee (NomCom) for ARIN this year, helping identify the slate of candidates for the Board of Trustees and the Advisory Council elections. From the call for nominations:

ARIN is issuing an open call for General Members in good standing to nominate candidates for two (2) seats on the Board of Trustees, five (5) seats on the Advisory Council, and one (1) seat on the Number Resource Organization (NRO) Number Council that become open when current terms expire on 31 December 2010.

The Board of Trustees and Advisory Council election has a Nomination Committee (NomCom) that is responsible for identifying, recruiting, and certifying a properly selected slate of candidates to be placed in nomination before the membership for election. This year’s NomCom members are: Board of Trustee members Paul Andersen and Scott Bradner, Advisory Council members Heather Schiller and Bill Sandiford, and general member volunteers Bill Manning, Justin Clutter, and Benson Schliesser. Paul Andersen is serving as NomCom Chair.

New Board, Advisory Council, and NRO NC terms begin 1 January 2011. The two Board seats opening are held by Paul Vixie and Lee Howard. The five Advisory Council seats opening are currently held by: Cathy Aronson, Marla Azinger, Owen DeLong, Scott Leibrand, and Tom Zeller. ARIN Board and Advisory Council incumbents may be re-elected for consecutive terms. Jason Schiller’s seat for the NRO NC also became open this year. Please note that the NRO Number Council representatives now fulfill the role of ICANN’s ASO Address Council.

Nominations close on Monday 9 August at 17:00 (EDT, I believe) so act quickly if interested. For more information, please see https://www.arin.net/app/election/.

ARIN 2010 Elections is a post from: Benson Schliesser

I’ve been delayed posting the follow up to my previous post Network Virtual Appliances Are Silly, for reasons I’ll go into later. Sorry. But for now, I’ll continue to post other stuff as usual. For instance I came across this video, via Nebraska never looked so appealing: anatomy of a zombie attack. Oops, I mean a recession.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ssIhiD8kKM

Zombie Apocalypse or Recession? is a post from: Benson Schliesser