How the physical infrastructure of the Internet works

General Chit Chat
1

Fascinating comment on Reddit: http://reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5smioq/eli5_how_does_the_physical_infrastructure_of_the/ddgknvs

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2

The “last mile” part is kinda different in the UK, but yeah, that’s pretty much how it works.

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3

MMM, more complicated than we all thought then.

I was under the impression that Moss explained it quite well, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

4

It’s actually rather straightforward once you get your head round the terminology and different technology used.

5

…says a networking expert. :wink:

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s/networking expert/sysadmin/g

Believe me[1], there are many, many people who are proper networking experts, and they consistently run rings around me on this shit. Just when I think I have some sort of bearing on networking, and internetworking specifically, someone mentions something totally amazeballs and massively complicated to me, so casually as though they’re telling me how simple it is to make cheese on toast, and I remember where my position is in the pecking order.

I admit that when I’m saying “it’s rather straightforward”, I’m kind of lying a little bit, because when you deep dive into shit like BGP, ASNs, VRRP, DNSSEC, HSTS, and the simultaneous miracle/clusterfuck that is IPv6, things go a bit mental rather rapidly, and to be honest you have to wonder how on earth it actually works at all.

[1] "Believe me"™ © 2016-2017 Trump Enterprises

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I don’t think there is anything particularly complicated about how the internet works but it is a layered system with protocols on top of protocols.

I think most people here, especially if they can write software, could get their heads around it if they wanted to. There is a lot to it however so unless you actually need to there will be few people here who actually do understand it in detail. And I don’t see a reason most people should.

I don’t have a full understanding myself but the company I used to work for made test equipment with an Ethernet interface.

It took me about 6 months to develop the TCP/IP v4 and v6 stack together with Auto-IP, DHCP, DNS mDNS, TELNET, Web server and a few other protocols. This was on a relatively small ARM7 processor so we didn’t have the space to go with embedded Linux and did not want to have to pay someone for a RTOS where we would have to pay someone for each unit shipped.

The reason it took so long was not that anything was particularly difficult, just that there was a lot of code to be written. I can’t remember the exact figure but the library I produced was about 25000 lines of C.

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