[Outages-discussion] [outages] Comcast Issues Central & East

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Thu, Aug 01, 2019 at 01:02:37PM -0500, Eric Spaeth wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 31, 2019 at 2:11 PM Scott Weeks <surfer at mauigateway.com> wrote:
> 
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------
> > and uses RIPv2 to announce its LAN-side IPv4 block
> > ----------------------------------------------
> >
> > They use what!?!?!  :)
> >
> >
> The right protocol for the job.

I suspect the "they use what?!?!" comment is driven by the age-old
mentality of "RIPv1/v2?  OMG who uses that, nobody uses that, it's old,
limited hop count, it uses multicast, it's terrible, it should be
replaced then taken out back and shot!"

This overall belief is a very broken one, yet continues to rise/bloat in
the day and age where everyone wants "new shiny" and thinks "newer is
better".  I've seen similar reactions to all sorts of late
ARPA/DARPA-era protocols, even ones as "basic" (except not really) as
telnet.  Rarely is good/solid technical justification given for this,
instead it seems to be driven by dislike for having to read RFCs and
disapproval towards all things "old".

More rarely is consideration given to the fact that something is used
because it is technically better/more relevant to the situation (such as
here), or because it's substantially more well-understood (this latter
point is often overlooked.  Example: syslog has some shortcomings (see:
RELP wrapper), but it is a well-understood protocol and is a lot easier
to troubleshoot comparatively to things like, say, logstash).  I am not
implying alternate or newer routing protocols are not well-understood, I
am speaking about the mindset.

Picking the right tool (protocol) for the job is the proper approach, no
matter how "old" it may be.  I wish more people asked "why was {thing}
chosen and when?" first.  The why, as demonstrated here, is important.
Because newer is not always better.

</soapbox>

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                 jdc at koitsu.org |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      PGP 0x2A389531 |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                        |