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Comment by pennaMan | Hacker News Reader

Having a single communication medium is a SPOF no matter what name it has

Isn't internet a single communication medium anyway?

The internet is specifically designed to route around downed links such that there is no SPOF, that’s the theory anyway.

However, when major backbones go down it takes it a while to recover.

Well, kinda! Just look at this recent CloudFlare blog post[1]. It's true, theres no Single Point of Failure - there are MANY points of failure ;)

[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-verizon-and-a-bgp-optimizer-...

The internet, like the road network is designed to cope with failures - even if a major problem leads to congestion.

We build services on top of that that don't cope with failures.

Does this change anything though? The internet has many of these SPOF services. And even more AS's who through malice or fluke can take trigger a failure of those SPOFs + more.

At the end of the day, that sounds like a massive pile of SPOFs that just barely keep up..

Not really? The internet is literally an internet, i.e. a network that connects networks. You can nearly always find another connection that still works, be it a coffee shop or cellular.

Sure, having a single connection is a SPOF, but anyone living in an urban area and anyone with a cellphone (and not using the same cellular carrier for home internet) has more than one connection.

I'm on Google Fi, so theoretically I have redundancy on my phone as well. I have used my phone as a hotspot for work, and I've also gone to other locations to get work done (library, coffee shop, a neighboring company's lobby, etc).

A lot has to go wrong for me to not get work done. If Slack goes down, I use text, email, or Jira comments (in roughly that order of priority). Relying on only one communications method is foolhardy.

What OSI layer are we discussing?

Interestingly that you say this; we need an additional layer called layer 8.

As app is 7 but we have grown beyond the seven into meta layers of service types which have become the favric of how we operate... such as email, txt, chat etc to keep all other aspects of infra up and running.

the OSI model is not a truthful representation of the different layer of networking. Things get messy between layer 2 and 3 (ARP for instance?).

Also, everything above layer 4 is a enormous mess, considering that stuff is usually happening at the application itself anyways. There are network protocols which have proper OSI seperation, but they are rarely used. (IS-IS in combination with CLNS for instance).

Knowledge atrophy is a serious thing... i used to be deeply skilled in all of that but attention is where the heart is... so ive literally forgotten so much abt networking over the years.

A failure of mine was to not keep a project portfolio runbook which i could look back upon.

Imagine a system where all your status reports were logged and searchable - that would be move valuable than linkedin...

It is, technically. Good thing there's also phones and SMS.

Both of which increasingly work over the Internet on the backend, from what I hear.

I have heard a horror story involving a phone line multiplexed over fiber to an IX and someone used it as OOB.

But it is routed. Also your laptop usually has 2 Network cards on different physical layers... Not the same.

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