The Hedge Podcast #57: Brian Trammell and PANRG
Brian Trammell joins Alvaro Retana and Russ White to discuss the Path Aware Research Group in the IRTF. According to the charter page, PANRG “aims to support research in bringing path awareness to transport and application layer protocols, and to bring research in this space to the attention of the Internet engineering and protocol design community.”
Technologies that Didn’t: Network Operating Systems
For those with a long memory—no, even longer than that—there were once things called Network Operating Systems (NOS’s). These were not the kinds of NOS’s we have today, like Cisco IOS Software, or Arista EOS, or even SONiC. Rather, these were designed for servers. The most common example was Novell’s Netware. These operating systems were the “bread and butter” of the networking world for many years. I was a Certified Netware Expert (CNE) version 4.0, and then 4.11, before I moved into the routing and switching world. I also deployed Banyan’s Vines, IBM’s OS/2, and a much simpler system called LANtastic, among others.
Hints and Principles: Applied to Networks
While software design is not the same as network design, there is enough overlap for network designers to learn from software designers. A recent paper published by Butler Lampson, updating a paper he wrote in 1983, is a perfect illustration of this principle. The paper is caleld Hints and Principles for Computer System Design. I’m not going to write a full review here–you should really go read the paper for yourself–but rather just point out some useful bits of the paper.
