death of the Internet predicted. Film at 11.

[Jim Thompson]

bzs wants to talk mainframes… meh.  How about some networking rant for dinner?

Today someone announced some more IPv4 routes on the Internet.  Nothing new really, but this meant the global routing table has exceeded 500k entries (501,525 as we speak).
This has caused a lot of popular Cisco router models to go tits up because their default value for the IPv4 table size is 512k which in this case was not enough to hold the global table.
Theoretically the table should hold up to 512k entries, but the memory is not exclusively used for it, some of it goes to IPv6, some to maintaining various sessions, MPLS etc, so it
crapped out at around 500k. 

As discussed on NANOG from a few months ago:
http://markmail.org/message/n32fmeb2dmtnbsff

Now, 512K routes isn't necessarily a hardware limitation, it's the default TCAM allocation for IPv4 in a Cisco.
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/switches/catalyst-6500-series-switches/116132-problem-catalyst6500-00.html

But... don’t reload your Cisco...
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/memory.html

Talk about "damned if you do, and damned if you don’t."

I find the economics of the routing table to be fascinating. When someone announces a route, it makes use of a constrained (and often expensive, TCAM-based) resource on routers all over the world.
This totals to, by some measures, $6200/route/year.:  http://bill.herrin.us/network/bgpcost.html

Now boys & girls, $6,200 * 501,525 is $3,109,455,000/year, and growing.  

But back to reboots.  Despite the above, woe be to anyone who tries to get Cisco to replace their grey-market way-beyond-deprecated almost-definitely-not-covered-by-SmartNet Sup720 linecards in 2014.

It's very odd that "grey market" equipment is considered the standard way to refer to genuine Cisco equipment when sold by a company other than a Cisco partner.
I understand keeping out counterfeits, but given the first-sale doctrine, how is a resold piece of equipment anything other than completely legitimate?

If you think about it, and get past the "it's just industry standard" mentality, it’s a bit insane that Cisco uses (and gets away with) these pseudo-monopoly tactics.
In the old days, (say with maintenance on IBM Selectric typewriters), such schemes were called "bundling" and "tying," and the DOJ would pursue the companies for anti-trust violations.

But that was yesterday.  Today the DOJ arrests people based upon nebulous complaints from Cisco's general counsel. See e.g.
http://abovethelaw.com/2011/07/sue-a-giant-corporation-get-rewarded-with-audacious-criminal-charges/#more-84911
wherein a British citizen was arrested in Canada for starting a company that competed with Cisco maintenance.

The Canadian court quashed the request for extradition after the DOJ's request trapped him in a foreign country for years. Today, he remains under indictment in the US, despite the Canadian judge stating that the DOJ's case was a fairly transparent copy of Cisco's civil suit. The ruling was incendiary, stating that "The extradition process to bring the applicant before United States Courts… involved innuendo, half truths and complete falsehoods."

The judge concluded:

"The only reasonable inference I can draw from the facts is that the criminal process was used to pressure (unsuccessfully) the applicant into abandoning his antitrust suit against Cisco…. Any well-informed person acquainted with the truth would conclude that the collective result of the mistreatment of Mr. Adekeye offended fundamental notions of justice."

Are all Cisco execs fugly and unethical?
http://www.businessinsider.com/cisco-exec-vows-to-hunt-down-leak-2012-11

Jim