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Order of fallback systems, should the internet go down?

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PlainName:

--- Quote ---In the end, shutting down the internet would be like saying “shutting down all land travel”
--- End quote ---

I think differently. With travel you are dependant on yourself. Without major roads you can generally get around, albeit sometimes quite slowly and carefully. You don't even need any road at all to do that. With the internet you are completely dependant on your uplink. Without your ISP you're talking to no-one, and without their provider (because they are likely to be resellers) they won't be able to pass anything on even if you sent them a carrier pigeon.

Also don't forget that some countries are easily able to cut off the internet on a whim. And recent accidental routing issues have taken parts offline.

The much vaunted resilience and redundancy only applies if you actually have alternative routes to switch to. The backbone does but the vast proportion of internet users don't. Some parts of the internet will keep up, and those attached to those parts will be able to connect to each other, but the likes of you and me won't be in those parts.

Berni:

--- Quote from: tooki on November 01, 2021, 05:35:12 pm ---I’d say that if there is a weak point in the modern internet, it’s DNS, because if DNS fails, you can’t find the servers you need, even if they’re still up and running. (This is exactly how Facebook self-immolated recently: it accidentally took down its own DNS, leaving them unable to reach their DNS servers to fix them, because they were themselves only accessible using DNS!  :palm: So they had to physically go to the data centers and fix it right on the machines, which (rightfully) requires getting through many layers of physical security.)

--- End quote ---

DNS is also distributed, if nothing else in order to be fast and handle the traffic.

There are lots of DNS servers around, each ISP typically hosts its own set of DNS servers for there own network. These servers exchange the "DNS address book" with each other so that they can learn about new domains while holding the entire thing to serve to its users quickly. Some of the more professional routers also hold a DNS cache locally to improve the speed of DNS lookups (Tho they usually just hold the most recently looked up sites, not the whole thing). So typically you will at least have the ISPs DNS servers to go from. If those go down then your ISP is probably down too anyway. The tough thing is that once you loose DNS you can have difficulty finding another working one because you can't even get to google to search for it. So unless you have one memorized you would have to randomly portscan internet IPs until you find something that looks like DNS (Most users will not know how to do this)

That being said most people already have 2 redundant roads into the internet, the copper/fiber to there house and the cellular network. The later can also be expanded easily by getting data only SIM cards for the various networks in your area.

Keeping the local ISPs up is quite important for the economy, so they will try pretty hard to keep them going for as long as possible when shit hits the fan. But as i said before i hope i will never see it happen because this amount of shit hitting the fan would also cause me much worse things than not being able to google stuff.

Nusa:
There's quite a few DNS's one could use aside from your ISP, but the ones I don't have to look up are easy to remember:

8.8.8.8 Google
9.9.9.9 Quad9
1.1.1.1 Cloudflare

Berni:

--- Quote from: Nusa on November 02, 2021, 07:15:14 am ---There's quite a few DNS's one could use aside from your ISP, but the ones I don't have to look up are easy to remember:

8.8.8.8 Google
9.9.9.9 Quad9
1.1.1.1 Cloudflare

--- End quote ---

Yep i use those too. with the ISPs as a fallback. If i have DNS issues i typically use the google one to test it.

But most people don't, so for them when there default DNS goes down they are effectively without internet. Keep in mind that most people need to be guided trough how to reboot a modem.

mfro:

--- Quote from: Nusa on October 29, 2021, 08:15:52 am ---While the internet is a large collection of connected networks, that doesn't mean that all networks are part of the internet. Or even if they are, that local operation would automatically fail when global operation does.

--- End quote ---

For commercial users, it's actually that Internet isn't the most reliable/safe option. There's indeed a large network world existent independently (and to the most part physically separate) from the public Internet.

MPLS providers, e.g., guarantee (at a price) much better availability than any Internet provider.

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