ship said:
Please note that this was more a question in general. I have absolutely no idea of why MSN as a home webpage allows me to use them for it when I have Comcast for a host. No idea before now of how or why the Google type thing works, much less ask geeves.
When I hot websites like "this to that", I have no idea of if by my going to the website, the person somehow gets a kick back or if he or she is paying to keep the website alive. Otherwise if it's just a null thing. Remember at one
point while with AT&T for a host, I had something like three or seven websites available as a membership thing covered in the regular monthly dues. On the other
hand, should I have formed some type of website and it became as popular as this one, at some
point I would have to pay for a website with more
power or something. Or would I if all those viewing in some way as making a phone
call were paying to use the
line and part of that phone
call to the website was in payment to the website wasting that person's time.
IN other words, I really do have no idea of how this whole internet thing works. It's post 1979 technology. Explain further please, though what has been said so far has helped.
So someone like msn is making good money off msn.com. MSN is also a dialup ISP - you can pay them some number of $ a month to have the right to dial into their modem pools and then you have a route to what we like to
call the Internet from there. DSL and cable are the same - you pay someone for your connection to the Internet. For the purpose of this discussion, we'll
call this connection your "transit" link. Unless you happen to be what is considered a Tier 1
carrier (more on that later), you're paying someone for your transit, usually a higher tier
carrier. As an end user at home, your ISP is the next tier up.
So, we're buying transit from someone, lets say AT & T for now. ATT is more or less what I would consider a tier 1
carrier. By this I mean that they generally don't pay for transit. Now, everybody has a definition of their own for who is tier 1, 2,
etc. There is no list. Some carriers are generally accepted to be tier 1. So then how do you as an ATT customer get from your computer which is connected to an ATT
router to lets say someone who is using
Level(3) as their primary transit? In this situation,
Level(3) and ATT likely have what is called peering connections, probably in multiple locations. When carriers enter into a peering agreement, they agree to exchange customer traffic at no cost. Usually there are stipulations such as whats known as cold-potato vs hot-potato routing, but, that's beyond the scope of this discussion I think. A tier 2
carrier usually buys their bandwidth from a couple of tier 1s (e.g. Level3, ATT, MCI,
etc). They will have peering agreements, but, not such that they can get anywhere.
If you pull up a command prompt on your PC and do a tracert
www.controlbooth.com, your comuter will show the series of routers data passes through between you and
www.controlbooth.com and the
latency from you to that
router. When you get *s, that particular ISP has disabled ICMP on their routers (and you're SOL here). Lets look at a
trace from me to
www.controlbooth.com:
C:\tools>tracert
www.controlbooth.com
Tracing route to
controlbooth.com [69.73.172.20]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 10.129.161.2
2 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 10.128.1.36
3 <1 ms 1 ms <1 ms 10.128.2.34
4 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 66.158.94.13
5 <1 ms <1 ms 1 ms ge0-0.sob10.chicago.lincon.net [206.166.2.33]
6 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms pos-9-0-sob10-nap-sob2.chicago.lincon.net [206.1
66.9.117]
7 4 ms 4 ms 4 ms p6-3.hsa1.chi1.bbnplanet.net [4.24.203.65]
8 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms ae-1-51.bbr1.Chicago1.Level3.net [4.68.101.1]
9 38 ms 37 ms 37 ms so-1-0-0.mp1.Houston1.Level3.net [209.247.11.169
]
10 37 ms 37 ms 37 ms so-11-0.hsa2.Houston1.Level3.net [4.68.96.54]
11 37 ms 39 ms 38 ms unknown.Level3.net [209.247.109.114]
12 36 ms 37 ms 36 ms hou-rtr3-vl2.cyrusone.com [69.7.175.19]
13 37 ms 37 ms 37 ms vl2-rtr1.nocdirect.com [69.7.160.227]
14 37 ms 36 ms 37 ms siberia.nocdirect.com [69.73.172.20]
Trace complete.
The first few hops are within my
network (10.X.X.X is reserved for internal networks). How does my ISP, Illinois Century
Network know who to
hand off my packets destined to
controlbooth to? BGP or the
Border Gateway
Protocol is a routing
protocol which every
router which is on the Internet runs. With BGP, ISPs exchange routing tables and in the case of a
router with wahts known as full tables, they have a next hop route for every subnet being announced.
Lets say I own the IP
block 129.21.0.0/16 (all the IP addresses on the Internet are assigned by IANA to a regional registry, ARIN in North America, which in turn leases IP space and ASNs to end users and ISPs). I happen to be buying transit from Level3. What I do is get an ASN (Autonomous
System Number) issued to me by ARIN, and I setup a BGP peering with Level3. I announce the prefix 129.21.0.0/16 to Level3. I also ask Level3 to
send me full routing tables for the Internet.
For redundancy, I also have an Internet connection from Cogent. I also announce my prefix (129.21.0.0/16) to Cogent, but, I add a special community to it to decrease the preference on that prefix. Cogent also sends me a full set of tables. Now my
router has two sets of full Internet tables. One of the interesting things here though is that through things like the community that I added to my announcement to Cogent, I have different costs on the routes. When I go to
send some traffic to a
network, my
router uses the least cost path. In routers around the world now, there are two routes to my
network - these routers in term pick the best cost to them. In the event Cogent has
network issues, or my BGP session goes down with them, tht route disappears from the global tables and everything comes in
thru Level3.
So if you look at the
trace again, it looks like the company which is hosting
controlbooth.com is using
Level(3) as one of their transit providers. Most likely they have at least two, and via BGP my ISP (Illinois Century
Network) selected the
Level(3) routes as the best.
Thats a high
level how stuff gets from
point a to
point b, I have about 2000 pages of BGP material on my bookshelf - it's a pretty complex thing. Some statistics about the Internet routing table as of today according to the CIDR report:
176,919 prefixes (different networks) are in the full Internet tables
21,264 AS (autonomous systems) are announcing routs into the full tables
The US DOD (AS721) is announcing 91,312,384 ip addresses to the Internet (this is the largest number for any single AS)
http://www.cidr-report.org/as4637/ - other useful stats
So, ship, unless someone locks down what
IPs/subnets (aka prefixes) can access their site (like if ATT only wanted Worldnet subscriers to access their homepage), you can get to it. ISPs get money for the stuff they put on their customer homepages usually. Personally, mine is set to "about:blank" - nothing.