cfm@sparta.com (Carl Muckenhirn) (10/18/90)
the map you are refering to used to be available from the DDN NIC (NIC.DDN.MIL). It has nothing to do with network geography or topology, but is a listing of the domains that are registered with the NIC. It was (is, it is probably still out there somewhere) basically a tree with the "INTERNET" as the root node, .com, .mil, .gov, .org, .us, .uk, ... as the first level descendents, .af.mil, .sparta.com, .mitre.org, ... etc. For the most part the tree is very shallow, but some branches are fairly deep (mit.edu comes to mind). This whole map is just a layout of administrative domains. There are a number (most?) of domains that consist of several "networks" (a group of computers organized under a single network number). There is no reason that a domain (sparta.com for example) cannot be geographically diverse (for example with a "network" in Washington, D.C. and another in Baltimore, MD) but sharing the administrative and naming structure provided by the DNS (all hosts on these networks have hostnames of the form <something>.sparta.com (<something> maybe <foo> or <foo>.<bar> or <foo>.<bar>.<foobar>..... [you get the picture]). If you want a picture of the "network topology" you need to start looking at the network addresses, find the gateways on those networks, hook the gateway's different network addresses together, then go to the next layer of networks and so on. This should be doable (I've been working on related pieces of this problem for the last 2 years on and off) with the information in the NIC (and NSFNET NISC). The hard part comes when you try to display it, what is the point of reference (if I start at the nsfnet the picture is much different than if I start at a stub network), what symbology is appropriate (are the connected networks lines, clouds, layers of an onion) and so on. And once you've figured that out, someone will say, "But WHERE are these things?" and you now have to get all the addresses for the gateways, and now the pretty layered picture is a bowl of spaghetti. (Are there any idle topologists out there?) All this is to say, I doubt that there are any "network maps" out there that show the entire internet. There are some very good geographic maps of some of the regional and educational nets (THENet sticks in my mind) out there, but I think that all were manually done (a Mac, some clip-art, a lot of time). I can't remember right off where they can be found, if anyone is interested drop me a line and I'll see if I can dig it out. A few people here at Sparta have done a lot of thinking about how to do automated generation of topographic and geographic network maps, and we have some of the basics down but we are between contracts and don't know if this work will continue (being a defense contractor is the pits sometimes). If anyone has any other insights on this topic I'd be happy to hear from you. carl.
HANK@VM.BIU.AC.IL (Hank Nussbacher) (06/23/91)
I am looking to create a list of where everyone stores their network map. Please send me the following information: 1) anonymous ftp name and number 2) cd __________ 3) get ___________.ps 4) what is included in your map? 5) how often is it updated? Thanks, Hank