On 9 Jan 2025, at 5:28 pm, Mathew, Cherry G. <cherry@backyardinnovations.co.uk> wrote:

Hello Tashi,

Thanks so much for that informative history - as a NetBSD developer (and
a former FreeBSD one) i'm very pleased to see that BSD was used! (I
assume FreeBSD ?).

Yes indeed :-)

Am sure Dr.Philip/Jichen/Ganga would have those early Internet setup photos, but this talk at APRICOT 215 is a good one https://conference.apnic.net/data/39/history-of-internet-on-bhutan-apricot-2015_1425186413.pdf

For additional historical walk back in time, have a look at this pre-SANOG6 workshop DrukNET hosted in April 2005 in collaboration with NSRC (both Philip Paeps and myself now volunteer as trainers for them to workshops and engineering assistance work across APAC):

Workshop outline - https://nsrc.org/wrc/workshops/2005/pre-SANOG-VI/outline-detailed.html

Photos - https://nsrc.org/wrc/workshops/2005/pre-SANOG-VI/photos/index.html

This was before Bhutan hosted the 6th edition of SANOG (south asian network operators group) workshops/conference few months later in July 2005.

What I find interesting is that the folks that worked on FOSS that I
have come across (both in Bhutan and other places) have done very well
in their careers. This is not an accident, in my experience.

Oh absolutely sir!

Many of the early folks from DrukNET (including those who attended the pre-SANOG6 workshop) and those folks who were lucky to SANOG6 workshops, have led very successful careers and some are still very active in the Bhutanese ICT industry.

(excepting Router/Switch OSes).

it's hard to compete the cisco (and now huawei) ecosystem - but for eg:
IIJ routers which runs Japan's ISP backbone still uses FOSS (Used to be
NetBSD, but Maz, who I met at btnog24 last year, told me they are/have
transitioned to linux now).

JunOS is still based on FreeBSD from what I know, but Cisco’s IOS-XE is/was linux based, and I assume IOS-XR is based on QNX. Interestingly, Nokia has SR Linux which is based on their SR-OS.

I'd be curious to see what tradeoffs are possible with modern ISP
requirements - I believe there are optimisations such as Edge
router virtualisation etc. that have now come in, due to the IPv6 + IoT
usecase explosion.

Well, control plane (routing protocols) was never an issue and has lots of open source options - BIRD, FRR, Quagga, VyOS.. and maybe even OpenWRT.

The challenge has always been the locked and tightly coupled forwarding plane ~ outside of the vendors, we need to figure out reasonable packet forwarding rates for practical use in real world.

If its if any interest to this community, there are champions like Andree Tonk (https://toonk.io/) who have been pushing the userland networking boundaries to allow better forwarding rates, through kernel bypass mechanisms, like DPDK.

Cheers and looking forward to some volunteers from the Bhutan FOSS community to work with btNOG.

Cheers,

—

Tashi