Read this a couple weeks ago when it came out. Great story, but yeah when having kids and a family takes another sort of person to still want to pursue those adventures. But some cannot just sit still and feel the need to push their endeavors to the highest limit.
There is always an oversubscription ratio at pretty much every hop in the network, at least in a commercial service provider network. That doesn't mean packet loss is occurring all the time, for the most part providers monitor and plan their networks so that doesn't happen, at least during steady-state non-failure.
Utilization patterns can also vary quite a bit based on geography and the type of users being served.
US cable providers do keep track of users who consume their last mile bandwidth all the time. It's typically against their terms of use, so if you are nailing up 300Gbps 24/7, you will get a letter from them and may get your connection turned off.
Linux tool? Hate when everything Unix automatically gets categorized as Linux. Have used Expect for many years for many use cases from automating servers to networking use cases as well.
For example, expect(1) is described in the 1989 Don Libes book "Life with UNIX". Libes is the author of Expect. A title such as "Life with Linux" would probably have made little sense at the time.
Correction: I went back and looked at the book and it does not mention expect. According to Wikipedia expect was first released the following year, in 1990. Apologies for the inadvertence.
Nevethless I think it is safe to say that expect was not written using or for Linux as Linux was not released until 1991.
BGP confederations are still used in some large SP networks today, mostly because it's hard to transition away from it. However, it hasn't been a recommended solution for scaling BGP for 15+ years now. I had someone approach me recently wanting to deploy them after reading a BGP book written 20 years ago. No.
Myself and some of the original #warez folks on EFNet still hang out on a non-IRC chat platform, 30+ years later. Some of those guys were Razor members at one point in time. Lol most have grown up kids now. It's definitely a far cry from back in the day. I was briefly a courier for Razor starting on BBS but they were quite demanding. I would courier releases from their HQ at the time Mirage to a number of the member boards, but they wanted things done like the second it hit and really wanted all their couriers to have multiple lines. Certainly some colorful fellows in Razor 1911 like the TRC.
