August Backbone Engineering Report

Sun Sep 13 22:59:45 UTC 1992

> Jordan,
> 
> I notice that there was no mention in your report of the serious
> outage NEARnet experienced early in the month.  Do such outages get
> reported via some other mechanism?
> 
> - John

John,

We generally do not report specific outages in the monthly engineering
report, unless they are causes or effects of changes in network
software/hardware.

With respect to the outage you describe, there were two routing
problems which surfaced at the beginning of the month that caused some
outages.  We inadvertantly neglected to include these.  Thanks for
pointing this out.

To clarify: a bug in the EGP protocol code of our T3 rcp_routed
software induced a serious outage at both NEARnet and SESQUInet on
8/11, and resulted in at least one change to the T3-rcp_routed
software.  This occured at about the same time that we exceeded the
8KB EGP update size in outbound network announcements, which caused
problems with a few regional routers, and complicated the diagnosis of
the T3 routing software bug.

As an aside, we have been maintaining a current set of release notes
on the T3 network routing software that describes the bug fixes and
changes in each release.  This is available via anonymous on
ftp.ans.net in the file /pub/info/T3-rcp_routed/Release-Notes.  We
hope that people find this information useful and welcome feedback
from the community.

Finally, our practice for outage reporting has been to post real time
T3/T1 outage reports involving regional network and service provider
attachments to the NSR mailing list and provide additional information
on the regional-techs and nwg mailing lists.

			Jordan