Westnet and Utah outage

Hans-Werner Braun hwb at upeksa.sdsc.edu
Wed Nov 22 18:21:36 UTC 1995


>Scott asks:
>
>So this is to imply that you do have a problem w/ Sprint and that
>you are picking on them in a specific way?
>
>COOK:  your suggestion scott not mine.......  If I remember correctly on 
>my one previous querry 6 weeks ago, the problem seemed to be more MCI's 
>than sprints.  I am in the midst of writing a long cover story on how 
>backbones are responding to internet growth pressure and when something 
>breaks I am interest in understanding what happened.  It looks in this 
>case however like people want me to yell on the sprint outage list rather 
>than here so I'll check out the possibility of doing that.  Do you guys 
>have an outtage list I can join?  My apologies if I have offended anyone.
>
>********************************************************************
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>********************************************************************

I really hate to make Gordon's points here, but the network is so
broken at times, it is hard to get interactive work done. Even an FTP
between two NSF supercomputer centers ((so far) idle 266MHz machines at
the end points) went at a whopping:

 3320903 bytes sent in 1.1e+03 seconds (3.1 Kbytes/s)

And that was already the second try, as the uncompressed file version
just took ways too long. The packet losses were between 8 and 10
percent.

These kind of performances are ways too regular for me these days. And
as a "user" I have very little means to find out what the hell is wrong
with this network. I am sometimes so sick and tired of this that I am
tempted to use the tools I have (ping and traceroute) and broadly post
to people as to where things seem broken. And I will not care at all if
you guys tell me "well, that's unfair, as ping and traceroute go to
the main processor." Give me a working network, better tools, or SHUT
THE HELL UP AND GO BACK TO FARMING. I will be glad to shut up myself,
once you get your act together and provide smooth and transparent
network services.

Obviously I am able to send much more polite notes, but I am really
getting sick and tired of this lousy performance and degrading network
service qualities.

I suspect MANY will increase their amplitude over the next few months
if this continues.

And I don't want to hear this bullshit about regular 10% packet losses
being just fine, and 100% being just marginal.

*At least* let people know if things are broken, so they look for
alternatives (be it a cup of tea if short term, or another service
provider if persistent).

I think this problem is wide spread and not confined to specific
service providers. So if someone points a finger at your competitor,
don't be too happy about it. You may be next.

Geez.



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