Netcom Outage (Was: My InfoWorld Column About NANOG)

Fri Jun 21 21:50:44 UTC 1996

> Can other big parts of the backbone fall down and take 13 (or more) hours
> to get back up?  Or is the rest of the net engineered more redundantly than
> Netcom?  Should I build two backbones, each with separate technologies?
> Was this a foreshock of the coming Metcalfean Big One, or just lousy
> procedures at one of the bigger ISPs?

Maybe we should turn off a major exchange point for 6 hours as a test.
Seriously, unless you have on-staff people who are quite swift and
really understand both the architecture and the implementation bogies of
your particular IP network, it might not be a bad idea to build two
separate backbones with different technology and/or routing policy.

> Inquiring minds want to know.  Right now, it appears to be just a few
> (thankfully?).  And now is the time to develop communications and publicity
> strategies for this sort of thing -- along with the engineering to
> hopefully prevent them.
> 
> -- 
> Pete Kaminski
> kaminski at nanospace.com

Avi