Netcom Outage (Was: My InfoWorld Column About NANOG)

Fri Jun 21 22:35:00 UTC 1996

On Fri, 21 Jun 1996, Peter Kaminski wrote:

> I'm wearing two hats for the next set of questions -- the first as
> a technical manager for an ISP growing an international backbone, and
> the second as someone who's concerned about marketing the Internet
> (and my company) to the public.
> 
> 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?

Having a fully meshed/redundant network should be the goal of any serious
ISP. The only one that claims it with any substance IMO is UUNET.  We are
trying to build one and its not easy.  Haveing redundant links in place
does not guarantee instant fall over of traffic. Static routes, IGRP,
iBGP, bridgeing, rip1 vs rip2, etc. are some of the issues we are running
into. As well as when an interface is down, but actually looks up to the
router, etc..it can be done, but there are so many possible points of
failure and unforseen scenarios, it is very difficult to construct and
certainly takes time to develop.

/stb

---
Stephen Balbach  "Driving the Internet To Work"
VP, ClarkNet     due to the high volume of mail I receive please quote
info at clark.net   the full original message in your reply.