Plethora of UUnet outages and instabilities

Tue Jul 1 15:05:59 UTC 1997

On Mon, 30 Jun 1997, Wayne Bouchard wrote:

> I know one of the problems that UUNET has been having (and I believe
> several other folks as well) is high CPU usage on many of their
> routers. (When the ping times to the router itself get high its either
> a congested link or, usually, a router thats spinning hard..) However,
> thats not a problem you can fix easily or fix overnight.
> 

No, as a matter of fact, it's not, as it took UUNet months to upgrade a
Net Edge box that they were originaly going to replace.  It took them
months to eventually get around to upgrading, and then it took another
upgrade later in the week to fix the previous upgrade.  UUNet has far too
much backing and resources to be having these kinds of problems.  UUNet's
NOC is always fun to deal with.  I spent the better part of two days
trying to find out why the bgp tables we were getting from them were so
screwed after they rebooted routers in 3 different states.  The rebooted
them again 2 days later, and the problems disappeared.  The whole time,
I've got engineers telling me that the setup that's worked flawlessly
since I've been here has got to be what's wrong.  Then, the next day, I
read on here that everyone is having UUNet problems.  Confront the guy at
UUNet again, and he admits they are having BGP problems in several states.
An honest answer would be nice.  Also, they don't make it part of their
known outages that their news system is currently overloaded and won't
allow customers to feed articles to them.  I made it a point to check, and
the current status of the mail and news was posted as normal.  I get on
the phone with the person in charge of news, and she says it's a capacity
issue that they've been dealing with for the last week or so, and they're
about to have a meeting on it right away.  Once again, I got an honest
answer, but only after being lied to.  

I was once a strong UUNet supporter, but their performance and quality of
service needs to improve drasticly.  I hope they do...

Joe Shaw - jshaw at insync.net
NetAdmin - Insync Internet Services
Learn more, and you will never starve.