MAE-East weirdness on May 13, 1999

Fri May 14 09:15:52 UTC 1999

The explanation for the May 13, morning weirdness at MAE-East appears
to be a trunk failure between one or more of the Gigaswitches.  I haven't
heard officially back from MFS yet on it, but other people had.

The afternoon is still unexplained.  Although there were several jokes
about the alien packets, the afternoon weirdness does in fact seem to be
related to large streams of unknown packets which drove the CPU on
the router to 100%.  But I don't have any copies of the mystery packets,
nor do I know what caused them.  I'm pretty sure it wasn't SMURF, the
traffic pattern was very different.  It seems to have consisted of four
short, huge bursts of unknown packets.  My current working assumption
is it was some type of strange data corruption related to the repair
activity from the morning incident, which then cleared up.
-- 
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
  Affiliation given for identification not representation