TNT issues "workaround"

Ejay Hire ejay.hire at isdn.net
Mon Aug 25 15:42:12 UTC 2003


In response to this, I'd like to comment on Lucent's excellent response
to this issue.  Never before have I seen such an effective application
of hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, and speak-no-evil.  While other vendors
were wasting our time sending out notifications of bugs /
vulnerabilities with workarounds / fixes, Lucent's response was much
more efficient and eloquent.  

Here is a summary of the responses I've received over several days phone
calls, calling for my current employer who does not have a service
contract, and one for one of my consulting customers who does have a
service contract.

If you have a service contract, I'm allowed to tell you we aren't aware
of any issues.  If you don't have a service contract, I'm allowed to
sell you a service contract.

On that note, I might have some TNT's for sale pretty soon.

-Ejay


-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Wallingford [mailto:brian at meganet.net] 
Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2003 12:41 AM
To: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: TNT issues "workaround"

I haven't seen specific details posted here, so:

Like many others, we've had a few TNTs online for years without hiccups
or
reboots until this week.  Beginning late Sunday, we saw seemingly random
blade reboots, and total system crashes.  Errors ranged from memory
leaks
to infinite loops on the controller blade, but all blades were 
susceptible.  HDLC2 blades seemed to be particularly vulnerable.

We saw boxes that had been rock-solid for very long periods suddenly
rebooting at periods ranging from 20 minutes to 4 hours, with no obvious
cause (i.e., nothing more specific than the above).  Border and core 
filtering of icmp echo * did little good.

On the suggestion of some folks on another list, and against my better
judgment, we disabled route caching in order to free up additional
memory (though memory did not appear fragmented).  This stabilized all
involved boxes, and surprisingly, did not result in significant
degradation of end user performance.

Granted, it's not a true fix, but it may get you a few extra Z's at
night.

hth,
brian





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