verizon.net and other email grief

Tue Dec 14 14:39:59 UTC 2004

On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Simon Waters wrote:

> I believe here the problem is using anycast, and not providing a backup system
> not using anycast. The previous case I'm aware of was when bits of the NE USA
> lost ".org" because they only had anycast DNS servers

If it's the same incident I pointed out here, prompting denial and finger
pointing from the folks in charge, much of the eastern half of the US did.
(I'm in Atlanta, GA, with seven backbone providers at my disposal, and all
but one of those were affected.)

> Whilst I plead ignorant of the technical details of anycast, strikes me that
> it is clearly more complex, and thus more prone to failure, and these
> failures are potentially less obvious.

That's definitely true, though it can be used successfully -- if there's a
very reliable kill-switch to withdraw the advertisement in a moment, or some
kind of fallback mechanism in place to handle gross failures.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv at duh.org> <tv at pobox.com>