UUNET issues?

Mon Nov 6 02:17:52 UTC 2006

> Anyway, I don't think that would have helped if you're talking about the
> same incident I'm thinking of.  There were application-level
> retransmissions of (corrupted) packets, complete with building new bad
> packets from bad data structures, all over the net
>
> The problem is documented in RFC 789  It and "The Bug Heard 'Round the
> World" are two of my favorite "how complex systems fail" papers; all
> system designers should read, memorize, and undertand both.
I actually asked Stephen if he was referring to the LSA corruption problem 
and he said he was referring to an earlier issue (circa 1972).

As for the LSA issue- rebooting would have fixed the problem, assuming it 
was done by all nodes at the same time. All of the Link State tables would 
have been rebuilt from scratch by the IMPs and the corrupt announcements 
would have been gone.

As I recall the IMP software was actually patched to ignore the 
problematic announcements from IMP 51.

-Don