BGP Problem on 04/16/2007

Thu Apr 19 17:44:52 UTC 2007

On Apr 19, 2007, at 12:52 PM, David Temkin wrote:

>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On
>> Behalf Of Warren Kumari
>> Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2007 12:01 PM
>> To: Robert E. Seastrom
>> Cc: Leigh Porter; Jay Hennigan; Andre Oppermann; nanog at merit.edu
>> Subject: Re: BGP Problem on 04/16/2007
>>
>>
>>
>> On Apr 19, 2007, at 10:17 AM, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> With certain susceptible Sun CPUs which were popular during
>> the last
>>> sunspot maxima, this was actually demonstrably true (and
>> acknowledged
>>> by Sun), so don't laugh too hard.
>>
>> Yup, Sandia National Labs made a radiation hardened Pentium
>> and, as far as I remember, was working on a hardened SPARC --
>> there was also some work done (AFAIR on PPC) whereby 3
>> processors would run the same instructions and vote on the output...

>
> Thinking of perhaps Resilience?  http://www.resilience.com/
>
> God, those things were horrid before they realized that the business
> model of assuming "The app will always be OK, the issue will be the
> hardware" was completely misguided.  I forget what the product was  
> named
> at the time, but I'll never forget what a piece of crap it was.

Nah, I wasn't thinking of them -- post-traumatic memory loss allowed  
me to forget them... There was someone else who's name I have managed  
to forget who tried to do the same thing through 4 parallel SCSI  
connectors and fancy OS software -- it was horrendous.. There were 2  
motherboards in a case (driven by the same, non-redundant, non- 
swappable PSU!) and each motherboard had 2 dual channel SCSI  cards  
with cables stretched between the cards. Fancy drivers exposed each  
board's RAM to the other machine -- there was also a 10Base-2 cable  
(I'm dating myself here) between the mother-boards for coordination  
and communication. Every now-and-then your application was supposed  
to make a system call that would cause the machines grind to a halt  
and compare their memory -- if there was a difference, the syscall  
would return non-zero and leave you to figure out what to do about it  
-- unfortunately because there were only 2 machines voting there was  
no way to know who was right and who was wrong -- the vendors  
suggestion was to a: reboot or b: "just choose one and hope you  
guessed right". Wildly broken system...

I cannot find any of my docs on the system that I was originally  
talking about, but it was 3 PPC cores in a single package -- there  
was built in hardware to keep them synchronized and voting. AFAIR,   
it was a drop-in replacement for the "normal" version of the same  
device, modulo the power-draw.

Maxwell Technologies makes a triple modular redundant cPCI board with  
SOI processor and rad tolerant FPGAs that is really nice -- somewhere  
I think I still have a stash of them...

NB: The above mentions 10BASE-2 and cPCI (which will fit in certain  
vendors hardware) which *just* managed to keep this on-topic --  
hopefully :-)

W

--
If the bad guys have copies of your MD5 passwords, then you have way  
bigger problems than the bad guys having copies of your MD5 passwords.
-- Richard A Steenbergen