Level3 worldwide emergency upgrade?

Siegel, David David.Siegel at Level3.com
Thu Feb 7 21:19:22 UTC 2013


I remember being glued to my workstation for 10 straight hours due to an OSPF bug that took down the whole of net99's network.

I was pretty proud of our size at the time...about 30Mbps at peak.  Times are different and so are expectations.  :-)

Dave


-----Original Message-----
From: Brett Watson [mailto:brett at the-watsons.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2013 6:07 PM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: Level3 worldwide emergency upgrade?

Hell, we used to not have to bother notifying customers of anything, we just fixed the problem. Reminds me a of a story I've probably shared on the past. 

1995, IETF in Dallas. The "big ISP" I worked for at the time got tripped up on a 24-day IS-IS timer bug (maybe all of them at the time did, I don't recall)  where all adjacencies reset at once. That's like, entire network down. Working with our engineering team in the *terminal* lab mind you, and Ravi Chandra (then at Cisco) we reloaded the entire network of routers with new code from Cisco once they'd fixed the bug. I seem to remember this being my first exposure to Tony Li's infamous line, "... Confidence Level: boots in the lab."

Good times.

-b


On Feb 6, 2013, at 5:41 PM, Brandt, Ralph wrote:

> David. I am on an evening shift and am just now reading this thread.   
> 
> I was almost tempted to write an explanation that would have had 
> identical content with yours based simply on Level3 doing something 
> and keeping the information close.
> 
> Responsible Vendors do not try to hide what is being done unless it is 
> an Op Sec issue and I have never seen Level3 act with less than 
> responsibility so it had to be Op Sec.
> 
> When it is that, it is best if the remainder of us sit quietly on the 
> sidelines.
> 
> Ralph Brandt
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Siegel, David [mailto:David.Siegel at Level3.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2013 12:01 PM
> To: 'Ray Wong'; nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: RE: Level3 worldwide emergency upgrade?
> 
> Hi Ray,
> 
> This topic reminds me of yesterday's discussion in the conference 
> around getting some BCOP's drafted.  it would be useful to confirm my 
> own view of the BCOP around communicating security issues.  My 
> understanding for the best practice is to limit knowledge distribution 
> of security related problems both before and after the patches are 
> deployed.  You limit knowledge before the patch is deployed to prevent 
> yourself from being exploited, but you also limit knowledge afterwards 
> in order to limit potential damage to others (customers, 
> competitors...the Internet at large).  You also do not want to 
> announce that you will be deploying a security patch until you have a 
> fix in hand and know when you will deploy it (typically, next 
> available maintenance window unless the cat is out of the bag and danger is real and imminent).
> 
> As a service provider, you should stay on top of security alerts from 
> your vendors so that you can make your own decision about what action 
> is required.  I would not recommend relying on service provider 
> maintenance bulletins or public operations mailing lists for obtaining 
> this type of information.  There is some information that can cause 
> more harm than good if it is distributed in the wrong way and 
> information relating to security vulnerabilities definitely falls into that category.
> 
> Dave
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ray Wong [mailto:rayw at rayw.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2013 9:16 AM
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Re: Level3 worldwide emergency upgrade?
> 
>> 
> 
> OK, having had that first cup of coffee, I can say perhaps the main 
> reason I was wondering is I've gotten used to Level3 always being on 
> top of things (and admittedly, rarely communicating). They've reached 
> the top by often being a black box of reliability, so it's (perhaps
> unrealistically) surprising to see them caught by surprise. Anything 
> that pushes them into scramble mode causes me to lose a little sleep 
> anyway. The alternative to what they did seems likely for at least a 
> few providers who'll NOT manage to fix things in time, so I may well 
> be looking at longer outages from other providers, and need to issue 
> guidance to others on what to do if/when other links go down for 
> periods long enough that all the cost-bounding monitoring alarms start 
> to scream even louder.
> 
> I was also grumpy at myself for having not noticed advance 
> communication, which I still don't seem to have, though since I 
> outsourced my email to bigG, I've noticed I'm more likely to miss 
> things. Perhaps giving up maintaining that massive set of procmail 
> rules has cost me a bit more edge.
> 
> Related, of course, just because you design/run your network to 
> tolerate some issues doesn't mean you can also budget to be in support 
> contract as well. :) Knowing more about the exploit/fix might mean 
> trying to find a way to get free upgrades to some kit to prevent more 
> localized attacks to other types of gear, as well, though in this case 
> it's all about Juniper PR839412 then, so vendor specific, it seems?
> 
> There are probably more reasons to wish for more info, too. There's 
> still more of them (exploiters/attackers) than there are those of us 
> trying to keep things running smoothly and transparently, so anything 
> that smells of "OMG new exploit found!" also triggers my desire to 
> share information. The network bad guys share information far more 
> quickly and effectively than we do, it often seems.
> 
> -R>
> 
> 
> 






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