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One Broken Router Takes Out Half the Internet?
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Feb 16, 2009 06:32 PM
from the brain-gone-punky dept.
from the brain-gone-punky dept.
Silent Stephus writes "I work for a smallish hosting provider, and this morning we experienced a networking event with one of our upstreams. What is interesting about this, is it's being caused by a mis-configured router in Europe — and it appears to be affecting a significant portion of the transit providers across the Internet. In other words, a single mis-configured router is apparently able to cause a DOS for a huge chunk of the Net. And people don't believe me when I tell them all this new-fangled technology is held together by duct-tape and baling wire!"
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Submission: One broken router takes out half the internet? by Anonymous Coward
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Few stories back... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Few stories back... (Score:5, Funny)
Nuclear Sub? Is that a new sandwich from Subway?
"The all new Subway Nuclear Sub: It glows in the dark! Get a lotta green for a little green! Now only $5.99 for a 12-inch! Subway: Eat Fresh!"
Parent
I lost a router (Score:5, Funny)
And took out THE _WHOLE_ INTERNET!!!!!
It's true! Ask my wife!
Parent
Re:I lost a router (Score:5, Funny)
Which one is true? A lost router took out the whole internet, or you have a wife?
Parent
Re:I lost a router (Score:5, Funny)
Are you saying that you accidentally the whole Internet?
Parent
Re:I lost a router (Score:5, Funny)
Is that bad?
Parent
Re:Few stories back... (Score:5, Funny)
That is actually correct. The sub shop in Bremerton (West Coast port for Trident Ballistic Missile Submarines, SSBN-726, etc.) sells the Trident Nuclear Submarine Sandwich with an extra serving of horseradish somewhere in the middle of it. It'll light your hair on fire, or, in my case, turn my scalp red.
Parent
Half the internet? Are you serious? (Score:5, Informative)
A router takes out 'half the internet' and I learn this from Slashdot?
Seriously, what is/was the impact? I work for a large e-commerce provider and haven't seen a thing that would indicate a problem today.
Ditto the A.C. (Score:5, Informative)
It must have been the "half the Internet" that I don't use. Which would be an interesting half because many of the sites I visit regularly are based in Europe.
From the thread, it looks like AS 47868 was the route being lost.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_System_Number [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re:Ditto the A.C. (Score:5, Funny)
> It must have been the "half the Internet" that I don't use.
The non-pr0n half.
Parent
Re:Ditto the A.C. (Score:5, Funny)
> It must have been the "half the Internet" that I don't use.
The non-pr0n half.
Such a place exists? 0.o
Parent
Re:Ditto the A.C. (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't just AS47868, it was kicked off by AS47868 sending real long routes like you can get to a by going through b, c, d, e, f ,g, h... and so on and so forth. Older versions of IOS wack out with the crazy long routes and lose their BGP sessions so it is possible that he lost half of the internet while you were on a network segment which was not seeing the issue. If the OP were to post the ASN or IP block he was on we could run BGP play and see just how much of the net he really lost. I'm going to guess about .5%.
Parent
Re:Half the internet? Are you serious? (Score:5, Funny)
A router takes out 'half the internet' and I learn this from Slashdot?
Non, no, no. You messed up the troll and got modded "Insightful". Let me fix that for you:
A router takes out 'half the internet' and this is front page news at Slashdot? Slow news day?
Thank you, I'll be here all week...
Parent
Re:Half the internet? Are you serious? (Score:5, Funny)
A router takes out 'half the internet' and I learn this from Slashdot?
Seriously, what is/was the impact? I work for a large e-commerce provider and haven't seen a thing that would indicate a problem today.
Well I'm not sure about you.
Personally, I have BIGGER news! A single router in a remote rural US state managed to take down the ENTIRE INTERNETS!!!!
Yes, indeed when I noticed my cat had unplugged the power adapter, I replaced it. Then the ENTIRE internet came back! It was amazing how I single-handedly brought back the whole internets. Al Gore would be proud.
Parent
Sorry (Score:5, Funny)
My bad. I never should have cut that tape.
You get Duct tape? (Score:5, Funny)
Yep, Its true (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yep, Its true (Score:5, Funny)
Now I really don't know all that much about large-scale networking so maybe someone could explain this to me. What difference does it make if the router is rouge, versus say, green? or black?
Thanks for any insight :)
Parent
Re:Yep, Its true (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Yep, Its true (Score:5, Funny)
Now I really don't know all that much about large-scale networking so maybe someone could explain this to me. What difference does it make if the router is rouge, versus say, green? or black?
So they announced a route that was, shall we say, malformed. Part of the problem is that due to a Cisco bug (CSCdr54230), some routers choke on it instead of ignoring it. The bug is fixed. It was fixed some time ago. Nonetheless, it's a pretty bad bug, labeled as "1 - catastrophic" by Cisco (in red letters, even). Routers still running affected code versions are having issues.
And it's only at this point in writing my reply that I realize you were taking advantage of a pun by way of misspelling. I'll leave my reply anyway ;-)
Parent
Re:Yep, Its true (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, Mages are known for powdering their cheekbones. Rogue's on the other hand, like to stab people in the back.
Parent
Re:Yep, Its true (Score:5, Funny)
Rouge is overpowdered!
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Re:Yep, Its true (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the problem. You shouldn't use rouge on your routers.
I think that a rouged router would possibly be overly promiscuous.
No wonder problems like this can spread like the clap in a port town!
Parent
Am I being too vauge? (Score:5, Funny)
That's the problem. You shouldn't use rouge on your routers.
They think a rouge router is in vouge, but they're out of their leauge. We should haranuge them! A plauge on them! Rip out their tounges so they cannot aruge! Them and their colleauges. Nothing but demagouges and idealouges I say. There can be no dialouge on this matter. Send them to the moruge!
Are you intriuged by my ideas and want to subscribe to my travelouge?
Parent
Re:Am I being too vauge? (Score:5, Funny)
*calls 911*
I think I just witnessed a brutal murder...of a spell checker. Gotta hide my dictionary!
Parent
AS 47868 (Score:5, Informative)
There is a post in nanog and on isc.sans.org.
AS 47868 causing AS paths to become too long...
http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg15472.html
Oops (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry, I *told* Mustafa not to drop the anchor there! But does he listen to me? No...
baling wire, not bailing wire (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baling_wire [wikipedia.org]
I think you mean baling wire. One uses buckets for bailing.
Oblig. I.T. Crowd (Score:5, Funny)
What is Jen doing with The Internet??
Don't knock duct tape (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, do, you're right to be concerned. The thing is, our technology infrastructure has always been a nasty kludge. In 1965, some coincidental misconfigurations at two minor power plants took out the power grid for an area in the northeast U.S. and eastern Canada where 25 million people lived. It was 14 hours before the grid was fully restored. Our inability to keep our technical house in order is a very old problem.
Outage Cause: Old software (Score:5, Informative)
The AS 47868 decided that they wanted to prepend their ASN about 75 or so times to their BGP announcements. When this got re-populated throughout the rest of the world, a bug in older versions of Cisco IOS still in use on many ISP/NSP networks does not like paths this long. As soon as they saw the prefix with that long of a path, the software terminated the BGP session, resulting in the doorway being closed between the two networks -- So on and so forth throughout the rest of the web.
Mod parent up (Score:5, Informative)
Mod the parent up - this is the real cause of the problem.
bgp maxas-limit 75 [cisco.com]
would stop this on most routers.
Parent
Make sure you are using cat 5 bailing wire. (Score:5, Funny)
Make sure you are using cat 5 bailing wire.
-- Terry
Re:Make sure you are using cat 5 bailing wire. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
It took out 9000 internets (Score:4, Funny)
In other words, a single mis-configured router is apparently able to cause a DOS for a huge chunk of the Net.
This means the router was able to take out over 9000 internets. Quite impressive.
Ye olde versions of IOS (Score:5, Informative)
This only broke BGP implementations that are getting pretty long in the tooth now, on a moderately recent version of IOS all we saw is:
Feb 17 05:25:03.731 nzdt: %BGP-6-ASPATH: Long AS path 10026 3356 29113 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 47868 received from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: More than configured MAXAS-LIMIT
It was definitely an insane path, our routers were configured to drop anything with an AS path longer than 75, old versions of IOS would often just drop the BGP session ( or even crash with some _really_ old versions ).
I'm sure there will be some red faced network engineers updating IOS or even doing forklift upgrades of old boxes at their edges in the near future.
Only some old versions of IOS broke (Score:5, Informative)
This only took down people running fairly old versions of IOS that didn't patch a known bug.
Did not affect non-cisco.
Did not affect modern versions of IOS
Did not affect old versions of IOS that set the knob to limit the max as-path.
Lord of the Token Ring!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Welcome to Sauronet... One Router to Rule them ALL!!!!
BGP (Score:5, Informative)
The internet's dirty little secret. It's amazing it works at all.
Parent
TAG THIS ARTICLE KDAWSONSUCKS (Score:5, Insightful)
This "article" is incredibly misleading as nothing has really gone awry. It is just another pointless KDAWSON post. These things are getting REALLY old, KDAWSON.
I work for a tier-3 provider, and if "half the Internet" dies, you are going to hear from a half-brained big media outlet (e.g CNN, ABC) VERY fast.
Parent
Re:Intelligence Op (Score:5, Funny)
They need to replace it with a network that is designed to survive a nuclear attack. Oh wait, hang on....
Parent
Re:Intelligence Op (Score:5, Interesting)
They need to replace it with a network that is designed to survive a nuclear attack. Oh wait, hang on....
Wish I had mod points today. Parent should already be SCORE:5 Funny. Apparently not enough Slashdotters know the history/evolution of the net.
If you're referring to the myth that the Internet was "designed to withstand nuclear attack", perhaps Slashdotters know more than you think.
The Internet was designed to allow distributed control, and to withstand telephone company malice and incompetence. This was a much more useful goal than withstanding nuclear attack.
Parent
Re:Intelligence Op (Score:5, Informative)
They need to replace it with a network that is designed to survive a nuclear attack. Oh wait, hang on....
Wish I had mod points today. Parent should already be SCORE:5 Funny. Apparently not enough Slashdotters know the history/evolution of the net.
If you're referring to the myth that the Internet was "designed to withstand nuclear attack", perhaps Slashdotters know more than you think.
The Internet was designed to allow distributed control, and to withstand telephone company malice and incompetence. This was a much more useful goal than withstanding nuclear attack.
One of the early arguments made by DARPA folks to politicians, in order to secure continued federal funding for packet switched network development, was the ability of the network to route around failed or destroyed nodes. They made this argument in the context of the cold war, of nuclear war.
It reality, as you state, this argument had little practical impact on the technical development or evolution of the the network. However, it most certainly did have an impact on the commitment of federal/military funding. This is the origin of the "surviving nuclear attack" lore of the development of DARPANET. It's not a myth. It's real.
Take Obama's current stimulus package as a parallel example. It's not going to solve the recession, but it's being sold as such. And the congress bought into it. Just as this stimulus bill isn't what it's being sold as, most likely DARPANET wouldn't have really given us what it was sold as at one point. Nonetheless, it was sold as such, thus creating the lore that you call myth.
Parent
Re:Intelligence Op (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the early arguments made by DARPA folks to politicians, in order to secure continued federal funding for packet switched network development, was the ability of the network to route around failed or destroyed nodes. They made this argument in the context of the cold war, of nuclear war.
They made that argument in the context of a widely distributed POTS copper wire network.
The infrastructure of today's internet is fiber based.
And most of that fiber is consolidated in a small number of long backhaul runs.
Remember that grad student whose thesis was classified because he gathered up public documents and mapped out the fiber runs that make up the domestic internet? They classified it (and pulled most of the references he used) because his analysis showed there were a few critical points which, if disrupted, would effectively fracture the domestic internet infrastructure.
The internet isn't nearly as bulletproof as the DoD would like and there isn't much they can do about it short of laying new fiber that skips over the vulnerable points.
Parent
Re:Intelligence Op (Score:5, Informative)
Aw heck, someone in Nebraska is going to trip over one power cord, and shut down the Interweb. :)
In addition to using public maps, I did a lot more research. I had my own little project going for a little while. The project was intended to monitor for faults between datacenters we had equipment in. I added the root nameservers. I also had a few other points, such as friends houses and places they had virtual hostings at.
Simply enough, it was running traceroutes from everywhere I had control to all points in my "network". I stored what router attached to each hop in a database.
I located each hop simply by the city it was located in. Some were easy. Some weren't so easy.
It was fun and games with 100 routers. I was manually setting city and state locations.
It was a little less fun when it grew to 500 routers. I wrote regular expressions to take known naming conventions and make them into city names. That sounds easy, but it gets pretty hard pretty quick.
It was a lot less fun when the list grew to several thousand routers.
Basically, ever time there was a routing change, I found new routers.
I had a lot of fun using both Google Maps to show the routes (for routers that I could place in a city), and a Graphviz model of the Internet as we observed it. It was a very big map. That was only what we had observed. I doubt we even saw a very small percentage (probably less than 0.01%) of the routes.
The map got very very very complicated. I could point out choke points. They existed, but there were also alternative routes.
Hell, even on a single good provider, there are no good choke points. On one Tier 1 provider that I used, in a non-core city, they had 6 diverse routes with OC192's. It wasn't a matter of me trusting them when they told me. I saw the routes showing up.
There are 4 cities in the US, where if say a big nuke hit each one, ya, the Internet would be hurting. You may not get from Provider A to Provider B, but you'd still have some connectivity within your own provider, and other peerings would start working fairly quickly. More obviously, you'd find that some sites that are hosted in one city would be inaccessible. That's why geographic and topological diversity is very important for anyone who wants to keep their stuff up and running.
Google puts stuff out all over the place for a reason. If a route, or a dozen routes, go funky, you'll very likely still be able to reach some datacenter.
My office is connected by 3 uplinks. They're all with different providers. The odds of a provider outage killing the office is pretty slim. Other things can happen though. Lightning hit a transformer across the street, which serviced our building. From what people on that side of the building said, it was very pretty. :) Was our Internet connection dead? No. Well, not totally. We still had 2 uplinks working. We didn't have power for the desktops though. The UPS (a big one, not the little desktop ones) provides for the server room and a very few workstations.
The biggest effect we saw from that outage was that cell phone service became minimal. The top of our building is also used for cell phone coverage. Without those antennas working, we only had service from the surrounding towers. It probably didn't help that there was now an office building full of people who were evacuated to the ground floor (it tripped the fire alarm), so almost everyone were on their cell phones making calls to customers, friends, family, etc.
The most upset people were stuck in the elevator. They were already going downstairs for a smoke break, when it got stuck because those aren't backed up with anything at all.
Parent
Re:Intelligence Op (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, it wasn't a DOS attack. That was just the Internet becoming self-aware.
OK, on second thought, maybe worrying is in order.
Parent
Re:Intelligence Op (Score:5, Funny)
The last time I experienced a DOS attack it evolved into Windows. Didn't come out of that one unscathed.
Parent
Re:Intelligence Op (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, this was my first thought as well. It seems clear that the internet, while designed to route traffic through all sorts of alternate links, is almost certainly being routed through single, centralised listening posts at various intervals.
Parent
Re:Pre-FUD propaganda (Score:5, Funny)
You left out 'updating your myspace page', 'writing poetry about how no-one understands' and 'cutting yourself'
Parent
Re:I'm not sure I follow (Score:5, Informative)
If I'm understanding this 'router' thing correctly, its like a faucet connected to the series of tubes?
If not, exactly what role does this router thing play in tube interaction?
Your understanding is rather accurate but what your missing is the manifolds. You see, all the tubes connect to big manifolds with valves to control what gets sent where. At each manifold room there is some poor admin who is in charge of opening and closing valves in order to make sure that the right AOL gets sent down the right tube. In order to keep track of what tube to send your AOL down, the admin keeps a list of all the other manifold rooms and how to get to them. Some of the manifold room operators didn't have a wide enough notebook to write down the new directions so they just closed all of their valves and went home.
Parent