One Broken Router Takes Out Half the Internet? 412
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!"
Hmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose that a networking event with one of our upstreams [merit.edu] was behind that router?
3/11 (invalid or corrupt AS path)
Or maybe I'm behind that router?
Pre-FUD propaganda (Score:3, Interesting)
No, we DON'T NEED A NEW INTERNET! Stop pitching it, statist drones.
The internet works fine, and that's what the RIAA/MPAA/etc are trying to fix.
Even before that... (Score:3, Interesting)
The ancient egyptians
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hdonat/2422108343/ [flickr.com]
had their engineering problems too.
As soon as we humans invented technology, we humans began screwing it up.
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.
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.
Re:Even before that... (Score:3, Interesting)
Google seems to think you're talking about Snefru's Pyramid. There's some difference of opinion as to why it collapsed and when. Some authorities think it collapsed because of the steepness issue you describe (which may have been done to make it harder to pillage), and then was rebuilt to work around it. It then collapsed for good much later. Others think that it was badly designed, but that the Egyptians redesigned in mid-building to keep it from falling down. Either way, the second (or maybe only) collapse occurred in Roman times, or even the Middle Ages. That makes it a botch job by Egyptian standards (some of their earliest pyramids are still around after 4500 years!) but still better built than anything we have. I mean, can you think of a modern building that is still likely to be standing in 2000 years?
Re:BGP (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, until a major ISP decides to run their ATM core switches at almost 100% load and one of them goes offline during an upgrade. Can you say 'cascade failure'?
And this is not hypothetical. This is exactly what happened last summer with the former monopoly telco here in the Netherlands. Took out a significant chunk of DSL service, including business lines.
Mart
Re:Yep, Its true (Score:1, Interesting)
> Owners too stingy to pay for the new version that has the fix?
That's my problem now. I don't want to pay more to cisco for a needed software update than my border routers are worth. SMARTnet is not cheap. Of course that's not an option anyway because cisco doesn't allow me to run the newest versions of IOS on our model of routers. Maybe I could find a version that fixes this particular bug that I'm allowed to run, but TAC was unsure if that was true.
People forget that when dealing with routers, you're dealing with a very expensive and closed company. The hardware is made to be junked very quickly. While I've only replaced a couple of routers due to hardware problems, I have about 40 cisco routers sitting in a pile that I had to scrap because I couldn't upgrade the software.