[37299] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Instant chats and central servers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dave Israel)
Tue May 8 17:25:09 2001
From: Dave Israel <davei@biohazard.demon.digex.net>
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Message-ID: <15096.19369.739514.5634@biohazard.demon.digex.net>
Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 15:40:25 -0400
To: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: Instant chats and central servers (Sean Donelan)
Reply-To: davei@biohazard.demon.digex.net
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
Sean,
There's a bunch of machines for AIM, spread out across the
AOLosphere... there is no one server that will take down the service.
(That's for the Oscar stuff; the TOC stuff, which the open messengers
use, is also clustered in the back end, but there is that One Server
You Must Talk To(tm).)
I imagine the other services are similar.
-Dave
On 5/8/2001 at 11:35:27 -0700, Sean Donelan said:
>
> A question (and a test to see if I'm still subscribed)
>
> The various instant messenging services, such as AIM, ICQ, Microsoft,
> Yahoo, other Messenger uses a central server to manage "presence".
>
> No central server appears to mean no instant messages, am I correct?
>
> What does this have to do with NANOG, apparently it is becoming more
> common for backbone NOC folks to communicate with their friends in
> other NOCs via one of these instant chat programs. I didn't realize
> how common it was until I was informed about it last month when AOL/AIM
> had difficulties. This month Yahoo Messenger had power difficulties,
> which disrupted their central servers.
>
> If folks are using this these services for real-time communications,
> should we be trying to improve their reliability? Or is this just a
> "feature" of how presence services work.
>
>
--
Dave Israel
Senior Manager, IP Backbone
Intermedia Business Internet
