[96136] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: BGP Problem on 04/16/2007
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Warren Kumari)
Thu Apr 19 12:03:35 2007
In-Reply-To: <86y7kov46q.fsf@seastrom.com>
Cc: Leigh Porter <leigh.porter@ukbroadband.com>,
Jay Hennigan <jay@west.net>, Andre Oppermann <nanog-list@nrg4u.com>,
nanog@merit.edu
From: Warren Kumari <warren@kumari.net>
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:00:53 -0400
To: "Robert E. Seastrom" <rs@seastrom.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
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...
>
> ---rob
>
> Leigh Porter <leigh.porter@ukbroadband.com> writes:
>
>> Somebody form a certain large network vendor actually blamed problems
>> with their kit on cosmic rays causing memory corruption...
Oh, not just "somebody" -- a certain large vendor has many, many
references to it -- and I have received it as a explanation for
random reloads -- believe me, trying to tell an irate customer / PHB
that the reason that his "mission critical" circuit bounced was
because of cosmic rays is No Fun(tm). Hmmm.. Isn't this the same
vendor that now has a router sitting on a satellite ?! ;-)
There was also an issue where one of the large manufacturers of
(binary) CAMs received a batch of polyimide that was contaminated
with an alpa-emitter (for some reason thorium oxide springs to mind)
and their quality control didn't catch it... As far as I know the
problem was identified before any products with the CAMs were
shipped, but I had an order held up while the vendor tried to source
alternate parts...
>>
>> --
>> Leigh Porter
>>
>> Jay Hennigan wrote:
>>>
>>> Andre Oppermann wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Audie Onibala wrote:
>>>>> Yesterday on 04/16/07 between 3:00 - 3:45 PM we had sporadic
>>>>> Internet problem. Our ISP's are Sprint and Qwest.
>>>>
>>>> Around that time there was quite a bit sunspot activity and the
>>>> moon
>>>> had an unusual position too. The NOC contacts of your ISP's
>>>> probably
>>>> may be of more specific help. But make sure to ask them for their
>>>> networks SPF (sunspot protection factor). That's an important
>>>> metric
>>>> to qualify their network reliability.
>>>
>>> Are you sure it was sunspots? My NOC contacts were seeing
>>> substantial
>>> memory corruption due to cosmic rays.
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay@impulse.net
>>> Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/
>>> Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
>
--
After you'd known Christine for any length of time, you found
yourself fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could
spot daylight coming the other way.
-- (Terry Pratchett, Maskerade)t
