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KPNQWest Admins Keep Bankrupt Network Running
sebastianw writes "Some of the network administrators from KPNQWest, although they have been (apparently) ordered to shutdown the network, took over control of the KPNQWest NOC. They are trying to keep the network running and keep customers up, regardless of KPNQWest's insolvency. The company warned on Thursday that they would be forced to shut down KPNQwest's entire European data network on Monday unless its customers paid their bills in full immediately." There's a related story on the Register, talking about the possible effect on UK internet access. If anyone needs to hire some network engineers...
For a day or so, you can keep most large networks running with only one person or so. I work in a NOC that handles access for over 2000 sites, and for nights and holidays (weekends too), we have exactly one person here.
Though when things go bad, we have other people on call-- it can get hectic.
So if all goes well, they could hold out for quite some time (until something important breaks).
They only need to keep it running for a short time, KPNQwest is trying to find a buyer for the network. Let's hope it finds one, as the european Internet will suffer a huge bandwidth shortage if the network goes down.
As a KPNQwest customer myself, I'd like to say that they've provided a great service over the years. This is absolutely the best ISP ever, no real outages, great customer service (as you might have noticed). It's a real shame it turned out like this.
Its good these guys keep on working even though they havent been paid for a long time (some in Holland since may). If KPNQwests network goes down well.. here is their map. Too bad most of the news around this is in english.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
They were fired on the 6th, yet they stayed becasue they were the only ones left to support the network.
"Don't mess with him, he taunts the happy fun ball."
Yes, it is designed to route around damage, but this isn't damage - it's the whole network going down at once.
Take a look at this map and you'll see the problem...
Interestingly, our local KPNQwest is leaving the mothership and this seems to be happening elsewhere, too.
0 20 607.shtml (in Finnish)
On the Finnish company's page they state they're ready to re-route traffic and do what it takes. KPNQwest Norway got bought by Catch Communications and this might be the fate of the others, too. Seems Nokia is already on board as a customer.
http://www.kpnqwest.fi/yritys/uutiset/uutinen20
Anyone got more on this?
J
I had to run xine -p 'mms://195.158.250.186/EboneLive?.asf' to make it work. However, I'm on a PPC Linux system (Debian on a blue/white PowerMac G3) so no Win32 codecs, but it streams just fine - it's apparently in DivX format anyway.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Obviously, you are unaware (as was I) of the recall field notice for all Cisco 7401ASR's with a model number less that '-10'. They screwed up the L3 cache logic which causes memory corruption (and thus random reboots and even complete hardware lockups.) So much for QA and customer support -- we wen't notified of the notice for over three months.
t ml (CCO required)]
Oh, and I've seen an ethernet module in a cat5000 suddenly start turning every packet into a broadcast packet. Oh, that was a day in hell.
But, on the whole, the hardware is impressive and stable. The software provided is a very different story.
[See Also: http://www.cisco.com/warp/customer/770/fn18164.sh