Electricity Outage Puts Routing to a Tough Test

infofarmer writes "Today at about 11:30 MSD (GMT+4) a major electricity outage in Moscow, Russia brought new meanings to words like "uninterruptible", "redundant" and "uptime" for network administrators, who haven't experienced such harsh and unexpected power failures since the USSR got its Internet connection. Half of the city is totally out of electricity - including subway and the most important traffic exchange point, half of the top russian sites went down, including www.mail.ru, www.rambler.ru, www.lenta.ru, some of them haven't been brought up yet. IP packets going from ADSL users in Moscow to some local sites got rerouted to somewhere in London and then back to Scandinavia, where they met their "No route to host" deadend. Other routers found themselves in a loopback, which made many packets get dropped with TTL expired. The point is that most of popular servers have got two or three mainline Internet connections, but lack of BGP/RIP2/whatever configuration resulted in packets losing their way to hosts."

Comments

Re:Probably unrelated

[jafomatic]

Argh. I was beaten to it and quite badly at that.

In all seriousness, we (or, y'know, lawmakers somewhere) should really look for the spam volume trending before-during-and-after the outage.

A surprise for some, no surprise for the rest of us?

Re:In soviet russia...

[PornMaster]

Unfortunately, power has failed Russians for longer than any of them can remember...

Re:The submitter has to have his priorities checke

[keraneuology]

Considering that sewage, power and medical processes could all rely on the internet...

There's more traffic on the 'net than pr0n, wazrez, mpEs and /.

Some of it actually matters.

Re:The submitter has to have his priorities checke

[venicebeach]

Yes, but slashdot is concerned with the internet, and so this is an appropriate forum to discuss how an event like this affects the internet. I don't think someone who runs an ISP in Russia should be trying to figure out how to get the sewer working, they should be figuring out how to get the internet up.

Re:The submitter has to have his priorities checke

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody cares that this was in russia, that people can't get their email, or that it was because of a power outage.

The reason this is on ther front page is because the internet is suposed to be able to handle things like this. People will be watching how the routers automatically deal with the outage (there's one response like that already), and what manual intervention it needed. Hopefully this information will be used for training the next generation of router admins.

Even if this was because of a meteor strike or nuclear bomb, we'd still be interested on how the net took it. We'd be more interested in the everything else about the event, but the response of the network would still be interesting

Re:Not big headline?

[Politburo]

It was interesting that news.google.com, cnn.com, msnbc.com, etc. do not have this story on its front news page. I guess the outage isn't severe like one in New York a few years ago.

Well, first off, you're factually incorrect. The outage 2 years ago affected a large area of the Eastern United States as well as some areas of Canada, not just NYC. Furthermore, the sources you cite are all american sources. It's no surprise that they tend to report american events more than world events.

let's separate that in two issues

[tinkerton]

I'm sure Putin will exploit the power outage to weaken and possibly get rid of Chubais.

Whether the FSB caused the outage directly, to prompt an attack on Chubais is another matter. Maybe they were working on a plan but it wasn't ready yet. They have a lot to do :)
Even Putin sometimes just exploits opportunities.

In any case, the outcome is the same.

Re:The submitter has to have his priorities checke

[keraneuology]

If that's true, whomever designed those systems deserves to be punished severely. Why would you put all your eggs in a basket you don't own?

The same can be said of the electrical grid. And the cellular network. And the water network. And the sewage system. Or the public road infrastructure. Or the food distribution chain. Face it - virtually every aspect of modern life requires you to rely almost completely on infrastructures that you do not own.

One has to remember what the internet actually is - a system to transport data. For me it has proven to be far more reliable than the power grid - when the lights go out the internet connection at my house remains active. Should a system go down the first time a packet is dropped? Absolutely not. But that isn't the case here. What Russia is seeing is a massive widespread power failure that is probably beyond the designed tolerance. And keep in mind what else -could- be happening. Why was the sewage shunted to the river? Was it to keep it out of the basement of the local hospital?