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Electricity Outage Puts Routing to a Tough Test

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the go-ahead-and-replicate-the-meme dept.

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."

4 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Probably unrelated by jafomatic · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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?

    --
    ::jafomatic
  2. Re:In soviet russia... by PornMaster · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    --
    500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
  3. Re:The submitter has to have his priorities checke by keraneuology · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
  4. Re:The submitter has to have his priorities checke by venicebeach · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.