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One Broken Router Takes Out Half the Internet?
Silent Stephus writes "I work for a smallish hosting provider, and this morning we experienced a networking event with one of our upstreams. What is interesting about this, is it's being caused by a mis-configured router in Europe — and it appears to be affecting a significant portion of the transit providers across the Internet. In other words, a single mis-configured router is apparently able to cause a DOS for a huge chunk of the Net. And people don't believe me when I tell them all this new-fangled technology is held together by duct-tape and baling wire!"
Until the internet evolves away from its trust-everyone roots,
one well placed server will be able to cause massive damage.
There would be a lot more impetus to force the change if hackers were nuking things from orbit for lulz instead of infiltrating systems for business reasons (spamming, bot herds, etc).
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Well, do, you're right to be concerned. The thing is, our technology infrastructure has always been a nasty kludge. In 1965, some coincidental misconfigurations at two minor power plants took out the power grid for an area in the northeast U.S. and eastern Canada where 25 million people lived. It was 14 hours before the grid was fully restored. Our inability to keep our technical house in order is a very old problem.
people don't believe me when I tell them all this new-fangled technology is held together by duct-tape and bailing wire
If only it were that reliable... my duct tape patches and bailing wire repairs typically hold for a decade.
Punctuate much?
Quit jabbering on the phone while driving. You are not that important.
That's the problem. You shouldn't use rouge on your routers.
I think that a rouged router would possibly be overly promiscuous.
No wonder problems like this can spread like the clap in a port town!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
WW3 is an external problem.
A misconfigured machine is an internal problem.
The internet can survive cut cables, provided that there are other routes.
But if it can't find said routes, then there is a problem.
If the bug is THIS serious and can cause such major problems, why are there any routers out there that haven't run the fix yet? Are they routers that are too important to bring down long enough to apply the fix? Too much risk involved (vs the smaller risk of actually being hit with the bug)? Too old to support the needed new version? Owners too stingy to pay for the new version that has the fix?
It was meant more to stop the network from failing due to LOST nodes, not malfunctioning nodes. But that doesn't say much for its ability to withstand sabotage which is expected in wartime.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I'm going to go with option G) Laziness
This "article" is incredibly misleading as nothing has really gone awry. It is just another pointless KDAWSON post. These things are getting REALLY old, KDAWSON.
I work for a tier-3 provider, and if "half the Internet" dies, you are going to hear from a half-brained big media outlet (e.g CNN, ABC) VERY fast.
a well deserved woosh