Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

One Broken Router Takes Out Half the Internet?

Posted by kdawson on from the brain-gone-punky dept.

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!"

9 of 412 comments (clear)

  1. Trust by TubeSteak · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!
    1. Re:Trust by lambent · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Precisely. It wasn't "one broken router" that took out half the net, it was thousands of substandard routers using obsolete code run by incompetent admins that took out half the net.

      the people who actually know what they're doing were unaffected by this.

  2. Don't knock duct tape by fm6 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Half the internet? Are you serious? by jjrockman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Punctuate much?

    --
    Quit jabbering on the phone while driving. You are not that important.
  4. Re:Yep, Its true by myowntrueself · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  5. Re:Yep, Its true by mail2345 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Yep, Its true by v1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  7. Re:Yep, Its true by travbrad · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm going to go with option G) Laziness

  8. TAG THIS ARTICLE KDAWSONSUCKS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.