- Test - lists.nanog.org

qwest/JFK meltdown
by multics＠ruserved.com 02 Oct '00

02 Oct '00

I've heard that qwest is having an edge router problem at JFK. Its affecting my network connectivity which is how I learned of it. I don't have an estimated repair time. -- Richard Shetron multics(a)ruserved.com multics(a)acm.rpi.edu NO UCE What is the Meaning of Life? There is no meaning, It's just a consequence of complex carbon based chemistry; don't worry about it The Super 76, "Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy", Las Vegas Strip.

1 0

QAZ probes from webtv?
by Dan Hollis 02 Oct '00

02 Oct '00

Anyone else seeing webtv probing your customers for QAZ? The following webtv hosts seem to be probing our dialup customers port tcp/7597: Name: storeless-272.iap.bryant.webtv.net Address: 209.240.199.76 Name: cookie-336.public.rwc.webtv.net Address: 209.240.200.226 Name: storefull-115.iap.bryant.webtv.net Address: 209.240.198.107 -Dan

1 0

Re: Statistical Games Providers Play (RE: availability and resiliency)
by Sean Donelan 02 Oct '00

02 Oct '00

On Sat, 30 September 2000, Alex Bligh wrote: > Excluding force-majeure from availability is not totally unuseful > (provided you can still compare apples with apples), on the basis > that (historically at least) many other things are likely to > cause more worry than failure of your internet/telecoms service > in the event of war/asteroid strike etc. I also think its reasonable to exclude force majeure in a SLA. When I wrote SLA's I excluded all sorts of stuff in the force majeure clause. My point wasn't to suggest it is unreasonable to do so, but customers should understand a provider includes only certain risks in their SLA. Insurance companies are very good for covering the other risks. What drove me crazy was I couldn't get the information I needed to do my job from providers. Fiber cuts happen. I don't want a 99.999% network guarantee, I want an accurate map of my circuits on your network so I can plan where to put my backup circuits. If I could outsource the reliability of my network, it would be great. But the fact is, I was the one who had to live with fallout when my network failed; not the provider. At most large providers, my "dedicated account team" rarely lasted a fiscal quarter let alone a fiscal year. I sometimes think folks, and I was once one of them, are just looking for the provider which promises the highest availability number (100% service guarantee) without realizing some providers are achieving such high numbers by excluding a lot of disruptive events. If everyone included and excluded the same things, you could compare the numbers. But everyone doesn't. So customers need to understand what the numbers mean. It is possible for a provider with a 98% availability guarantee to have better actual performance than a provider promising 100% availability. > Finally, the availability number is meaningless unless there is > a clear way of measuring what period it applies to. Five nines > availabilty over a day is completely different to five nines > availability over a year, if there is a fixed MTTR (think about > it). Ah, Mean Time To Repair. For availability purposes, MTTR is frequently a bigger contributor than MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure). Can you repair one half of a redundant system before the second half fails. > IE availability numbers are *not* useless - but they generally > aren't comparible without looking at the contract, and system > in depth. If you look at what happened in the disk drive market, for a while Seagate and the others waged the battle of MTBF. You could buy a 400,000 hour MTBF drive or a 800,000 hour MTBF drive or a 1.2 million hour MTBF drive. Was there a difference between the drives, in some cases yes. In most cases, you were actually buying the same drive with different extended warranties. Did the difference in MTBF's mean the disk drives never failed? No. If the drive did fail, did you get data back because it was a 1.2 million hour MTBF drive? No. If you didn't have a backup, did Seagate lose their job, or did the computer operator lose theirs? Does RAID held? Yes. Does RAID completely eliminate disk failures? No. If you look at network backbones, almost everyone uses the same vendors, supplying essentially the same equipment, and nearly the same network design. So why would different providers have different availability numbers? Is it just an accident of the statistical series, some providers had their failures earlier but everyone will end up the same in Year Infinity? Or are there real differences, besides price, between providers?

3 2

ICANN vote advocacy
by William Allen Simpson 01 Oct '00

01 Oct '00

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- While I'm thinking about it, here's a bit of advocacy on ICANN board membership. Of course, this may just cause folks to vote contrarily, but participating is important, so get out the vote! I'm putting Karl Auerbach at the top. He's the only one with technical, operational, and legal background. I don't always agree with him on every issue, but he has both depth and breadth, and on that basis is the best choice. He was nominated by popular acclaim. He's also a genuinely caring fellow, and I just plain like him. My backups are Lyman Chapin and Barb Simon. Thay are primarily technical, but have a long association with the Internet and lots of volunteer and professional committee and board experience. Lyman is a former IAB Chair, giving him a bit of a boost in our community. Barb is another nominee by popular acclaim. Lessig is smart and principled, but his Q&A positions are almost identical to Auerbach's. His legal depth may be greater. And of course he has more name recognition than our technical choices. So, those are my top choices. I'm sure many of the others have fine attributes, but we only get to choose one person in this election. I'm ranking the rest alphabetically. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 6.5.1 iQCVAwUBOdcSb9m/qMj6R+sxAQF7AwQA125N3UdY6LUsWrXglTVDToBQwoTmHNeJ +iPG43ARXPbOas/Ea+qso5H7aignHRzIpTqNFd7uwCxgIKpkDqTDYeiNIlX4t820 zrvh+aEz/kqNJgcOGtERxmsN+KymTH9dWkC2WGK3J3lhoIKWFr0PmRw2DxtXBV3m lCot0YMDGhc= =opVC -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0

ICANN election.com not working reliably
by William Allen Simpson 01 Oct '00

01 Oct '00

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I've tried the election mechanism this morning at nearly the earliest possible time, and after proceeding through all the pages, and verifying my choices, suddenly the page indicated that I could not proceed at this time. First of all, that's a terrible error message. Content free. Secondly, I noticed a very long URL at the top of my page, most of which was not visible. I copied it into a text editor: https://vote.election.com/icann/error.asp?critical=yes&desc= Component%2EApplyVote+failed&errnbr=50101&errdesc=Invalid+credentials%2E +Your+member+number%2C+PIN+code+and+password+combination+is+incorrect%2E Now, that's dandy. If I'd mis-entered my credentials, I'd expect it to tell me on the first secured page, before entering and verifying my votes. Since I'm just copying and pasting, I'm a bit surprised that there was an error. Just in case, I tried it on the ICANN member pages. It still works! So, it looks like there's a problem in the verification system. I know it's Sunday, early in the morning, but that's when the Board chose to start the voting. Hopefully, somebody is checking for errors. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 6.5.1 iQCVAwUBOdcNJNm/qMj6R+sxAQFVqgP/atu4Kltv4zfveQE3+KJ1v8Uc0F4Y+Pdf GEaIFnIGApgAazuO0i+srl2uluFdckfUBo9KAaIkDgnbcpdGNfV1GqaZ31j2Lo0n NEcoGZ6f53VqBrftnCnde+3UfEaS2xVKL+Lz/xkYrJnv5LT8q2/+36TrSUT2ovK5 B3nhMtU/OV4= =vvTY -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0

Re: Statistical Games Providers Play (RE: availability and resiliency)
by Sean Donelan 01 Oct '00

01 Oct '00

On Sat, 30 September 2000, Vijay Gill wrote: > There are a lot more variants regarding the routing architecture (IGP > setup, bgp setup, et al), and depending on various failure modes, some are > better than others for a subset of failures and vice versa. True, but in the end does it end up being a zero-sum game? Or are there real differences in performance? I'll pick on a couple of different providers, but we could use anyone. In my experience AT&T has a huge MTBF, over 7 years when I bought circuits. But when the two natural disasters struck at the same time, it would take AT&T several days to get the circuits working again. On the other hand, Sprint had a problem every month or two, but they usually had them fixed in about 20 minutes. What's the trade-off. Over 10 years, the availability numbers weren't that different between AT&T and Sprint. Sprint hypes their SONET fiber network, AT&T hypes their FASTAR network restoration. Is it strictly a question of cost? Although a lot of advertising and sales emphasis is placed on the technology, I haven't found the technical differences between providers affecting the delivered performance. Non-technical factors seem to have a bigger affect.

1 0

RE: availability and resiliency
by Roeland M.J. Meyer 30 Sep '00

30 Sep '00

> .. and the concept of this happening on Wintel hardware > running anything > is sheer ludicrousy. Whoever mentioned that SMP can help you > get high uptime > boxes is smoking heavy crack in most cases. I had an SMP Lintel box that had a failed PentiumPro. No one even noticed until the next maintenance cycle. Besides, we are only talking three nines here. Not high, by most standards and you really don't need SMP to do it either. I once had 435 days continuous uptime on a lintel host. Only took it down to upgrade the kernel. Then I added a bunch of services and had to upgrade the MoBo. BTW, if'n y'all turn Wintel into Lintel, you wind up with a pretty good server, for cheap dollars.

1 0

RE: availability and resiliency
by Roeland M.J. Meyer 30 Sep '00

30 Sep '00

It refers to the percent uptime of a host or site. 99% is two "9"'s (2x9?) and 99.9% is three nines. Getting a single host to meet more than three nines (99.9%) can be a challenge ( <8.76 hours outage, per year), but can be more easily met with multiple hosts in a site. Four nines (99.99% uptime, <0.88 hours annual downtime) is extremely difficult for a single host, less difficult for internal data centers, and (given lots of $$$) a bit easier for a internet site (using multiply redundant hosts). Five nines (99.999%, <5.26 annual minutes down) is almost impossible for a single affordable host to meet. This is where we enter the world of High-Availability (H-A) systems. These are usually high transaction flow critical systems and are found in large corps, telcos, and reliable internet sites. At this time, only governments are willing to part with the required cash to build systems meeting six nines (99.9999%, <0.53 minutes annual downtime), or better (NASA, NORAD, US Space Command, etc). Usually, this is done using multiple site redundancy. Hosts meeting three nines, or better, typically have redundant power supplies and integrated UPS, bootable RAID for the OS, redundant NICs, and SMP CPU configurations. -----Original Message----- From: Leo Nelson [mailto:lnelson@axient.com] Sent: Friday, September 29, 2000 10:08 AM To: 'nop(a)alt.net'; Andrew Bangs Cc: nanog(a)merit.edu Subject: RE: availability and resiliency Pardon my ignorance, but what the heck does a "9" refer too? Is it a UPS, rack, floor space, circuit... Thanks in advance -leo -----Original Message----- From: Lionel Lauer [ mailto:longword@newsguy.com] Sent: Friday, September 29, 2000 10:54 AM To: Andrew Bangs Cc: nanog(a)merit.edu Subject: Re: availability and resiliency On Fri, 29 Sep 2000 17:39:04 +0100, Andrew Bangs <andrewb(a)demon.net> wrote: > >On Thu, Sep 28, 2000 at 02:39:40PM -0600, Irwin Lazar wrote: >> Hi all, >> Does anyone know if a template exists for what it takes to provide 5 9's of >> availability, 4 9's etc.for Internet data centers? Specifically I'm looking >> for something that would say "if you want 5 9's of availability, here's what >> you need to do", and so on. > >For 5 9s you need: > >1) Lots of money >2) Lots of clue >3) Lots of luck >4) Lots of balls > >You can do 4 9s with any 3 of the above. Too true. But you forgot to include 'halfway-clued management' - without that you haven't got a hope in hell of even getting three 9's. ;) -- W . | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because \|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est ---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------

5 4

Inventor of the Internet Technology / Father of Modern Day Networking
by Ehud Gavron 30 Sep '00

30 Sep '00

My apologies for this non-op note. I was hoping to tap the wisdom of the collective. http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/ http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/LK/Inet/keys.html Is there a person who invented the Internet, and is this person him? Cheers, Ehud

14 20

Re: Disabling QAZ (was Re: Port 139 scans)
by Dan Hollis 30 Sep '00

30 Sep '00

On Fri, 29 Sep 2000, John Fraizer wrote: > On Fri, 29 Sep 2000, Dan Hollis wrote: > > It would be cool if someone would make a tool that would auto-disinfect > > users... > Yep. The problem with that is that current laws on the books (in the US > at least) make this an illegal solution. If memory serves me correctly, > the one I'm thinking about is worded something like: > "...any person who without authorization, accesses, modifies, deletes or > destroys..." A web page that users themselves must click "OK, disinfect me"? Seems authorization enough to me... > The penalties are pretty stiff too. The best of intentions don't negate > the fact that it's illegal. When the user initiates the disinfection themselves? -Dan

6 5