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Re: MCI WorldCom fiber cut - Syracuse, NY
by Andrew Odlyzko 07 Oct '99

07 Oct '99

Could the explanation be simpler? Effects of gas pipeline and water main breaks tend to be localized because they supply commodity goods, and there is local storage (and, especially in case of water, local supplies) of those. Hence such breaks affect fewer people. The gas supply to my kitchen does not depend on maintenance of uniform pressure in all the gas pipelines from the well off the shore of Louisiana all the way to New Jersey; my supplier has enough gas stored around here to keep pumping for quite a while even if a pipeline in Kentucky is cut. On the other hand, when a fiber gets cut in Ohio, and I am trying to get some bits from California, it does not help me to know that somebody in Pennsylvania has terabits on her server that she is willing to ship to me. Andrew At 07:27 PM 10/5/99 -0400, Mike Heller wrote: >I find it interesting that we don't hear about more accidental gas >explosions and water main breaks from backhoes. Are the blueprints and >posted warnings more detailed or is there more fiber than utility pipe in >the ground? > >Michael Heller >Sr. Systems Engineer >Earthweb, Inc. >212.448.4175 >mikeh(a)earthweb.com > followed by other contributions from Derek Balling, Charles Sprickman, and Nathan Stratton. ************************************************************************ Andrew Odlyzko amo(a)research.att.com AT&T Labs - Research voice: 973-360-8410 http://www.research.att.com/~amo fax: 973-360-8178 ************************************************************************

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Re: MCI WorldCom fiber cut - Syracuse, NY
by Michael Heller 07 Oct '99

07 Oct '99

Has anyone come to the conclusion that there might be a market for titanium-reinforced innerduct? Add up the yearly costs of outages for the average provider and the high costs of indestructable conduit make more sense. At 02:02 PM 10/5/99 -0400, Scott Drassinower wrote: > > >MCI WorldCom claims that they have located a fiber cut in or near >Syracuse, NY (300+ miles northwest of NYC and White Plains) that is >the cause of the outage. They say crews have been dispatched. > >We had several MCI WorldCom circuits go out of service at about 12:40 EDT. >Some of the circuits are totally within WorldCom's fiber network, some >have endpoints on Bell Atlantic's network. All are in the NYC area. > >Unconfirmed by WorldCom, but apparently this cut has taken out two OC-48s. > >It's very interesting (and seemingly absurd) that to go 25 miles south, we >first must go 300 miles in the totally opposite direction. > >-- > Scott M. Drassinower scottd(a)cloud9.net > Cloud 9 Consulting, Inc. White Plains, NY > +1 914 696-4000 http://www.cloud9.net > > > > Michael Heller Sr. Systems Engineer Earthweb, Inc. 212.448.4175 mikeh(a)earthweb.com

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Fiber cuts, telcos and excavators
by Sean Donelan 07 Oct '99

07 Oct '99

"Derek J. Balling" <dredd(a)megacity.org> writes: > I know some telcos do this already. When I worked for GTE (years ago), > we had this construction guy calling into the call-center asking when > the "call before you dig" guy would be there. We had no idea (I worked > in the billing department at the time), and simply referred him back > to the Dig-#.... he called about 10 times in 20 minutes (literally) > and finally he said to the last rep "Fuck it, I'm digging..." Sounds like the construction guy went out of his way to notify the utility the cable locate guy hadn't shown up on time. I have heard from the excavator community over the years. They often point out the utilities seem to not care, and don't show up to mark their utilities on-time. The famous telco appointment time of between 8 and 5, if at all. The excavator is losing money for every minute the locate marker is late, or doesn't show up at all. This isn't a lot of profit margin in excavation. Sometimes the choice is between not digging and definitely going out of business, or digging and possibly going out of business. My question is where was the cable locate marker? I know, people who live in glass houses etc., and I guess I now live in a glass house. But I wonder if telco's really consider it a high priority? It wasn't worth the effort to contact the repair or locate department before the cut happened. But afterwards when the "idiot overflow calls" started coming in, then the call-center made the effort to contacted the other departments. How much money did the telco end up costing itself by not making that call before the cut? As far as sending a big bill to the contractor. As has been pointed out before, most excavators have the minimum insurance and few assets. And the cynic may look at the number of contractors hired by utilities to outsource their construction, as if it is just a shield. There have been a few cases of fiber laying contractors hired by a telco, cutting the fiber of the same telco. There is even a case in the last six months of one telco's sub-contractor cutting their fiber, being warned and fined; and doing the same thing a few weeks later. The last FCC outage report from the telco reported the telco will terminate the sub-contactor, but not until after they finish the rest of the job.

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Fwd: Other types of underground utilities
by Sean Donelan 06 Oct '99

06 Oct '99

Mike Heller <mikeh(a)earthweb.com> writes: > I find it interesting that we don't hear about more accidental gas > explosions and water main breaks from backhoes. Are the blueprints and > posted warnings more detailed or is there more fiber than utility pipe in > the ground? This forum isn't as sensitized when the problem affects other utilities. All underground utilities have the problem. In fact the US Federal Call Before You Dig program is administered by the Department of Transportation pipeline group because so many of the incidents involve them. You might think excavators are more careful around explosive and deadly things like high-pressure pipelines or high-voltage electrical lines. But I don't see it. But this isn't the North American Gas Pipeline Operators Group (NAGPOG).

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Network Intrusion and possible remedies
by Rajesh Talpade 06 Oct '99

06 Oct '99

Hi Folks ! Could you please point me to information about known network attacks and possible remedies that may exist ? Also, the presentation by Robert Stone of UUNET was quite interesting. Robert, could you please point me to the report that you talked about ? Thanks. Rajesh. -- Rajesh R. Talpade rrt(a)research.telcordia.com 973 829-4261 Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore)

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Java BGP stack
by Paul Jimenez 06 Oct '99

06 Oct '99

For your edification, researchers and toymakers, I'd like to point you at http://www.place.org/~pj/software, which has a pointer to a BGP stack written in java. Of course source is included. Have fun. --pj

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Re: Real Media and M-Bone feeds
by Vadim Antonov 06 Oct '99

06 Oct '99

Multicast is broken as an idea, period. Now, why won't we just forget about it and spend our life doing something useful instead? --vadim Now working for Alcatel :) Oui. > can a broken protocol design, msdp, be configred correctly? > > randy

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Re: Real Media and M-Bone feeds
by Vadim Antonov 06 Oct '99

06 Oct '99

ddivinia(a)broadcast.com (Darin Divinia) wrote: >Caching doesn't work for live content. Why? (And what is "live content"? You mean interactive? Or "live" TV coverage?) --vadim

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Re: Real Media and M-Bone feeds
by Vadim Antonov 06 Oct '99

06 Oct '99

Jared Mauch <jared(a)puck.nether.net> wrote: > The problem is that everyone thinks that multicasting is > more complicated than it really is. The problem is, everyone thinks that million lemmings can't be wrong. Multicasting cannot be made scalable. It is as simple as that. One can play with multicast routing protocols as much as one wishes - in pilots and small networks. It only takes a question - "ok, how are we going to handle 100000 multicast channels?" to realize that L3 multicasting is not going anywhere as a real-world production service. Yes, there are better multicasting schemes (like EXPRESS from Stanford, or even more scalable multicasting I described some time ago in TRAP documents). Still, they are not enough. > People try and overthink a few too many things, and this I > think is one. Nah. It is a clear and present case of not thinking hard enough. > Worse yet, it distracts from deployment of the real solution - cacheing. > Multicasting is faster than disk. This is a rather strange statement. I worked on a product (which was shipped) which delivered something like 20Gb/s of streaming video content from disk drives. RAID can be very fast :) > I'm not sure how caching > is the solution. Distributed content is also good. Ah, distributed content :) Yet another kludge requiring lots of maintenance and "special" relatioships between content providers and ISPs. --vadim

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Re: Real Media and M-Bone feeds
by Vadim Antonov 06 Oct '99

06 Oct '99

Sorry for misattribution and confused date... (silly me, i should be checking references before posting them and not relying on memory alone). Thanks, Vijay! --vadim From: Vijay Gill <wrath(a)cs.umbc.edu> On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Vadim Antonov wrote: > ...and on '67 vintage theoretical work by Kleinrock and Klein who showed > that routing can be done in scalable manner. Aggregation is nothing new. Kleinrock and Kamoun. Most of the basis for the above are available in: Kleinrock, L. and F. Kamoun, "Hierarchical Routing for Large Networks, Performance Evaluation and Optimization", Computer Networks, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 155-174, January 1977 (A copy of this paper that Dr. Kleinrock was kind enough to autograph for me is one of my more prized possessions) And another other classic: Kamoun, F. and L. Kleinrock, "Stochastic Performance Evaluation of Hierarchical Routing for Large Networks", Computer Networks, Vol. 3, pp. 337-353, November 1979. /vijay

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