John Curran:
Again, NETCOM would be the authoritative source for such info... Reuter's June 19th coverage noted that the problem was related to a problem with a routine change to the "routing table". I will note that operating a large Internet backbone requires availability of staff with very specialized skills in both Internet routing and high-speed networking, and all Internet service providers face quite a challenge in maintaining such staff. This is a risk factor to Internet growth and stablility that receives little attention but nevertheless is quite real.
With this point being brought up, I'm still a little surprised that so few people _still_ only know large scale and/or complicated RP's (OSPF/IBGP/EBGP). I can't believe that the learning curve for configuring those RP's is that high... Looking at a small ISP here in the bay area who just got a 2nd transit line, I thought they'd have their MED's set up right (or at least have somebody who they could call for a quick looksee), but all I see is the typical asymetric routes. Their old transit provider is still the preferred back into the ISP, but the outbound is defaulted through the new transit provider. Does the learning curve top out at the "ip route 0.0.0.0 [etc]" command? rob.