On Apr 19, 2007, at 10:17 AM, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
With certain susceptible Sun CPUs which were popular during the last sunspot maxima, this was actually demonstrably true (and acknowledged by Sun), so don't laugh too hard.
Yup, Sandia National Labs made a radiation hardened Pentium and, as far as I remember, was working on a hardened SPARC -- there was also some work done (AFAIR on PPC) whereby 3 processors would run the same instructions and vote on the output...
---rob
Leigh Porter <leigh.porter@ukbroadband.com> writes:
Somebody form a certain large network vendor actually blamed problems with their kit on cosmic rays causing memory corruption...
Oh, not just "somebody" -- a certain large vendor has many, many references to it -- and I have received it as a explanation for random reloads -- believe me, trying to tell an irate customer / PHB that the reason that his "mission critical" circuit bounced was because of cosmic rays is No Fun(tm). Hmmm.. Isn't this the same vendor that now has a router sitting on a satellite ?! ;-) There was also an issue where one of the large manufacturers of (binary) CAMs received a batch of polyimide that was contaminated with an alpa-emitter (for some reason thorium oxide springs to mind) and their quality control didn't catch it... As far as I know the problem was identified before any products with the CAMs were shipped, but I had an order held up while the vendor tried to source alternate parts...
-- Leigh Porter
Jay Hennigan wrote:
Andre Oppermann wrote:
Audie Onibala wrote:
Yesterday on 04/16/07 between 3:00 - 3:45 PM we had sporadic Internet problem. Our ISP's are Sprint and Qwest.
Around that time there was quite a bit sunspot activity and the moon had an unusual position too. The NOC contacts of your ISP's probably may be of more specific help. But make sure to ask them for their networks SPF (sunspot protection factor). That's an important metric to qualify their network reliability.
Are you sure it was sunspots? My NOC contacts were seeing substantial memory corruption due to cosmic rays.
-- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay@impulse.net Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/ Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
-- After you'd known Christine for any length of time, you found yourself fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could spot daylight coming the other way. -- (Terry Pratchett, Maskerade)t