Can other big parts of the backbone fall down and take 13 (or more) hours to get back up? Or is the rest of the net engineered more redundantly than Netcom? Should I build two backbones, each with separate technologies? Was this a foreshock of the coming Metcalfean Big One, or just lousy procedures at one of the bigger ISPs?
Maybe we should turn off a major exchange point for 6 hours as a test. Seriously, unless you have on-staff people who are quite swift and really understand both the architecture and the implementation bogies of your particular IP network, it might not be a bad idea to build two separate backbones with different technology and/or routing policy.
Inquiring minds want to know. Right now, it appears to be just a few (thankfully?). And now is the time to develop communications and publicity strategies for this sort of thing -- along with the engineering to hopefully prevent them.
-- Pete Kaminski kaminski@nanospace.com
Avi