Sean, There's a bunch of machines for AIM, spread out across the AOLosphere... there is no one server that will take down the service. (That's for the Oscar stuff; the TOC stuff, which the open messengers use, is also clustered in the back end, but there is that One Server You Must Talk To(tm).) I imagine the other services are similar. -Dave On 5/8/2001 at 11:35:27 -0700, Sean Donelan said:

A question (and a test to see if I'm still subscribed)

The various instant messenging services, such as AIM, ICQ, Microsoft, Yahoo, other Messenger uses a central server to manage "presence".

No central server appears to mean no instant messages, am I correct?

What does this have to do with NANOG, apparently it is becoming more common for backbone NOC folks to communicate with their friends in other NOCs via one of these instant chat programs. I didn't realize how common it was until I was informed about it last month when AOL/AIM had difficulties. This month Yahoo Messenger had power difficulties, which disrupted their central servers.

If folks are using this these services for real-time communications, should we be trying to improve their reliability? Or is this just a "feature" of how presence services work.

-- Dave Israel Senior Manager, IP Backbone Intermedia Business Internet