North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Network collapses

  • From: Dean Anderson
  • Date: Mon Jun 08 15:46:51 1998

At 1:17 AM -0400 6/8/98, Jon Lewis wrote:
>On Sun, 7 Jun 1998, Michael Dillon wrote:
>
>> > If a large network with large amounts of nonportable space, like UUNET,
>> > were to fail entirely (financially, or system-wide, e.g.), what would
>> > happen to the address space that that network had assigned to its
>> > customers?
>>
>> Nothing. First the courts would appoint someone to run the company on
>> behalf of the creditors. Then someone would buy the assets and customers
>> for 10 cents on the dollar. Operational impact will be minimal to
>
>But...what would happen if some hypothetical national or international
>backbone provider (call it hypo.net) were to litterally run out of funds.
>If they fall far enough behind that the utility companies kill power to
>all their POPs, you could see a few days of loss of service before some
>other backbone buys the pieces and gets things back online.  Sure, this
>would require monumental mismanagement, and is probably about as likely as
>natural disasters simultaneously destroying all a backbones POPs.

One would kind of expect that a large publicly traded company wouldn't just
close up; that it would be sold to someone else who would take over
operations without interruption. But I suppose it could happen.

In which case, I presume the same that happens when little ISP's collapse,
only more customers are impacted.  I had some clients with BlueSky(?) (I
think that was the name) in Boston.  That company went belly up, shut down
the routers, and closed the doors with no advance notice.  They just turned
it all off and went home. Nameservice, *everything*.  For many of their
customers, they were the only contacts in whois, too, so changing things
was somewhat hard (faxes on company letterhead), though I think Internic
was very responsive getting updates processed quickly.  Their customers
scrambled to get service from someone else as quickly as possible. It
wasn't pretty.

I would presume, that in the event of a real closure, the IP space could be
reclaimed by the registry that assigned it, and reassigned.  Domain names
would presumably go away, as soon as their payment expired.

		--Dean


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