North American Network Operators Group
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Re: UUNET issues?

  • From: Donald Stahl
  • Date: Sun Nov 05 21:20:37 2006 


Anyway, I don't think that would have helped if you're talking about the
same incident I'm thinking of.  There were application-level
retransmissions of (corrupted) packets, complete with building new bad
packets from bad data structures, all over the net

The problem is documented in RFC 789  It and "The Bug Heard 'Round the
World" are two of my favorite "how complex systems fail" papers; all
system designers should read, memorize, and undertand both.



I actually asked Stephen if he was referring to the LSA corruption problem
and he said he was referring to an earlier issue (circa 1972).



As for the LSA issue- rebooting would have fixed the problem, assuming it
was done by all nodes at the same time. All of the Link State tables would
have been rebuilt from scratch by the IMPs and the corrupt announcements
would have been gone.



As I recall the IMP software was actually patched to ignore the
problematic announcements from IMP 51.



-Don