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Re: BGP Problem on 04/16/2007

  • From: Warren Kumari
  • Date: Thu Apr 19 12:06:17 2007


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 <[email protected]> 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 - [email protected]
Impulse Internet Service  -  http://www.impulse.net/
Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV


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