LINX failure slows UK net traffic
Nooooo waaaaaaaay
Posted in Management, 10th December 2009 15:51 GMT
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The London Internet Exchange (LINX) suffered a major failure yesterday afternoon, leading to a significant slowdown of UK traffic.
The initial failure has been isolated to a network switch which then "cascaded", causing more problems, said spokesman Richard Yule.
Investigations are ongoing as to whether the glitch was in hardware or software, or a combination of both, he added.
LINX acts as a main peering point for UK ISPs, allowing them to exchange traffic directly, which is cheaper than sending it via transit carriers. The failure hit only one of its two peering platforms, which each use different hardware.
Neverthless, there was a significant impact on peering, and therefore speeds enjoyed by customers, as some ISPs cut their connection to LINX while engineers worked. The impact is visible in LINX's 24-hour status graph.
Yule said the failure was fixed this afternoon, and things should now return to normal. ®
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COMMENTS
@Tom 7
Err, that's the whole reason why things have slowed down.
If you take out a node in the network everything routes around it, but that means the remaining peering points have to take up more of the slack, thus the network as a whole slows down.
You might want to read the RFCs yourself.
Richard Yule
He's brought out every Christmas to read the log files?
Yeah it was great
Ah that explains it. My VPN connection to work went down and nobody could contact me. It was fabulous - no interruptions, no managers hassling me to tell them stuff they should already know, no email, no ******* Microsoft Communicator. The most productive afternoon I've had in years.
Yes, but...
...They also said they'd fixed it at 9pm and 11pm last night, so don't be surprised to see it all go titsup again this evening.
Re: RE: Eh?
Yes, have tightened that for those who thought it was the most egregious error they have ever suffered witness to. Best,
Chris
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