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back to article Linx outage caused by upgrade

A mangled port upgrade caused an outage at Linx yesterday. A spokesman for Linx (the London Internet Exchange) said a routine port upgrade introduced a problem which caused processor usage in a router to surge, leading to instability on one of its LANs. The other LAN, provided by another vendor, took over and members had to …

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  1. Edward Dore

    THN not LHC

    The power problems were in one suite on the ground floor of Telehouse North, not the London Hosting Centre.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Headmaster

      *A* London Hosting Centre

      Not *The* LHC.

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    2. Bah Humbug
      Reply Icon

      The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

      The power problems knocked our network connection out as well, but we're in Telehouse Metro.

      One of the joys of London data centres really - only takes a small problem in one to cascade to loads of others.

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  2. bikerboi87

    makes sense

    might explain the problems i had around that time. i was going to blame bt but....

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  3. Victor Ludorum
    Boffin

    Look at those stats

    Linx is peaking at nearly 600Gbps! That's a lot of traffic. Twice as much as two years ago. Note the ramping up of data in late 2007... Anything to do with iPlayer and iPhones?

    V.

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    1. Bob H
      Reply Icon
      Go

      dare i suggest

      That is a whole lot of porn...

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Inter-AS ISP Stats

      My daily inter-autonomous system ISP top-talker stats suggest it is traffic to/ from AS15169 aka google = youtube. And has been for a long, long time.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What makes sense?

    The topology is a redundant L2 ring. A shared IP subnet.

    A port upgrade sounds more like a specific IXP router/ Unix eBGP Route-Reflector problem which players whose routing policy permits will inter-connect via.

    Tier-1 players are unlikely to inter-connect via this because they want to sell Joe Public Tier-2 IP Transit.

    Sounds like a bit of a drama for a specific line card upgrade for the IXP itself. BGP takes care of re-routing anyway via another path for any customers exchanging prefixes via the route-server.

    Only speculating...

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  5. Dan K-F

    Not LHC

    *A* London Hosting Centre, not LHC :)

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Broadcast storm

    It wasn't a port upgrade, a member's session was being turned up and due to miscommunication between the member's engineer and the LINX engineer a loop was somehow introduced in to the network which caused a broadcast storm and a switches CPU to max out cue packet loss and dropped BGP sessions.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Agreed

      But it doesn't take 20 mins to figure out or switch to another topology.

      Most of the players at LINX are large Tier-2 or 1 and their engineers hopefully know better than to spew even CDP et al on to that LAN.

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