Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Mad router zaps Latnet

Latnet, a rather popular business internet service provider (ISP), went down because of what amounted to a mad router on Monday. The presumably Cisco device, which also sits on the ISP's alternative international internet connection, went batshit around 8 am Monday and started feeding huge amounts of irrelevant directory information to the other routers in the system. They choked and died. It was also not possible to immediately determine the cause of the failure, and specialists from Latnet, Lattelekom and elsewhere were called in to put a straitjacket on the offending machine and clean up the huge mess it left. Service was restored late in the afternoon.
Among those fubared (f**ked up beyond all repair) by the Latnet fiasco were Latvian TV and Radio, the Customs service (electronic declarations stopped) and several private companies, such as the publishing house Preses Nams.
Latnet apparently isn't insured against beserk routers so may have to pay heavily on a number of service level agreements that it was forced to violate because of the incident. Oddly, not too many affected businesses seem to have taken the natural step of improvising a mobile internet link with a phone and a laptop. Latvian Mobile Telephone (and Tele2's) mobile internet services were unaffected by the Latnet outage (except for the poor suckers who tried to reach a Latnet hosted entity). LMT, at least, did not report any extraordinary GPRS or EDGE useage.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nu te vel var pastrideties vai tas bija "mad router", vai turejiem specialistiem rokas no citas vietas aug.
Svarigi ir tas ka vairakas avizes ir parezi pacelusi jautajumu ka ne visi biznesi ir gatavi tam ka viniem nedarbojas sakari. Musdieniga pasaule katrai kompanijai jabut but "biznesa rezervesanas" planam - tas ne tikai komunikacijas, bet ari parejas IT sistemas, darbavietas un cilveki.