Most of the SF Bay Area portion of BBN Planet's network has been offline
since late last night. I've finally heard, via a friend who is a major
customer of theirs, that they are having power problems in Palo Alto.
Now, I haven't heard a peep about this on any of the mailing lists I'm on...
and since knowing about BIG outages like this would make it easier for
me to answer my customer's questions... am I missing something?
Is there a mailing list that I should be on? Or is this just a private
BBN issue that I'd need to call their ops center people about (people who
I'm sure are very very busy without small network operators calling them)
-matthew kaufman
matthew@scruz.net
I just spoke to their NOC and was told that a power switch that is
supposed to be able to switch them between 3 different power utilities
failed at 12:30 this morning (friday). They bought and installed 2
large diesel generators today and are hoping to be back up using the
generators within 30 minutes.
We're trying to figure out how long BBN's been down, are you talking
12:30am PDT? If so, then they been down 16 hours. I started seeing mail
failures to Stanford (a big BBN site) at 9:33am PDT and first got email
about the problem from another ISP at around 11am.
I believe that Infoworld magazine's site is also on BBN. This is the
magazine that Bob Metcalfe writes for.
I haven't been able to get to www.infoworld.com all day. A traceroute to www.infoworld.com (192.216.48.63) ends at barrnet.SanFrancisco.mci.net
(166.48.19.250) and whois whois 192.216.48 shows up with this
BBN BARRNET, Inc. (NETBLK-BARRNET) NETBLK-BARRNET192.216.0.0 -
192.216.255.255
The various failures that are happening this year are sure getting a *LOT*
more visibility and press coverage than failures in previous years. It
seems to me that in a way, Metcalfe's Internet collapse of 1996 really has
arrived. However I would say that it is a measure of the net's
pervasiveness and importance rather than a measure of the net's stability.
I haven't seen anybody answer this, and while I suppose everybody
could call the BBN NOC and ask, that's probably not a useful way for
them to spend their time. Therefore, for those who don't know but
want to, and for the record (archive)...
According to BBN ticket # 60414, the problem started at 03:27 UTC
(October 11, 1996). As of October 12, 1996 01:54 UTC (the latest
entry on the ticket), BBN believes all affected customers should be
back online. This is the last entry on the ticket as of now.