Did this happen on Friday? If so I heard from a directly knowledgeable
source that there was a power failure in Dallas that affected the MFS pop
there and that MFS had to bring in a truck with generators to get the
node operational again. If this is correct wold the looping be really
blamable to either UUNET or Sprint?********************************************************************
Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher Subscript.: Individ-ascii $85
The trace shows bouncing between sites which are both local to Washington
DC. I don't see how Dallas comes into this, unless at least one site
involved is pointing default somewhere (which could cause this). My
understanding is that both Sprint and Alternet run defaultless (as do
many multihomed providers who have a reasonable route table such as MCS.)
Discontinuities in a defaultless network do not show up as route loops --
they show up as !Hs or black-holes (ie: no returns at all) somewhere along
the line, depending on ICMP configuration issues. You *can* get them if one
or more of the routers in the game are pointing default (or have a
less-specific CIDR route) in a way which can be looped back. This is an
architectual problem which needs to be found and fixed -- looping packets
will destroy the efficiency of your circuits (consider the TTL of most
packets and the number of bounces before they TTL out).
Hard-wired and "pulled-up" routes can also cause this kind of silliness.