I seem to have lost connectivity across MAE-East to a group of
peers. It appears to have come back at about 1:00PM Eastern
time. I've attached some snippets from our BGP table, anyone
know what may have happened, and what is common to these
peers that dropped thier sessions?
I would suspect that all the peers you mention are in Boone Boulevard
and probably all on shared FDDI (certainly we are - AS5413). This appears
to have been doing all sorts of strange things. I had MFS change our
physical port on the FDDI card, the jumper fibre, and the concentrator
port and it makes no difference. Symptoms are (if you want to try it)
do a 8000 byte 8000 packet ping to something not on shared FDDI
and it will all work fine for (say) 30 seconds. But occasionally there
is the odd 10 seconds of slowness and/or 50% packet loss, and the odd
5 second blackout. If you look at UPDOWN logs, you may see a bounce
one or two times an hour where the i/f went down (we sort 30 yesterday).
MFS is currently blaming our FDDI card - I think I'm blaming congestion
as there is currently only one, unmanaged concentrator serving all
shared FDDI clients.
If anyone else on shared FDDI can see similar problems, I'd be really
grateful to hear about it as though MFS have been pretty helpful in
swapping things out, they have now swapped everything except the
concentrator itself (and, of course, the topology 
). This will help
me greatly in proving my congestion / dead concentrator thesis.
Alxe Bligh
Xara Networks