Dear Valery,
Actually I had not done ANYTHING...yet. I read your first message earlier
this morning, and had not yet had the opportunity to look into the exact
nature of the problem, and then I get this new message from you. So,
please let me try to explain a few things that might shed light on the
problems of MSU's inablilty to communicate with portions of the NSFNET
community from time to time.
Two things are happening that are probably related to the problems you have
been experiencing:
1. The NSFNET is being decomissioned (abandoned, going away), and it
is being replaced with several interconnected national Internet
service providers: MCInet, SprintLink, and ANSnet. The transition
is taking place now and will last fur a few months, and things are
not always stable during the transition. Route that work one hour
may be replaced with routs that do not always work in the next hour,
and these have to be identified and corrected.
2. The routers on the East Coast of the United States, mainly around
Washington, D.C., are "glowing red hot" with traffic overloads. Some
new code has been written to improve their performance, and network
experts try to install the new code and observe its performance at
low traffic times here (around our midnignt), which correspond to
periods of high activity in Russia with the 8-hour time difference.
One by-product of all the attempts to upgrade the code is "route
flapping" instability,in which the connectivity and routing
information contained in the routing tables cannot keep up with the
changing physical realities of the network itself: there is just too
much work for the routers to do, and they cannot keep up with both
packet switching and routing table updating.
So, if your problems corrected themselves without my intervention at all,
my guess is that one or both of the above mechanisms must be the culprits.
If you continue to experience intermittent problems, please have your
technical people write to Sean Doran <smd@sprint.net> and/or Vadim Antonov
<avg@titan.sprintlink.net> at Sprint with the precise description of the
problems as you see them.
There is no policy reason of which I am aware that would cause the problems
that you have experienced. We have been routing traffic from Russia for at
least a year, and I recall having seen that a new MSU network has just been
added to the data base. MAYBE what you have observed is that the addition
of the newly registered MSU network entry has just taken effect. Below, i
will copy a notice about the [proposed] new procedures to replace the
current NSFNT procedures for registering routing information.
Best wishes,
Steve