On Fri, Dec 30, 2005 at 12:29:51PM -0500, Adell Flourry, Jr. wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Is anyone having trouble getting to various web sites off campus today?  
> In particular, microsoft windows update, and symantec.

For the record, the network troubles on Friday were a result of some 
network maintenance being done by Northwestern University at a key Chicago
POP.  It had been announced that access to Abilene/Internet2 would be
unavailable during the maintenance window (7 am - 3 pm CST), but we
expected that other services would be unaffected.

It appears that MSU's access to commodity Internet services was also 
affected, due to a combination of two errors in the backup routing which
took over when the Chicago POP was down.  MSU's traffic should have been
routed via Detroit rather than Chicago, and as a result, the traffic
took an extra hop to Chicago, then back to the correct destination via
an IP tunnel.  Unfortunately, the IP tunnel wasn't passing large IP
packets properly.

Merit resolved the problem for us around 1:30 pm Friday by fixing the
errant route which was sending the traffic to Chicago while the Chicago
POP was down.

Doug


-- 


Doug Nelson, Network Manager		 |  [log in to unmask]
Academic Computing and Network Services	 |  Ph: (517) 353-2980
Michigan State University		 |  http://www.msu.edu/~nelson/