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back to article LINX failure slows UK net traffic

The London Internet Exchange (LINX) suffered a major failure yesterday afternoon, leading to a significant slowdown of UK traffic. The initial failure has been isolated to a network switch which then "cascaded", causing more problems, said spokesman Richard Yule. Investigations are ongoing as to whether the glitch was in …

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  1. May Contain Nuts
    FAIL

    Yes, but...

    ...They also said they'd fixed it at 9pm and 11pm last night, so don't be surprised to see it all go titsup again this evening.

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  2. Tom 7

    They design a netwrok that can be imune to nuclear attack

    and then everyone goes their own way.

    The RFC's are free - go read them LINX.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Not the only one who is slow

    Nearly 24 hours to report this on the reg? Talk about slow..........

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  4. Jamie Kitson

    Richard Yule?

    Do they wheel him out every Christmas?

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  5. Paul 25
    Thumb Down

    @Tom 7

    Err, that's the whole reason why things have slowed down.

    If you take out a node in the network everything routes around it, but that means the remaining peering points have to take up more of the slack, thus the network as a whole slows down.

    You might want to read the RFCs yourself.

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    1. Steve Evans
      Reply Icon

      Still...

      Sounds like a capacity problem... If all your nodes are running at 90%+ a failure of any node will overload the others and cause trouble, so it's hardly a well designed redundancy system is it.

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  6. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Thumb Down

    Would that include the host for El Reg?

    Crossing pages has been RAF since last night. Not just a slow page load, a stalled page load.

    OTOH at least they have maintained different hardware to reduce the common failure on all units situation.

    Would have felt better if Reg had put something up on its main page (which I note has been updated throughout the day) early.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    Yeah it was great

    Ah that explains it. My VPN connection to work went down and nobody could contact me. It was fabulous - no interruptions, no managers hassling me to tell them stuff they should already know, no email, no ******* Microsoft Communicator. The most productive afternoon I've had in years.

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  8. Simon Orr
    WTF?

    Surprised you took so long to report this

    I've been having emails about this since last night. Some more info for you:

    We have received confirmation from LINX that they are currently experiencing difficulties with a core switch located in Telehouse East on their Brocade LAN.

    Unfortunately this issue has caused congestion on a multi-10G link bundle between Telehouse North and Sovereign House.

    LINX are currently working on the issue and hope to restore full connectivity shortly.

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  9. Martin Nicholls

    Yesterday?

    Forget yesterday, the whole country keeps dropping off the internet /today/...

    Look at LINX's own net stats and the fact the internets have been totally borked all afternoon.

    This countries entire net infrastructure isn't fit for purpose and has absolutely no redundancy.. Somebody explain to me how there isn't questions in parliament every day about this.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      RE: Yesterday?

      Martin, if this countries entire net infrastructure wasnt fit for purpose and had absolutely no redundancy then when Linx had problems there would have been a TOTAL loss of connection ( for those routes that went over Linx) instead of a slight slow down due to traffic taking a longer routes to the destination.

      most people on linx will be on both linx networks for redundancy!

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  10. Simon Brown
    Coat

    Richard Yule

    He's brought out every Christmas to read the log files?

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    1. Paw Bokenfohr
      Reply Icon
      Thumb Up

      Ho ho ho

      That is all.

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  11. Sam Crawley
    WTF?

    Eh?

    "LINX acts as a main peering point for UK ISPs, allowing them to exchange traffic directly, which is cheaper than sending it over the public internet."

    I'm no network person, but surely ISPs peering *is* the public internet??

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      RE: Eh?

      Peering is a private connection between 2 networks, by public internet they mean Transit

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      1. Chris Williams (Written by Reg staff)
        Reply Icon

        Re: RE: Eh?

        Yes, have tightened that for those who thought it was the most egregious error they have ever suffered witness to. Best,

        Chris

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  12. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    There is redundancy and capacity...

    .... just that most ISPs choose not to pay for/use it. LINX runs two peering LANs, most ISPs only peer on the one (or in a v. v. limited capacity on the 2nd). So when the one that most of them peer on goes titsup.com there's very little traffic on the 2nd - Don't blame LINX, blame your ISP (or rather the mindset in this country that everything Internet related should be free or as near as).

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  13. Dr Patrick J R Harkin

    It was terrible.

    For nearly an hour the internet was cut off from me.

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