Live data from Hacker News

CenturyLink 911 outage was caused by a single network card sending bad packets

twitter.com

81–90 of 166 posts

Re: CenturyLink 911 outage was caused by a single network card sending bad packets

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

centurylink fiber is pretty great as well

Doesn't exist across 99% of their last mile footprint. Just one or two cities. I would guess the vast majority of their revenue comes from extorting old people and farmers with shitty overpriced ADSL that squirrels eat into and take down annually.

Rural folk here. Biannually.

Re: CenturyLink 911 outage was caused by a single network card sending bad packets

#82
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

centurylink fiber is pretty great as well

Yeah, my experience with Clink's fiber offerings has been a good one. It's definitely "Gigabit" — there are many fiber splitters in play, which means (a) your downstream traffic is broadcast to everyone on the same splitter network in plaintext and filtered at individual ISP-owned termination devices, much like cable networks, and (b) you definitely never reach 1000 Mbps down, but often can reach 900 Mbps up. Typical…

You do know that perfection with TCP over Ethernet (no 802.1q rages, no retransmits) at 1gbps is 941Mbps, right?

Re: CenturyLink 911 outage was caused by a single network card sending bad packets

#83
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

centurylink fiber is pretty great as well

Here in Denver we get full 1Gbps for $75/mo, every provider has outages and this was the first partial outage we experienced with the service (pages loaded just slowly most of the day)

If only it was available in Golden... I could hit the CL POP with a baseball (less than a block away).

Re: CenturyLink 911 outage was caused by a single network card sending bad packets

#84

Packets or frames? The report mentions both (including "packet frames", which, ugh)

These terms are interchangeable. Although typically one or other is used when speaking about a specific technology. Also see datagram, cell and probably others I’m forgetting right now.

> terms are interchangeable

No, use frame when your talking about layer 2, packet when your talking about layer 3, and segment for layer 4. Datagram and protocol data unit (PDU) are general terms that can apply to any layer.

A switch forwards frames, while a router routes packets.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31446777/difference-betw...

Re: CenturyLink 911 outage was caused by a single network card sending bad packets

#85
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your cable options have an 80gb limit?! WTF!! Comcast has data caps (which is stupid) but it's 1TB and I think my 7 person household has only passed the halfway mark once, so it's meh. But 80GB?! That's insane! Destiny 2 is an 80GB download itself.

Seems strange how bad ISP's are in the US compared to the UK. I can get 400/35 Fiber to the Home with no datacap (no throttling either) for £54 a month (~$70).

> Seems strange how bad ISP's are in the US compared to the UK

UK average fixed-line download speeds in Q4 2017 were about 26 Mbps [1]. The same Q2/Q3 2018 statistic for the United States was over 96 [2].

American broadband is crappy. But in mean technological leadership, it’s ahead of the UK. (At the leading edge, I get 400/35 for $80 in Manhattan.)

[1] http://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-kingdom/#fixed

[2] http://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-states/

Re: CenturyLink 911 outage was caused by a single network card sending bad packets

#86
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the book "Release It!", the author describes an incident where an airline's entire check-in system went down for three hours, grounding its hundreds of planes and causing a pretty big backlog for hours more. The 'root cause' was code on the flight search server: lookupByCity(...) { .... try { conn = connectionPool.getConnection(); stmt = conn.createStatement(); ... } finally { if (stmt != null) { stmt.close(); }…

"Release It" is an awesome book. I contributed a couple FindBug Java checkers to warn about some of the problems the book describes. The case you mention above might have been prevented by using checked Java exceptions. Our programming languages and tools could be doing a lot more to catch these problems at compile time or make them impossible by language or API design.

I think that was taken into account when the "try with resources" statements were added to Java.

As you said it would be nice if the languages could make these situations impossible.

I think its a bit of a chicken and egg problem because some language issues don't come to light until people are using it and it is too late.

Re: CenturyLink 911 outage was caused by a single network card sending bad packets

#87
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, my experience with Clink's fiber offerings has been a good one. It's definitely "Gigabit" — there are many fiber splitters in play, which means (a) your downstream traffic is broadcast to everyone on the same splitter network in plaintext and filtered at individual ISP-owned termination devices, much like cable networks, and (b) you definitely never reach 1000 Mbps down, but often can reach 900 Mbps up. Typical…

I've been getting perfectly adequate IPv6 via their 6rd gateway (on fiber, in Seattle). I wrote some nerd notes on using one's own wifi router and setting up IPv6: http://b.tra.in/2015/07/notes-on-centurylink-fiber.html

6rd is pretty awful, generally, and I couldn't get Centurylink's to work last time I tried. I appreciate the notes and will take a look, thank you.

(One big problem I've experienced in the past is that any time you configure both IPv6 and IPv4, all programs prefer IPv6. But tunneled IPv6 has much worse performance than the native IPv4, so you really want applications to prefer IPv4 in a tunneled v6 environment.)

Re: CenturyLink 911 outage was caused by a single network card sending bad packets

#88
post #82
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, my experience with Clink's fiber offerings has been a good one. It's definitely "Gigabit" — there are many fiber splitters in play, which means (a) your downstream traffic is broadcast to everyone on the same splitter network in plaintext and filtered at individual ISP-owned termination devices, much like cable networks, and (b) you definitely never reach 1000 Mbps down, but often can reach 900 Mbps up. Typical…

You do know that perfection with TCP over Ethernet (no 802.1q rages, no retransmits) at 1gbps is 941Mbps, right?

What is your point? All of the observed numbers I've provided are sufficiently well below that as to make the distinction between 941 and 1000 meaningless.

Re: CenturyLink 911 outage was caused by a single network card sending bad packets

#89
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, my experience with Clink's fiber offerings has been a good one. It's definitely "Gigabit" — there are many fiber splitters in play, which means (a) your downstream traffic is broadcast to everyone on the same splitter network in plaintext and filtered at individual ISP-owned termination devices, much like cable networks, and (b) you definitely never reach 1000 Mbps down, but often can reach 900 Mbps up. Typical…

Hi, I'm on centurylink's fiber offering and have the same experience as you getting much faster upload than download (though download speed increases quite a bit during sleeping hours). Are you saying this is because the DL is congested during the day hours? Or is there some other technological block in play?

> Are you saying this is because the DL is congested during the day hours?

Yeah, it's congestion on the transmitter (upstream) end.

Post reply on HN