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Skype down. Again.

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Re: Skype down. Again.

#21
post #14

Are there any alternatives worth exploring? Has anyone used Oovoo? (not affiliated in any way, just curious)

Open Source alternatives are Ekiga and QuteCom.

But frankly, on Ubuntu both Ekiga and QuteCom are just as badly integrated (i.e. not at all) and its additional downsides are that there are hardly people using the network; you can hardly call anyone. Yet?

Aside from that, Ekiga is a 1:1 replacement for skype, feature and ease-of-use-wise. Maybe a tad more stable :). On Ubuntu at least.

Re: Skype down. Again.

#22
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well until that major outage, I don't know how much infrastructure skype was running. I recall something about supernodes (or super super?) that they would be hosting to prevent these cascading failures. The whole P2P nature was the clever trick, not sure how much more data centers will actually help when it's software bugs that seem to take the system down.

They've spun up "mega-supernodes," when cascading failures have taken the network down before[1], but they don't need to run them full-time, just when traffic is such that the traditional supernodes can't handle the traffic of a new network. 1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048630

Thanks!
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