[AusNOG] Outage that costs Millions

[Sean K. Finn]

This might be why STP calls it 'Flooding' BDU's. :)

Nothing.. Nothing..Nothing.. SMAK! WHOA! Where the heck did all this traffic come from.. Damn.. Nothing.. Nothing... Nothing..

Sounds like the Dam Burst and took the Bridge down river with it... (Bad Pun).

Sean.

> You can start having fun things occur like your STP never hitting steadyish
> state because of things like flapping roots, and these can occur because of
> full pipes triggering packet loss which causes differing paths to be preferred,
> then lots more learning needs to occur; then ARP timeouts may occur and
> retransmission of ARP happens; then your switch/router CPU maxes out and you
> miss a link/routing protocol heartbeat; then more flaps occur, etc, etc.

> This happens even now in the IP world. Why oh why do you think spanning tree
> is any different? :)
> Adrian