Juniper Under Scrutiny After Internet Outages
The North American Network Operators' Group
mailing list had originally blamed Cisco.
data.com
6/18/99
By David Greenfield and Stephen Saunders
Juniper Under Scrutiny After
Internet Outages
The North American Network Operators' Group
mailing list had originally blamed Cisco.
Cisco may be taking heat for Internet outages traced to problems with its Internetwork Operating System routing code, but recent evidence suggests it's notthe only vendor shipping buggy software.
Reports indicate that the June 2 outage that hit Cable & Wireless was caused by a failure in the software running on routers from Cisco archrival Juniper Networks. The North American Network Operators' Group mailing list had originally blamed Cisco.
"I received some third-party information that C&W was field-testing some Juniper routers, and this particular outage was a Juniper bug, not a Cisco bug," said Sean Donelan, network architect at ISP Data Research Associates.
Donelan declined to elaborate. Juniper refused comment.
If the information is true, it could be bad news for Juniper -- whose campaign against Cisco is founded on the supposed strength of its routing software.
In the meantime, more details have emerged about the Cisco glitch, which has affected networks run by AT&T and Uunet Technologies, among others, according to Donelan.
"The bug affects the Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) architecture, which causes a route cache to forget a route and then drop any packets destined for that network," said Edward Henigin, chief technical officer at Texas Networking, an ISP that was
affected.
ISPs can temporarily solve the problem by disabling CEF, Henigin said. But that can more than double the load on the router's CPU, degrading performance and at times crashing the router entirely.
Cisco said the problem was encountered on its 7500 series router platform, and that a fix has been issued. But as of today, it was unable to give the Web location of the patch.
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