Seattle2 POP

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     There have been ongoing problems with the Seattle2 POP, involving latency,
packet loss, failures to authenticate, failure to route, etc.

     Routers at Stockton, and at Seattle2 were replaced, and a switch was
replaced, to no avail.

     It was finally determined that the router and switch at Seattle2 were not
defective, they simply were not robust enough to handle the traffic volume.

     Yesterday, 10/17/2000, the router was replaced with a Cisco 7200 series
router, the switch upgraded, and the data backbone pipe upgraded to an ATM
circuit (155 mb/s optical).

     This should fix the latency/packet loss/congestion/fail to
authenticate/fail to route problems as it now has more than 3X the bandwidth
that the old Seattle POP had. 

     I believe this also contributed significantly to exhausting kernel buffer
resources on the eskimo.com host.  I have also made some configuration changes
to remove an exploit that has been used several times in the last two weeks to
intentionally crash the machine so stability should be significantly improved.

     Please let me know if you experience any more problems with the new
Seattle and Tacoma dial-up numbers or any of the other new numbers in
Washington state.

     I am aware that the new Auburn number is configured as long distance from
Enumclaw, Black Diamond, and Pacific.  It should not be, this is a translations
problem in the telco switches.  I suspect they configured based upon where the
switch was located rather than what rate center the prefix is in.  At any rate,
we are pursuing a fix for this problem.