Re: cable cut, sat-3 maybe? in early 2000s

On 10/05/2012 18:40, Joe Abley wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I seem to recall that in the early 2000s there was a multi-day failure in an under-sea cable that disrupted international internet access for South Africa, at least for customers of some ISPs. This was before I installed F-Root in Johannesburg, I think in 2004. The story went that the outage was sufficiently long that the delegation for the ZA zone expired naturally from caches which led South African users unable to reach local content using ZA domain names.
>
> I've heard this event referred to a number of times by way of explaining to people why having a local root server is a good idea -- it helps preserve access to local content in the event of an international network failure.
>
> Michuki (here in the Gambia at the AfNOG meeting) remembered a similar story, and he thought it was a failure in SAT-3. SAT-3 was only available from about 2001 (says Wikipedia), which would place the outage somewhere between 2001 and 2004. If indeed it was SAT-3, and if indeed any of this story is actually real. Perhaps Michuki heard it from me, and perhaps it came to me in a dream.
>
> I was about to type this as a footnote into a document I've been asked to write, but realised that I have no details about the outage, and suddenly a lack of confidence that I've remembered it properly at all. Perhaps it's all lies!
>
> Anybody recall such an event? Or was this all just an elaborate hallucination?
>
>
> Joe
> _______________________________________________
>

Joe,

I gave a talk at ICANN 11 I think (Marina del Rey) after 9/11, where I 
described some of the effects as we witnessed during 9/11 from this end 
of the pond (or is that two ponds). As I recall, we (South African 
service providers) had quite a few links terminating in downtown 
Manhattan and it caused some consternation as well as service 
interruptions. I seem to recall some of the downtime being quite 
substantial, and I think co.za examined timeouts based on that event.
I May have mentioned this as a good reason for having local (anycast) 
root servers, but I certainly did not say the ZA zone expired (because I 
would have remembered such an event occurring, and I certainly don't 
recall such an event).
This may be a source of hallucination, but some work would have been 
needed to get from my presentation to what you describe above.

Perhaps people who operated actual networks at that time might add to 
the above.

Another possible source might have been Mike Lawrie re-configuring the 
primary for .za to be out of country in light of the threatened ECT 
bill, an instance of which would have made it illegal to operate such a 
service in the country without a licence. But I'm not sure how root 
servers would have made it into such a hallucination.

regards

--Calvin

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