3 ms·
This reminds me of an incident on the early internet (perhaps ARPANET at that point) where a routing table got corrupted so it had a negative-length route which
by twic 6y ago
This reminds me of an incident on the early internet (perhaps ARPANET at that point) where a routing table got corrupted so it had a negative-length route which routers then propagated to each other, even after the original corrupt router was rebooted. As with AT&T, they had to reboot all the routers at once to get rid of the corruption.
I can't remember where i read about this, but i recall the problem was called "The Creeping Crud from California". Sadly, this phrase apparently does not appear anywhere on the internet. Did i imagine this?
- ficklepickle 6y agoI can't find anything by that name either, but the details do match the major ARPANET outage of Oct 27, 1980. The incident is detailed in RFC 789: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc789.html#b http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc789.html#b
- twic 6y agoInteresting, thanks! That is different to the story i remember, but it's possible that i remember incorrectly, or read an incorrect explanation. I believe that i read about this episode in Hans Moravec's book 'Mind Children'. I can see in Google Books that chapter 5 is on 'Wildlife', and there is a section 'Spontaneous Generation', which promises to talk about a "software parasite" which emerged naturally in the ARPAnet - but of which the bulk is not available: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=56mb7XuSx3QC&lpg=PA133&dq=moravec%20arpanet&pg=PA133#v=onepage&q=spontaneous%20generation&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=56mb7XuSx3QC&lpg=PA133&d...