[plug] [OT] bur.st unreachable

[Craig Ringer]

Ben Jensz wrote:
> Its not hosted on an ADSL connection is it?  Because there have been 
> major outages on Telstra's ADSL network today that are apparently still 
> going.  This affects all ISPs offering ADSL via Telstra's ADSL network 
> (pretty much everyone).  Its affected authentication I believe... so 
> bridged users (like my work) haven't had a problem.

It's more complicated than that - there may be several issues. What kept 
us off-line at work this morning was the DSLAM insisting that we already 
had 'too many sessions for this host' and refusing to initiate a PPPoE 
session. This was with a DSL modem in bridged mode using PPPoE on the host.

Bizarrely, switching the DSL modem to "router" on WestNet support's 
advice mode and letting it do its own PPPoE solved the problem. WTF?!?. 
They say it's nothing to do with specific PPPoE clients, but instead 
affects the use of ADSL modems in bridged mode with a PPPoE client on an 
internal host. There's obviously a big hole in my understanding of how 
this stuff works, because I would've sworn their solution couldn't 
possibly fix the problem if I hadn't learned never, ever to say 
"impossible" quite some time ago.

> Caused by a Telstra upgrade gone wrong again (seriously, do they even 
> test upgrades/updates before they do them?).

Well, it's not really that easy. They often have to do them network wide 
(can't upgrade just small bits), and sometimes problems will only turn 
up when they go into the wild. I wonder, instead, why they don't/can't 
roll back updates when they cause problems.

--
Craig Ringer