On Mon, 8 Aug 2005, Gary T. Benner wrote:

HI all,

Have been racking my brains trying to solve a problem, and I suddenly remembered an issue that Telecom had regarding "micro-outages".

Does this problem still exist?

No doubt, tho wether it is the same or not is anyones guess - afaik the micro-outage issue was to do with advertising of static routes and RIP update timers and was an issue brought about by device incompatabilities and timer changes which would cause a route to be withdrawn after exceeding timeout values.

Our problem comes up with a customer using chat rooms in the Moodle Learning Management System, for students in remote locations. The chat room relies upon a persistent socket connection for the duration of the "chat". Perhaps for 30+ mins or so at a time. However students and teachers are regularly dropped. The Chat daemon is basically a socket server, and the only way I can see this happening is if the socket connection is broken. We do not see this effect in LAN trials.

The micro-outage phenomina was dependant upon the media used to connect and seemed to happen predominantly with DSL devices. The problems you are experiencing could be caused by a number of different things and it is unlikely that these are the same problems that were causing micro-outages a while back, but without knowing more about how the client connects through to the end system it is hard to say what the cause could be. -- Steve.