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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

Why assume CF is a simple box?

I think the whole point of CF is that it isn't.

You have to plug in the cable somewhere. If the hardware where the x-connect is plugged in dies, has issues, has to be rebooted, etc. you have an issue and it's not like there were no CF issues ever.

From the post-mortem, it doesn't sound like like the problem was a single network cable. Redundant network switches have existed for a long time, and they're certainly using them (but not bothering to mention it in the post-mortem).

Their problem was that they only have two transit providers, and one of them black-holed about 3-5% of the internet. Since it was a routing issue, I'd guess it was either a misconfiguration, or that the traffic is being split across dozens of paths, and one path had a correlated failure.

Why does there have to be just one cable?

Do you think there are two cables that are never bundled in the same underground tube?

All the redundancy in the world can’t protect you from some random person digging in the wrong place.

Sure, maybe the underground tube was breached while someone was moving goalposts?

Doesn't matter.

Single or million boxes, if they apply wrong config, it doesn't work.

You dual home because you hedge your bets and hope no 2 ISPs gonna have fuckup at same time

I think you’re suggesting that some redundancy you get by accident — by having two ISPs — is better than the redundancy a single ISP could engineer.

That’s certainly possible in specific cases, but not a very good general principle to rely on. One CF could very well be better than two given ISPs.

That’s a false dichotomy. You can absolutely have two ISPs, one of whom is CF.

Sorry, that's not a false dichotomy.

A second ISP isn't free, it has significant costs in terms of dollars and complexity. The question is, does CF and another provider have significant benefits to justify the additional costs? For it to make sense you have to believe the redundancy CF provides is significantly lacking (and in a way that adding a second provider addresses). Maybe it's true, but it would be nuts to just assume it and start spending a lot of money.

The cost is few k's at most, not exactly massive cost for medium sized company or bigger.

We pay x10 for power alone

I'd suggest dusting off some math and calculating JUST HOW MUCH CF would need to be better compared to having 2 different ISPs fail at same time.

We had not that happen in 10 years

> That’s certainly possible in specific cases, but not a very good general principle to rely on. One CF could very well be better than two given ISPs.

You might think that if you have no idea what are you doing.

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