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A comment on Real System Failures. Parent comment

Re:Real System Failures by vitus on Friday July 14, 2017 @08:40AM (#14769292)
Yes, but those aren't Byzantine failures. Byzantine failures present with incorrect values, not simply the absence of a value (as seen by a total hardware failure).

See the abstract in Lamport's original paper introducing the Byzantine generals problem [0].

We also see a similar issue in error correction -- an introductory undergrad course might teach this via Lagrange interpolation [1], where you need only n+k of the coefficients in the presence of erasure errors, but n+2k in the general case (where n is the size of the actual message, and k is the maximum number of errors to correct).

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

[1] https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs70/fa14/notes/n8.pdf

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Re:Real System Failures by nickpsecurity on Friday July 14, 2017 @08:57AM (#14769413)
Partial hardware failures exist. The wrong values start going through the system. A bit flip is easiest example. NonStop has been countering both partial and total HW failures in their design a long time now.
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