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A comment on Why S3 went down.

Re:Why S3 went down by newton on Saturday July 26, 2008 @02:28PM (#257679)
Can I point out that this explanation did not identify a root cause? How was the corrupt message originally produced?

If they know how it happened, it's not reflected in this article. The solution they describe addresses the detection of and recovery from future mysterious occurrences rather than identifying, understanding and eliminating whatever bug or condition caused this one.

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Re:Why S3 went down by attack on Saturday July 26, 2008 @07:22PM (#257844)
Memory corruption.
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Re:Why S3 went down by jordyhoyt on Saturday July 26, 2008 @07:50PM (#257865)
Right, it likely wasn't a bug if it is a single bit and this only happens once in a blue moon. A machine can only transmit perfect 1's and 0's for so long before getting one wrong.
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Re:Why S3 went down by jrsims on Saturday July 26, 2008 @08:59PM (#257910)
But they're adding checksums right? Anyone see any holes in that?
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Re:Why S3 went down by jordyhoyt on Sunday July 27, 2008 @12:01AM (#258010)
Do you mean this?

> we're adding checksums to proactively detect corruption of system state messages

I dobut that means they're actually adding them together, they're adding checksums to the process to ensure data corruption has no effect. Or am I misunderstanding you?

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Re:Why S3 went down by michaelneale on Sunday July 27, 2008 @11:33PM (#258682)
They use MD5 in other areas, but not that particular message. So now they will. Do people call hashes "checksums" in a colloquial sense? no one actually uses a "check sum" literally any more do they?
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Re:Why S3 went down by jrsims on Monday July 28, 2008 @05:52PM (#259709)
Right, that's what I meant, 'adding checksums to the process'.
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