Re: Instant chats and central servers

[Dave Israel <davei () biohazard demon digex net>]

Sean,

  There's a bunch of machines for AIM, spread out across the
AOLosphere... there is no one server that will take down the service.
(That's for the Oscar stuff; the TOC stuff, which the open messengers
use, is also clustered in the back end, but there is that One Server
You Must Talk To(tm).)

  I imagine the other services are similar.

-Dave

On 5/8/2001 at 11:35:27 -0700, Sean Donelan said:
> A question (and a test to see if I'm still subscribed)
>
> The various instant messenging services, such as AIM, ICQ, Microsoft,
> Yahoo, other Messenger uses a central server to manage "presence".
>
> No central server appears to mean no instant messages, am I correct?
>
> What does this have to do with NANOG, apparently it is becoming more
> common for backbone NOC folks to communicate with their friends in
> other NOCs via one of these instant chat programs.  I didn't realize
> how common it was until I was informed about it last month when AOL/AIM
> had difficulties.  This month Yahoo Messenger had power difficulties,
> which disrupted their central servers.
>
> If folks are using this these services for real-time communications,
> should we be trying to improve their reliability?  Or is this just a
> "feature" of how presence services work.

-- 
Dave Israel
Senior Manager, IP Backbone
Intermedia Business Internet