Comment by tssva
4 years ago
In the late 90s to early 2000s I worked in the Network Planning & Design group for UUNET. They were phased out before I left but when I started Fore/Marconi ATM switches were used for interconnect within PoPs and to terminate the circuits between PoPs. For a while the NOC had to reboot them periodically at a scheduled time or else they would reboot themselves after a certain period of time. I believe it was 45 or 90 days.
Long time lurker but I had to create an account to comment. My first job out of college was at Fore Systems/Marconi back in 2000 as a QA tester. One of my first assignments was to test bug fixes for several different uptime issues we had. My favorite was the PNNI 397 day uptime where it would flap a port causing the switch to relearn all its SPVCs.
Fore/Marconi was a great place to work back then but the dotcom bust and the migration to pure IP/MPLS was a death knell to them. My entire division was laid off in Oct of 2001. I was lucky and had jumped ship only weeks earlier.
Now I feel guilty about my role in several migrations to pure IP/MPLS. If it helps at all a couple were off of Cisco Lightstream equipment.
IIRC, there was a long period of time where the max uptime on a Unix system was ~94 days. That makes a lot of sense.