Fun with PlanetLab and OpenBSD

This afternoon, the research and education network as well as the PlanetLab machines hosted at Jacobs University went offline. Our router reported a problem with a watchdog event. We quickly brought up identical replacement hardware - but the problem did persist. After some debugging, we finally figured out that one of our PlanetLab nodes started this afternoon to send packets that trigger an obscure bug in one of the Ethernet drivers of the OpenBSD based software router we use. We finally applied a one line patch and since then everything is fine again. (Of course, this all happened while we were facing a paper submission deadline. ;-)