Cisco's technical assistance center e-mail was waiting on us this
morning informing us of their diagnosis of the problem -- a software
error on a router.  A "fixed" version has been loaded, but the router
must be rebooted before it takes effect.

The problem mysteriously vanished around 10:00 AM this morning, and I
was hoping to be able to hold off until after 5:00 PM to reboot, but
is has reappeared this afternoon.  I will try to let it get through
the afternoon, but if the packet loss gets bad enough I will reboot
to solve the problem immediately.  In either case the reboot should
take no more than 5 minutes.

The administrative router was running the same release, but has now
been loaded with a matching version of software.  While it did not
appear to suffer the same fate as the academic router, better proactive
caution than reactive panic!  It will be restarted late
this evening.

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>