You can simulate partitions of this nature very easily in most Linux distros using iptables to turn on and off incoming/outgoing traffic on various different ports. Probably Windows has some mechanism of doing the same thing.
As a real-world example of how this might happen accidentally, imagine somebody tripping over an ethernet cable and yanking it out of a socket. This happens all the time in our development environment (Sometimes even intentionally). Scott On May 9, 2011 8:12 PM, "Ted Dunning" <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 6:02 PM, Martin Serrano <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Are there downsides to this? >> > > !?! > > Yes. There are. > > This defeats the ability to detect network partitions and other failures. > > >> Are there cases where a client will permanently lose the ability to talk to >> a server even though new clients would have no issues? >> > > Probably. There are innumerable ways that networks misbehave.
