Posted on 10/19/2013 7:30:35 PM PDT by MeshugeMikey
Internet users from Brooklyn to Philadelphia suffered slow to nonexistent service Saturday after equipment at a New York-area network hub broke down, disrupting service for several hours.
A spokesman for the Internet service provider Level 3 Communications Inc. LVLT +0.25% said technicians were working quickly to fix the outage, which cascaded down to customers using Cablevision Systems Corp.'s CVC -0.45% Optimum service and Time Warner Cable Inc., TWC -0.36% among others.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
EBT last weekend. Internet this weekend. WTH is it gonna be next weekend?
What chaos? People on the East Coast, where there’s a statistically high percentage of liberals, can’t watch Netflix for a couple of hours. In what sane world is that some sort of chaos? In what sane world is that an accomplishment? Face it, you’re just being ridiculously paranoid. You can’t even identify an actual goal, just “chaos” of which there actually wasn’t any.
at this point I am going to cling...closely to the Biblical advice about addressing One Days Troubles at a time .
FDacebook and Twitter users across the east coast.....were among those affected
Id expect that they may have experienced some level of anxiety
“Face it, you’re just being ridiculously paranoid.”
youve filled out your profile far more fully and quickly than Id have expected
thanks for sharing
But again what is the goal? Who cares if a densely populated area has its porn flow interrupted for a couple of hours? What does it actually accomplish? We already know if they want to shut if off they can, the whole internet goes through government owned computers eventually, so there’s nothing to test, and nothing to accomplish with a partial shut down. Out here in the real world it was just a glitch, something broke, on a weekend, the right people weren’t there to fix it quickly, but eventually it got fixed. No big deal.
I admit I am not an IT guy but I thought the whole point of the Internet was that is a NET. It was in invented to keep disruptions from preventing launch orders from being transmitted. I don’t recall ever hearing about an Internet outage in the past.
So people couldn’t post their status updates for a couple of hours. Again, so what. Anxiety? Please, rejoin sanity, people lose internet connection all the time, and they survive, now a whole bunch of people lost internet connection, and survived.
It’s pretty easy to spot a ridiculous paranoid, they think a minor glitch is a major conspiracy, and yet they can’t actually point to why such a conspiracy would exist or what would have been accomplished. Point to one ACTUAL DESIRABLE consequence to this, go ahead.
very slowly... yes.
Inter City home grown nets remain an issue.
Still there needs to be renewed efforts to set 'nets up that are beyond the gov't/big iron backbonez.
Well, sure... The Internet is a web, in theory. Originally the idea was for a national communications web where huge holes could be blown due to nuclear strikes, and the packet-based traffic would still hunt for any viable path around the holes. Of course... That’s back when email was most of the load and it was simple and text based and only a few kilobytes per message. There were open relays... So a message would bounce around front server to server playing a sort of “warmer... colder...” game until it found its destination. Open relays are unthinkable on modern mail servers. And... There was no WWW. There was telnet. There was pine. There was usenet. It worked and it was fairly resilient, if not so user friendly. But then the WWW happened.
Anymore the “web” is not a web. It’s more point-to-point with relatively few major backbones carrying the enormous volumes of traffic. Any outage of a key backbone route and just like a highway system traffic starts to back up. Like the airline system... If a major hub is taken out of action for a day... The flights back up in other airports and start to shut things down in a wider and wider area... And it can have nationwide and even global repercussions.
From Wiki
"UUCP is an abbreviation of Unix-to-Unix Copy.[1] The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers. Specifically, a command named uucp is one of the programs in the suite; it provides a user interface for requesting file copy operations. The UUCP suite also includes uux (user interface for remote command execution), uucico (the communication program that performs the file transfers), uustat (reports statistics on recent activity), uuxqt (execute commands sent from remote machines), and uuname (reports the UUCP name of the local system).
Although UUCP was originally developed on Unix in the 1970s and 1980s, and is most closely associated with Unix-like systems, UUCP implementations exist for several non-Unix-like operating systems, including Microsoft's MS-DOS, Digital's VAX/VMS, Commodore's AmigaOS, classic Mac OS, and even CP/M."
The original idea is that it will route around damage.
And it still will. This sounds like the loss of a popular local provider’s connection. Nothing is perfect on this mortal coil, but having multiple means of getting on the web helps.
Of course the Internet was designed to inherently re-route traffic. Nobody ever seems to mention that anymore.
Sounds like FR.
No reason it couldn't default to a low bandwidth system if needed.
I was a Unix head back in the heyday of this. It’s now, as best I know, an arcane little used system... people soon quit getting on the phone network with modems on their own per-call dime once a fairly reasonable 24/7 broadband became available. FR itself couldn’t carry on in its present form via UUCP.
At any given moment there's always something down, some backbone provider is not passing traffic from another or with reduced reliability. In the last year, I've noticed the outages have increased 2x-3x and and also the time-to-repair has gone up.
We kid each other about it but in the back of my mind I'm wondering if there isn't some nasty trend about to surface this fall/winter.
If we lost the web and a few people had the fore sight to build a back up UUCP system then FR could (nicely) exist as a usenet news site. Only draw back would be no monitors. It would be a free for all and the Rats would get to post too.
No but it could be a usenet news site. Usenet news is still in use.
Roger that. At one point at my company I had four different connections to the Internet. A main T-3, two backup T-1s to an alternate provider out the other side of the building to a separate trench, an ISDN to a third provider, and a microwave connection from the roof across the bay to a fourth provider. Gotta love redundancy. :-)
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