Slashdot Mirror
University of Twente Back Online
UncleH writes "University of Twente is back online again, after the University NOC burned to ashes on wednesday. This also means that the much discussed University Campus network is also fully available again. The university already had internet access through a masquerading box in the network of their neighbours. Big hurrah for the network engineers of the University, large applause for the network engineers of SURFnet for restoring the 10Gbps Point of Presence within 36 hours after the fire."
And the first thing to happen after getting back online is getting slashdotted. :)
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
I am a student at this university, and one of the people who had no internet connection for 2 days because of this.
:-)
The thing is, you don't realise how much you use the Internet everyday until something like this happens.
It's not that you can't read Slashdot and some other sites - I can do without that for a week or two (honestly, I swear!!
The thing is, there are exams this week and next week, and you run into problems like this:
- There is a system where you can see at what location your exams are - *on the internet*.
- Part of the things you have to learn for exams are on the internet (central server containing a lot of this stuff, which has been burnt away as well).
- You don't have a clue whether your exams will even take place, maybe the original assignments are burned so they have to make a new exam (might well have been in some cases, and turns out to be the case for one of my exams).
- You can't mail people to make an appointment or ask about what is going to happen next, you actually have to go there or someway find out their telephone number (if you don't have it - I nearly always use ICQ or mail). I usually look up telephone numbers using...you guessed it...the internet.
I can go on some more, but I think you can fill in the rest for yourself: you *really* become very dependent on something as "simple" as a permanent internet connection.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
The neighbours also have their site in English. They offer serverspace from an old Dutch gold storage facility (nuclear safe building deep underground). As cool as this is their quality leaves something to be desired ;-)
(the error in the last link is theirs, not mine...try it yourself by going to this page and clicking on "qualty".....really...quite funny)
Although this is not official (yet), the cause seems to be arson. From the official anouncement of CIV (loosly translated in, Center for Information Services):
"Nothing is known yet about the cause, the police have started an investigation. It is true however, that their have been reports of 2 small fires in the same building the day before the fire. Security has been increased due to this. The exact cause of the big fire is not known at this moment."
Today there was another incident. They found fuel and matches in the building housing the most IT services (second only to the TWRC building, which has burnt down). Some people claim it was already burning and they were able to put out the fire. All people leaving that building (building of Computer Science) were checked for fuel fumes.
This is indeed the most interesting exams period I have ever had here at the University.
I think the outpouring of emotion is because a lot of us can relate to those network engineers - but not on this scale.
It's about getting a page at 22:00 because a brownout at 17:00 fried a router and it takes you an hour to drive to the closet, it takes some time to figure out the router died, back to the office to set up a replacement, back to the closet, etc. You end up back home at 03:00. I'm not a network engineer, but I've seen some of the stuff these guys put up with.
Can you imagine the chaos those engineers and administrators faced? You have to wonder how much sleep they got over this period. And you can imagine the thoughts going through their heads as they watched their NOC burn down (of course, thoughts of "Oh shit" come after learning that nobody died or was injured - if you're worried first about the equipment instead of human lives, then yes, there's something wrong, but I can imagine the oncoming dread as you learn all your work is gone and you MUST come up with a replacement DAMNED QUICK).
Getting a page or phone call in the evening really sucks, but you can usually go home at the end of the day. These guys probably worked their asses off for days on end.
I congratulate these engineers and admins and offer a virtual beer.
lp0: printer no longer on fire
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I wish I could get these guys over to my house to restore my cable modem back the the glorious speeds I had about 5 years ago. Of course today if they mucked around 'restoring' my bandwidth, the FBI would show up with their guns and confiscate my my coffee pot and take a few donuts as some form of evidence. Oh well, back to my 'high-speed online' web surfing.
Or before you post, learn geography. The map is of the region of Twente, the University is just north of Enschede in the East.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
is getting slashdotted
Yes. This is downright reprehensible.
Did you editors not read the comment in the last story? They're running on an emergency setup, and *specifically* requested that their new network *not* be linked to by slashdot.
See this comment on your own story.
So they donate resources to Debian, their NOC burns down, they set up an emergency system *and* go to the trouble of politely requesting Slashdot *not* to link to it and the first thing you do is do exactly that, making the network unusable for the students that are already having to deal with the burning down of part of the university.
Assholes.
May we never see th
I saw the following on my favorite MUD, Tsunami, thanks to Sitavan:
There was a fire today that destroyed the datacenter at the University of Twente in Enschede, The Netherlands, housing a SurfNet (the academic and research network over there) POP amongst many other things.
A friend sent me these syslog entries which I found interesting... The first one is from a router in Enschede that was destroyed, and the second one is from the router in Amsterdam that it connected to:
0.ar5.enschede1.surf.net 3613: Nov 20 7:20:50.927 UTC:
%ENV_MON-2-TEMP: Hotpoint temp sensor(slot 18) temperature has
reached WARNING level at 61(C)
lo0.cr2.amsterdam2.surf.net 1146: Nov 20 07:20:56.458 UTC:
%CLNS-5-ADJCHANGE: ISIS: Adjacency to ar5.enschede1 (POS2/0) Down,
interface deleted(non-iih)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!