Network Blackout

An anonymous reader writes "Renesys put together a special report on the effects of the recent blackout on routing and network reachability on the Internet. It includes a cool animation of networks dropping off the internet (presumably as a result of the power outage). It is interesting to see how localized some of the outage was--networks in New York state right up to the Vermont border go dark while everything on the other side of the border is quiet. New York City obviously gets clobbered."

Comments

Origins of the Internet - no power, no work ?

[PaulBartlet7]

As the link says - http://www.socio.demon.co.uk/mphil/appendix1.html [Quote] The Internet is a web of several thousand computer networks that now extends to just about every region of the world and has 50 to 100 million users. The Internet of today has it's origins in a networking project called ARPAnet which was run by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a science research body set up in 1957 by the Pentagon. (Hafner & Lyon, 1996, 19) The popular belief is that the military created the ARPAnet, the precursor of today's Internet, so that data held on Pentagon computers could survive a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Upon attack, data from computers at the Pentagon and other military installations could be uploaded (sent electronically) to other remote computers not affected by such an attack. [/quote] It's always been my understanding that the Internet would continue working after a Nuclear war, at least that was the plan. If this blackout had effected all of US / Canada like a Nuclear attack would, would any of the Net worked ?

Re:Origins of the Internet - no power, no work ?

[Ralph Wiggam]

The popular belief that ARPAnet was designed to survive a nuclear war was created by a Time magazine writer who didn't know what he was talking about. ARPAnet was created so that people doing military research could share thier work and the DOD wouldn't have to pay for the same research twice. That's why the first nodes were universities and not military bases. My alma mater, Univ. of Illinois, was supposed to get one of the first nodes outside of CA, but hippie protestors delayed it for a while. Fucking hippies.

-B

Re:Florida?

[tmu]

The geolocation of networks is never a precise thing. Networks can be registered in the city of their corporate offices but deployed anywhere in the world (it's how the Internet works--cool, huh?).

There are some interesting, precise tricks that you can play by sending various kinds of packets (usually UDP) and using detailed latency information about each hop of those packets, along with a provider network map, to get closer to the physical location of a particular IP address. We didn't do that for these maps.