Slashdot Mirror
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."
That little red dot at the tip of LI is my home LAN going down...
Is that a red circle on the webserver hosting that gif?
Banaaaana!
I'm sorry. I had apparently text'd most of my friends saying electricity was poor, and almost immediately word spread around the north east..
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
Don't these backbone routers have backup? I was in an ISP server house in the UK which had a full backup system. In the case of a power failure, it had a UPS that kicked in for 10 seconds while the generator was booting up, which then provided power for the infrastructure of the building. I would find it hard to believe that in the USA they don't have similar systems?
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 ?
Woo hoo! Notice how all the outages are south of the border? We are so good! ;-)
Would love to see an animation of a webserver being slashdotted.
14th 4:20pm - Power goes out, our building's generators for some reason dont kick in.
14th 4:35 - Most of us decide to call it a day and go home
14th 4:30 - I'm in my car, I realize the blackout is bad when only 2 or 3 radio stations are working and the no traffic lights are. I know it was going to be a fun drive home - thank god i live 15 mins away.
14th 4:45 - I hear the blackout expands to parts of the States. me: OH FUCK@#$@#$
14th 4:50 - My sister sms's me on my cell telling me her and my mom are stuck in the subway - they need help. Like I care, I have my own problems , traffic is a mess and there are hundreds of psychos out.
14th 5:00 - I get home, look for a battery powered radio and listen in.
14th 5:30 - I get a call from my sister - they're stuck somewhere downtown. I just wish them luck.
14th 7:00 - I realize there are no candles in the freaking house, time to look for those puppies.
14th 8:00 - Sister & mom arrive home. me: LOL
14th 11:30 - I go to bed & pray the blackout lasts until the middle of the next day, that way I get an extended weekend -wohooo, back to bed
15th 7:30am - Wake up, lights are still out - no work, home free! wohoo, back to bed.
15th 11:30 - Receive a call from my boss, asking me where the fuck i was since they got power at the office but there is a lil "issue".
15th 12:30m - Got to the office, problem: No Internet connection, seems one of the ISP's switches went bye bye after the black out. Our main app server is down. No power you think? Nope The colo company hasnt been paying their bills and WorldCom used the blackout to pull the plug on them. Server is up and running but no outside world connection. FUCK@#*$.
15th 1:00pm - We think , no biggy let's use one of our other servers and restore apps and data from backup. HA! yah right - Turns out a DNS servers for our backup machines had died and the backup script had stopped working 10 days earlier. Great.
15th 2:30 - We wait to see if Worldcom is nice enough to plug the box back in.
15th 4:30 - Yah, it ain't happening - 20+ clients are without website and apps.
15th 5:00pm - Boss and I drive downtown to the WorldCom building to download data physically off the Box.
15th 5:30 - Stop for gas - HA! huge lineup.
15th 7:30 - Get into the server room, ha! the fucking cage where our box is is locked and the key is not working. One of us climbs the cage and goes into it, runs an ethernet cable from the box to the laptop. So picture these, 4 geeks inside a server room, three sitting on the floor , one inside a cage like some wild animal. I should have brought a camera. Let the tar'in begin.
15th 9:00 - Download is completed, our asses are sore from sitting on concrete, necks hurting, and WorldCom employee happy that we're finally leaving.
15th 9:30 - We're downtown wondering how the fuck we're going to upload 2gig+ worth of data and source code to our spare server.
15th 10:30 - Since there is no inet at the office and our home's cable is too fucking slow (Rogers cable sucks!) , we decide we bring out the ghetto in us. We walk up and down Yonge street asking Internet cafe's if they could lend us some bandwith!!!. Yes, you hear me right, we were begging for bandwith in internet cafes.
15th 10:45 - We decide we're hungry, so we stop at a sushi bar. After we're done we realized it might not be a good idea to eat fish after a blackout. Fridges not working aand all. Too fuckin late.
15th 11:00 - Found an internet cafe that will let us connect the laptop to upload.
15th 11:30 - Realize we can't do shit since the computer is in Korean , have all Win settings locked and the guy taking care of the place has no clue.
16th 1:30am - I'm at my boss's house uploading 2gig+ data , will take about 27 hours. Ask me if I cared about the clients at this point.
16th 1:35 - I leave and head to my friend's place where they're having beers & bbq'in on my friend's balcony. - My weekend Begins.
Network Blackouts? Yah they suck.
[alk]