Slashdot Mirror
Transatlantic Cable Fault Disrupts Internet In UK
An anonymous reader submits "Web traffic between the U.S. and Europe has been hit after an undersea cable developed a major fault on Tuesday. Because the TAT-14 cable network is shaped like a ring, it should be able to cope with one such failure -- but unfortunately the consortium that owns it hadn't fixed an earlier problem, just off the U.S. coast. Just shows how systems with build-in redundancy can still go badly wrong...."
LINX, the London Internet Exchange, which carries nearly all UK Internet traffic and over half of Europe's Internet traffic
I guess the Echelon boys got to go home early that day.
Trolling is a art,
I know that there is fault-tolerance, but putting control of most of the telecommunications connectivity of an entire continent is kind of scary..
We have a link from the US to the UK.
It is redundant, unless we have 2 faults.
We have a single fault...but we don't repair it.
So then we have anouther one!
I would really like to ask if these guys ever thought of putting together a startup....because let me tell you, they already have the right frame of mind.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
So that explains my inbox full of random british comments like "My internet's fell of the lolly!" and "I've bloody well lost my connection!" and "Cherrio good chap, the internet's down!"
Wow. What an insightful post.
"Hey, I hear Ford Explorers used to rollover a lot"
"Most people have refrigerators."
What was the ring fault they had lapsed on fixing the previous time, and who's responsible for maintenance on an international line within no clear national boundary (if indeed it failed in the ocean)
Imagine... some big cable that's thousands of miles long connecting continents...
That's just a weird idea. You gotta wonder who makes those things and how, exactly, they're maintained. Let alone set up in the first place. Do they just sit along the ocean floor? Are they suspended in mid-water? I have absolutely no idea. Just mind-boggling to me, the logistics of it.
i'm amazed that i survived - an airbag saved my life.
This really is a great loss for the Slashdot community.
lay some new cables... Why run one when two or three will obviously be better.
Well I use AOL and everything seems fine here in London.
Wanted : A Signature.
the article, but here's the link to the linx (badum tsh) website, with another news site for the article.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Ok, sometimes comments on Slashdot are a bit US-centric, but I think we have a winner!
Honestly, this reminds me of the first transatlantic cable. They kept getting faults and they couldn't figure out what it was. Turns out the paying-out machine had the cable rubbing against some fine metal shavings which would occasionally get stuck in the casing and ground the cable to the sea-water.
I wonder what happened to this one?
- Sherman
They should try running Mac OS X with a .Mac subscription. I should provide all the tools they need to avoid this problem in the future.
I'm in the UK, and I haven't noticed any problems. I've even had a realaudio stream running without interruption.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
There's indeed a big risk of electrocution for the ocean here. Imagine the mass extinctions such an accident could cause ! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH !
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
So, I'm in Britain, and obviously not doing my work, as I'm supposed to, and I wasn't on tuesday aswell, but I didn't notice any fault?
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
this was all over the service provider lists yesterday...
l es .html
.. i heard days ... not hours :-(
The latest from the rumor mill....
FYI, for some history on the TAT's
http://davidw.home.cern.ch/davidw/public/SubCab
still seeing decent ping times. anyone detect an actual outage or issue? Best info we have is that there are two outages. One has existed
for the last 3 weeks or so between Tuckerton (New Jersey) and Bude (UK). It takes out the "southern path" across the atlantic.
There is a second outage between Bude (UK) and Katwijk (NL). For circuits that landed in London or France this (should have) taken out the redundant path for those circuits.
Circuits from Tuckerton (New Jersey) or Manasquan (New Jersey) to Katwijk (NL), Norden >(DE), or some city in Denmark who's name I
forget should still be up on the northern path.
> So, if you're in London or France your circuits are likely to be down, however some people in those locations used Contentinal capacity to link up to Katwijk, in which case they might still be operational.
I confirm that France is having some problem with TAT14.
France Telecom International Backbone (Opentransit) is currently running with
non TAT14 capacity (10G) and one oc48 direct to Copenhagen (that is ok).
We (Opentransit) are currently not experiencing any congestion but are implementing a new 10G circuit to secure our topology until TAT14 is back to life (one leg at least).
Both problems are undersea issues, so don't expect speedy resolution if you are down.
Yep
-Opentransit (France Telecom)
Just shows how systems with build-in redundancy can still go badly wrong...."
Um, the built in redundancy worked as it should, apart from the maintainers not fixing the first fault. Their maintenance is what went wrong. Nobody will ever be able to afford or build a system like this with so much redundancy that you aren't required to maintain it.
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
It was definitly noticable as our customer reported
1) Website traffic down at least 30%
2) Around 75% packet loss from the EU -> US
3) Slow delivery of email
Basically it caused a massive amount of headaches and you have to wondered WTF didn't they fix the first problem when it came up. Its like running a RAID Array on one disk.
Well least things seem to sort of be getting back to normal
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Never noticed! Just how many transatlantic cables are there anyway?
"Just shows how systems with build-in redundancy can still go badly wrong...."
No, it shows how well designed redundancy can be overcome by bad management decisions! Engineering brought low by bean counters... Gee, when has that ever happened before?!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
When will people learn?
The most redundant systems can still break, if you have your head in your ass and don't keep them up.
Pretty Pictures!
She added that the Internet was not broken, as traffic was rerouted through other networks.
Au contraire. The Internet *IS* broken, regardless of damage to this particular cable.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Man, the FBI is going to have to interview *every* *single* *fish* in the area for Al-Queda connections.
No one will even suspect the dolphins because they are supposed to be, like, higher mammals or something.
--- Ban humanity.
I don't know about Linus, Alan, Richard and the KDE team but considering the size of most geeks there could be a lot of pressuring involved to get them into scuba diving outfits! ;)
You forgot the tea advocacy :-)
Anybody have hop count & RTT statistics?
You only have to loose one, and suddenly you have no reduandancy.
I would think for such an important link, there would be at least 3 (so you still have some redundancy durring repairs if one fails).
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Oh yeah. You know it. The Internet was our gift to the UK after beating them in the revolution?
WTF are you on? The Internet is a global communications tool; not a private club we let people in and shut them out when we don't like them. What is up with idiots saying "screw them" on this? Great way to fostger international peace and harmony; but cutting them off and saying "fuck off blokes". Geez... I wonder what the response would be if France were cut off for a bit....
Obviously it would be the company or group of company that owns it and reaps all the money for selling pieces of it off to ISPs and IAPs on both sides of the pond.
To think that the US, UK, French, or any other government could actually accomplish something of that magnitude would just be naive.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
Thats strange...I seem to have the internet up just fine! However I was running into a lot of problems with NTL's borked transparent cache last night, so set up a proxy server on one of my dedicated servers over in germany and was able to browse. Ntl offer the worst service I've ever encountered. I've stopped using their dns servers and set up a caching nameserver on my FreeBSD router/firewall it's that bad.
I am NaN
It probably was a startup, y'know, back in the ol' under-water-cable boom of 1999. But then the bubble burst, and all the people that dropped out of college to lay cables on the ocean floor had to find real jobs.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
There is a brit in the office next to mine, and he is having trouble calling his mates back home.
I'm in the UK, (Kent) and i've not noticed any problems at all :)
:)
The fact i'm posting here helps to prove that
Someone posts a link to a news story. Said news story discusses failure of major comm link between US and UK resulting in loss of Net connection. Said link points to server that is located *IN* the UK. Brilliant. I know that not *all* slash dotters are in the US - but the majority probably are.
I think some people are wondering why they can still get to the Web even if they are in London?? A lot of Companies would have bought bandwidth with more than one provider, our company in Ireland have access to the states direct and through Germany etc. etc. However if you decide to save a few $ by putting in access with one provider...................BANG!!
While there was a bit of a routing problem on Tuesday, we were doing fine without stateside connectivity.
;)
Contrary to popular belief, a section of "internet" severed from the states does not cease to function.
In fact it may even function better
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
She added that the Internet was not broken, as traffic was rerouted through other networks.
I read this and I couldn't help but think of a CDW commercial:
Clueless pointy-haired boss to the camera: "Fred? I think I just crashed the Internet."
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Because the TAT-14 cable network is shaped like a ring
That on a geeky, tech oriented site such as this, we could have a slighty better description.
Mother Earth Mother Board.
The way ICANN is run it makes me wonder somtimes....
That's strange, I'm in the UK and SlashDot is hosted in America, so according to this story, I should be having problems -- but in fact, everything is working just fiFgfdgf3gf4h32hh%$$$424452
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
Been NOT working lately...browsing /. etc. All fine and smooth - I can still hear you guys. Without any slowdowns.
Oh yeah, from Poland btw.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Have you considered the irony of posting such a comment in a web based discussion forum, considering that the creator of the web is British?
Seems my connection is just fine. In fact, if someone hadn't told that there was 'widespread disruption to Internet services in the UK' I would not have noticed.
Perhaps it's only an issue for certain networks/ISPs?
Silly Limeys...
You relise you call us limeys because we used to eat limes to prevent getting scurvy, while your teeth fell out and you eventually died of Scurvy from lack of Vitamin C. Ironic that the very thing that saved many sailors lives is a (semi)insult you now use against us!
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Why not do what my friend Mike does when he has a problem with a bad cable and just jiggle it a little? It works great for his monitor cable so why not for a giant bundle of fiberoptics/wires/whatever in the ocean? What could possably go wrong? Jiggling the cable has got to be cheaper than going down to BestBuy and buying a new cable and running it from the US to the UK. Don't get the extended warrenty though, it's not worth it!
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
I don't know what everybody's complaining about. I mean we've got these big, thick cables connecting us to our friends in the west. I'm in the UK and I'm not having an$**!#@j pr83
NO CARRIER
I was wondering... was the problems with their caches last night caused by all the threads that do the actual work being blocked waiting for things to time out??
One failure, occured on Oct 30, 2003, has existed for the last 3 weeks or so between Tuckerton (New Jersey) and Bude (UK). It takes out the "southern path" across the atlantic.
/.s since yesterday actually
http://davidw.home.cern.ch/davidw/public/SubCables .html
The new failure is between Bude (UK) and Katwijk (NL). For circuits that landed in London or France this (should have) taken out the redundant path for those circuits.
more info at
www.tat-14.com
http://www.kddiscs.co.jp/e/business/02_15.html
That was my first thought too. I must have been reading Slashdot too long - I read "ring shaped" and I imediately visualise a certain website beginning with goa and ending in tse.cx
At least there is cold water readily available for when you pick up the soldering iron by the wrong end.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Speaking as a Brit, this isn't flamebait, it's funny!
About the TAT-14 Cable Network
This transatlantic cable system is in full service, connecting the United States to the United Kingdom, France, The Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark.
The cable system is a dual, bi-directional ring configuration using DWDM multiplexing with 16 wavelengths of STM-64 per fiber pair. The system also utilizes reverse direction protection switching in the event of failure of the service fiber.
It has a dual route, transatlantic capacity of 640 Gbits on 2 service fiber pairs backed up by 2 protection fiber pairs. This configuration provides a capability of transporting 4,096 STM-1's or approximately 9,700,000 circuits across the ocean.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
It isn't like the US-side fault was just being ignored: "According to BT, the US-side fault should be fixed by the end of this week, which will bring the cable network online again." Given the logistics of repairing a fault, and without knowing when the US-side fault occurred, it is difficult at best to imply that the cable operators were somehow negligent in their actions.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I notice most of the Didn't-Read-The-Article crowd seem to be missing that this is an undersea cable. They're Not Easy to work with, and besides, this outage is a great excuse to point you to Neal Stephenson's great geeky essay
Mother Earth, Mother Board
I remember reading a book like this from one of Tom Clancy's junior authors. The whole story was about cartel's splicing into undersea fiber cables and moving the data elsewhere. I definitely have to check my library when I get home.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
If you're going to promise to correct others' grammar, use it correctly yourself. We Canucks are still here.
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
Funny, then, that you brits are infamous for your horrible teeth.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Thats a damn good point, didn't think of that! I assumed it would be a another problem with their dns servers (which are needed by the caches too) mucking things up. Oh well, it seems to be back up now which is all that matters! I always find it funny though that whenever stuffs not working with ntl you can almost always get nthellworld.co.uk up...just shows that lots of people on ntl think it sucks and visit that site to vent/find out whats wrong/find a solution ergo its almost always cached!
I am NaN
The USNS Zeus (ARC-7) is the Navy's cable laying and repair ship. The cable is laid mostly on the surface of the bottom, but at vulnerable points and at both ends (near shore) is its ploughed in to the mud/sand on the bottom. When a cut or fault occurs, the location of the fault is determined with a TDR or O-TDR, the same way it works with a land based cable. They know the cable length to the fault and have a survey map of where the cable was layed. It is physicaly located with side-scanning sonar and robotic submersibles, then hooked and brought on deck for repair (each end in case of a break). Once repairs are complete, the cable is unceremoniously shoved over the side, or re-ploughed depending on the location and mission of the cable.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
a) The article says it's a consortium
...
:-) seem to have had problems. I just set up squid on my colocated server at Level-3 and never noticed anything more. Is it still ongoing ?
b) There's more than one cable
The cable companies (well, NTL anyway
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Here's a map that I found which shows the "ring" of TAT-14...
TAT-14 Cable Route
Haha, check your facts...
Al Gore is not British.
Funny, then, that you brits are infamous for your horrible teeth.
Hey, 'you yanks' are infamous for being fat (I'd say overweight, but lets not beat round the bush), quick to anger, stupid (I'd say unintelligent, but again...), insensitive, vain and greedy, yet believe your country, with the highest rate of gun crime in the developed world, is somehow thoughtful and wise. Funny old world.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
...web traffic between the U.S. and Europe has been hit...
I guess that means no underage swedish lolitas for me today...*sigh*
Spread the RC luvin'
Besides, there is plenty of redundancy in the net. However if Europe were truly and completely cut off from civilization I'd imagine a "Lord of the Flies" scenario.
According to BT, the US-side fault should be fixed by the end of this week, which will bring the cable network online again.
/. post made it sound like they were ignoring the problem, when in fact they appear to be working on it. These things don't get fixed within hours, this cable is at the bottom of the ocean! Yeah, redundacy can fail but I don't think it is because of laziness of the telecoms or anything. They just got unlucky and had two failures close enough together where the first one couldn't be fixed in time to keep the network up.
The author of the
There's more than one cable system linking US with Europe, it just happens that several carriers (Above.Net being one) only have capacity through TAT-14.
Other carriers have working circuits on TAT-14 and another link (e.g. Apollo, Tyco, AC-1, Gemini) and may have some degraded service (depending on whether their transatlantic links are less than twice the size of their peak demand). FranceTelecom OpenTransit is an example of one of them.
Interestingly, not many EU ISPs use TAT-14 North route, since it has a propagation delay of around 110ms (which is 40ms or so more than TAT-14 South from the UK and more than most other transatlantic cables)
Most ISPs in Europe that I can see are fine. Certainly the big international transit ISPs (Sprint, L3, C&W, MCI et al) aren't showing any more trouble than normal.
At the risk of being accused of Karma whoring, This page and This wired article from the late 90s are are good summary and a great story about undersea cables, respectively, despite being a little out of date.
Yea it's Bushy, AssholeCroft and Rummy's fault! All of us here on slightdick should write protest emails, after all we've done such a good job stopping the RIAA, SCO and Microsoft.
"Vanessa Evans, of LINX, the London Internet Exchange, which carries nearly all UK Internet traffic and over half of Europe's Internet traffic, said she saw a drop in traffic of around two gigabits per second. At its peak, LINX sees 32 gigabits of data every second. She added that the Internet was not broken, as traffic was rerouted through other networks. " OH THANK GOD! I thought the internet was broken!
Please, Vanessa, tell me the sky isnt falling either.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
"wanker," personally. "Limey wanker" is a bit more specific. :)
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
goatse.cx was taken down by this!!!
Whats even more amazing is that they can get an accurate reading of a break in the fibre from thousands of miles away and know exactly where they need to pull it up.
Always wondered how they did this. You couldn't run a copper with it to get the resistance as that would go open circuit with a break.
Have they got some sort of clever trick where they time a reflection from a broken face of the fibre?
It's got me stumped.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Tracing route to slashdot.org [66.35.250.150]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.1
2 8 ms 8 ms 8 ms 172.25.47.254
3 8 ms 36 ms 10 ms glfd-t2cam1-b-ge93.inet.ntl.com [80.4.30.133]
4 36 ms 8 ms 8 ms gfd-t2core-b-ge-wan61.inet.ntl.com [62.254.207.165]
5 8 ms 7 ms 23 ms gfd-bb-b-so-300-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.185.29]
6 13 ms 9 ms 9 ms bcr1-so-2-0-0.Thamesside.cw.net [166.63.211.149]
7 163 ms 170 ms 150 ms dcr2-loopback.SantaClara.cw.net [208.172.146.100]
8 149 ms 180 ms 152 ms bhr1-pos-0-0.SantaClarasc8.cw.net [208.172.156.198]
9 149 ms 150 ms 149 ms csr1-ve243.SantaClarasc8.cw.net [66.35.194.50]
10 151 ms 171 ms 159 ms 66.35.212.174
11 * * * Request timed out.
Trace complete.
While there was a bit of a routing problem on Tuesday, we were doing fine without stateside connectivity.
;)
Contrary to popular belief, a section of "internet" severed from the states does not cease to function.
In fact it may even function better
Like "Channel shrouded by fog, Continent cut off."
No need to mod down IMHO, it is actually a very funny part of the Holy Grail:
...but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting... ...by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,... ...but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major-- ...her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur.
[singing stops]
That is why I am your king!
ARTHUR: How do you do, good lady? I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Who's castle is that?
WOMAN: King of the who?
ARTHUR: The Britons.
WOMAN: Who are the Britons?
ARTHUR: Well, we all are. We are all Britons, and I am your king.
WOMAN: I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.
DENNIS: You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship: a self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--
WOMAN: Oh, there you go bringing class into it again.
DENNIS: That's what it's all about. If only people would hear of--
ARTHUR: Please! Please, good people. I am in haste. Who lives in that castle?
WOMAN: No one lives there.
ARTHUR: Then who is your lord?
WOMAN: We don't have a lord.
ARTHUR: What?
DENNIS: I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week,...
ARTHUR: Yes.
DENNIS:
ARTHUR: Yes, I see.
DENNIS:
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS:
ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
WOMAN: Order, eh? Who does he think he is? Heh.
ARTHUR: I am your king!
WOMAN: Well, I didn't vote for you.
ARTHUR: You don't vote for kings.
WOMAN: Well, how did you become King, then?
ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake,... [angels sing]
DENNIS: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: Well, but you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: I mean, if I went 'round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!
ARTHUR: Shut up, will you? Shut up!
DENNIS: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
ARTHUR: Bloody peasant!
DENNIS: Oh, what a give-away. Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That's what I'm on about. Did you see him repressing me? You saw it, didn't you?
Blatantly offtopic, I know, but couldn't resist to share.
cheers
Whose fault were these faults? Were these faults the fault of the oceanic faults? I've heard some people say that these faults were the fault of faulty maintenance, but it seems to me that you can't fault them for the faults. Now perhaps that's a faulty assertion, but I really believe that the fault of the faults lies squarely upon the techtonic faults and not the fault of this supposedly faulty maintainers. I really doubt that the faults are their fault.
...this post was all my fault. :-(
I'm sorry.
"We've lost contact with [Britain]...
"Look, we don't know what's going on out there. It may just be a down [transatlantic cable]. But if it's not, I want you there...as an advisor. That's all.
"You wouldn't be going in with the [ISPs]. I can guarantee your safety..."
yep i'm also in the UK and i've been maxing out my bandwidth for the last couple of days, browsing US sites and so forth with absolutely no reduction in service. This story came as quite a surprise! So the system must be more redundant than we're giving it credit for. Or i should thank my ISP. Or we got lucky :)
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
I can hear it now:
"Hey boss, half of the cable just failed. We need to get on this right away".
The cable's still working, right?
"Yeah, but if something else goes wrong, we're screwed".
Look, that cable hasn't failed in ten years; let's put off repairing it until January. That way it won't affect our 2003 budget.
But these things generally happen in pairs, and with no back up - well, we're taking an awful risk. If something else fails, most of Europe - well, I don't have to tell you the consequences. Plus, remember..the weather in January -
cuts him off-- Not gonna happen! Put it on the schedule for mid January!
Hopefully that manager is no longer employed....but don't be surprised if he winds up at Clear Channel! He sounds like just their kind of guy!Hmm,
How much longer do you think it'll be until more servers are located outside the US than inside?
Europe does have a far larger population than North America, as does Asia.
I suspect in a few years time it would be the US that suffers more from being cut off, than the rest of the world.
That is, apart from the fact that they all speak foreign.
Here's a poem about undersea telegraph cables written by Kudyard Kipling way back in the 1800's.
The Deep-Sea Cables
by Rudyard Kipling
The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar --
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.
Here in the womb of the world -- here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat --
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth --
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.
They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time;
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!"
Are you in some way attempting to imply that America is the embodyment of civilisation?
Are you being ironic??
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Wireless. I hear it's quite popular.
-- No sig for you!
Yep,
But can you explain why the Aussies call us Poms ?
Can't think of any explanation.
Stupid bunch of convicts.
... with funny accents.
You're new here, aren't you? Management is cheap, not lazy. Redundancy means that when something breaks they save money by not fixing it, not that they can keep running while they do fix it.
They delays in repair may also be due to the bids they have out to fix it: A Greek sponge diver, the "Polynesian" pearl diver from an unnamed Florida amusement park and a crew from Bangalore with no diving experience or equipment, but a willingness to follow the diving script. There's also a chance that an unnamed "muff diver" may be employed as well, but executives are downplaying it as part of their don't ask, don't tell policy.
Management originally wanted the crew from "Ghost Ship" because the chick was hot, but when they found out it was only a movie they had to look elsewhere.
Keep in mind, too, that most connections from Asia to Europe go through America (much more reliable that connecting via India, the Middle East, etc.), so when a US - Europe cable goes down, Asia loses some connectivity to Europe as well.
My friend had a few high bandwidth transfers operating from the states last night (circa 150Mbps total)
He lost one and two others dropped to around 50Mbps for a few hours so there was a noticable drop, presumably while the major routers sorted themselves out.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
This massive Wired article from way back in '96 follows the FLAG cable project around the world an gives a complete history of undersea cables and the technologies used to make, lay and operate the cables.
As far as I'm aware the problem wasn't just limited to the UK but to the whole of Europe. One of our transit connection to the US using this Fiber, was disrupted. Following message we received from our transit provider:
We are currently experiencing a catastrophic failure on the fiber ring that is
affectively isolating Europe. We are researching the possibility of
alternative connectivity, and will update you as we get more information.
One more problem which was caused by this link outage is that our dns-servers (and those of multiple providers) where hit with a lot of dns lookups for lockdown.zonelabs.com (seems zonelabs firewall, queries that name). As the dns-server for that zone wasn't reachable anymore (no more traffic to the abovenet network in the US) the dns-servers had to do a query for each new lookup which caused a huge load. And effectively killing the customer dns servers, impacting traffic even more.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
It's like TDM, but for a fiberoptic line. Tells you within inches of where the break/fault is and can provide details such as what the nature of the problem is (air gap, short, loss of signal, etc).
Look up OTDR (some made by HP) for further info.
The engineer in charge of the project, in addition to having it rub against the shavings, also had some peculiar ideas about voltages.
It was the opinion of this man that the cable should carry the highest voltage possible; the higher the better. Thus it caused some serious problems on the lines.
Source: The History Channel - gotta love these guys.
I've found the whole notion of undersea cables fascinating ever since I read Neal Stephenson's Mother Earth Motherboard
Reminds me of how we went through all this trouble at [UNNAMED CORPORATION] of making sure to mirror the root disks for all 3000+ servers, but nobody setup alerts or notifications of a disk failure. So even though all the disks were mirrored if one drive failed, nobody knew. So we ended up running most our boxes off one drive until the other drive went out. So sure, mirroring delayed a major problem, but the major problem still existed.
We also had a similar problem with Fiber Storage. For all the servers they had run two seporate fiber runs to each box that needed to use the "SAN". Each server would have two fiber cards installed. This way if one network went out, it would just fall back to the other card. Well, of course, both cables were plugged into the same switch.. Smart. Yes, we did have a fiber switch go out once.
Prisoners of Mother England
Least that was the explanation I was given
Reminds me of the Brit newspaper headline - Storm Stops Ferries, Continent Cut Off!
I stole this
Have you considered the irony of posting such a comment in a web based discussion forum,
Ahem.....some of us are using gopher.slashdot.org
And even a few old-timers use ftp.slashdot.org for their fix.
If you have a low account numbber under 1000 - you can still use slashdot's 1-800 dial-up number with your 300 baud modem. Besure to set your parity to 7 and not 8.
TTY service to Slashdot has been down for the last year though...
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
HAND
They blamed a lack of an accurate forecast for this unscheduled distruption.
Here are some aerial photos and maps of the US landing
sites for TAT-14 (and other cables) courtesy of Cryptome's Eyeball series.
Uhh....SATELLITES?
Windows XP Home editions System Restore!
"System Restore actively monitors system changes to record or store previous versions before the changes occurred. With System Restore, you never have to think about taking system snapshots as it automatically creates easily identifiable restore points, which allow you to restore the system to a previous point in time." Like before the break!
See? Bill Gates could have prevented it!
From the essay:
Q: Why bother running two widely separated routes over the Malay Peninsula?
A: Because Thailand, like everywhere else in the world, is full of idiots with backhoes.
Q: Isn't that a pain in the ass?
A: You have no idea.
Q: Why not just go south around Singapore and keep the cable in the water, then?
A: Because Singapore is controlled by the enemy.
Q: Who is the enemy?
A: FLAG's enemies are legion.
- - - -
Intriguing, huh?
"Knowing's half the battle."
...the second largest baby boom in history happens. Better get it back up quick before people realize there's more to life than the Internet.
We still owe you for that.
Of course, this whole thing started with insults based on *old* stereotypes, so maybe we should just say that the United States of America will never be an industrial, military, or sea power! :)
Hell, there are no rules here. We're trying to accomplish something. - Thomas Edison
"undersea cable severed in the UK"
Rest of the World cut off.
-he who laughs last, is a bit slow.
journal
NTL Proxys?
I've NEVER had one, except for about 2 days. I wrote a small script to run TRACE requests against the fucker, I seem to recall you could insert about 4k of garbage before the X-Forwarded-For header. But I heard they removed them all anyway?
NTL DNS servers suck also, and the newsgroups and the TV service... Shit why am I still with these jokers?
I'll never forgive CowboyNeil for not repairing the RTTY gateway feed!
Waiter! Sense of humour for user 577120!
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Open Letter to Sprint and anyone else owning a major chunk of Internet backbone:
Dear sirs,
Your continued demonstrable lack of understanding of technology, or indeed of the financial consequences of that lack of understanding, are irritating both your customers and your shareholders.
I will gladly advise you on the correct procedure for operating a network reliably, with optimal performance. I can guarantee superior network performance at a reduced net cost. It is very clear your current technical advisors can do neither.
If you do not correct the defects in your network in a reasonable time, I shall have no choice but to proceed on determining the viability of, and obtaining captial for, a rival backbone that will be superior in performance and cheaper to maintain than your own.
In an age where the Internet is de-facto critical infrastructure, but where companies are negligent to such an extreme that even systems with built-in redundancy can catastrophically fail, there can only be two possible solutions. Either existing providers must correct their solutions - this would be the preferred option - or someone must build a system that meets the current requirements of reliability and performance.
It has been eight years since the last major blackout on the transatlantic line - eight years in which to fix existing problems and develop adequate procedures for such contingencies. Eight years in which you have demonstrably done nothing different to avoid such a crisis.
Change by choice, or change by market forces. The rest of civilization is growing weary.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
good things never last...
The problem happened yesterday; my home connection was very flaky for several hours in the afternoon/ eary evening at least.
u s- display.pl?site=PIPEX§ion=Network
Specifically, the DNS servers, failed to cope well with the loss of major traffic to the net, and name resolution failed a lot.
Eventually pipex managed to route more traffic via different backbones, and got everything back online.
Since about 8pm yesterday, I've been running as normal.
http://www.connection.pipex.net/cgi-bin/nsus/ns
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
When are you idiots going to get it? Canada is the shiznit. We're what a utopian society should be modelled after.
get to goatse.cx? Is there an equivalent british site, like goatse.uk? Now THAT would be redudnacy worth talkin' 'bout
Interesting!
Play with numbers:
Sprints info on TAT-14
As stated, the TAT-14 is 16 pairs of STM-64 fiber. With a help from google, the average cost was $6000/km per cable.
6000 * 16 = $960,000/km For All 16 pairs.
The total length of the cable is around 15,000km long.
$960,000 * 15,000 = $1,440,000,000
The cost of a transatlantic link cost almost 1 and a half billion dollars that is capable of 640Gbits throughput!
Every Super Villan uses Linux.
What, they don't call it GBOL over there? And you feel OK using this "American" service? Where's your sense of patriotism?
It's: "Fog in the channel, Europe Cut Off"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Absolutely not.
It's probably not pidgin English either.
Play by your own rules.
Prisoner Of Her Majesty (POHM)
Actually, it's more along the lines of:
"Hey, I hear Ford Explorers used to roll over a lot."
"That's okay. Most people drive a Toyota Camry."
Now stop being such a goddamned retard.
Well, I thought it was funny. Pity you didn't log in so I could "friend" you. But then since thinking this post is funny seems unpopular, I haven't logged in either...
Really?
I don't get it.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I am a telewest customer in birmingham and i've been having network outages all week.
Wednesday 19th telewest birmimgham down for several hours
Friday 21th Partial lost of internet, specifically I lost connection to rackspace UK. After a long chat with telewest, one of their routers / servers had stuffed up. telewest customers could not see a few UK hosting companies.
Weekend 22-24. Telewests DNS's were not being refreshed as qucikly as normally. A DNS switch usually takes less than 12hrs to take affect at telewest, it took 3 days before the sites I was moving could be seen from telewest broadband.
Sunday 23-today
Telewest (blueyonder.co.uk) mail servers are either not accepting connections, or when then do they take a long time to process mail.
Tuesday
Large, but not complete loss of the internet, most sites unreachable.
Not what you need when transferring email and websites over to nice new shiny rackspace boxs. Arrrggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
I don't understand why this is making news.
Cable faults happen all the time. I used to work for an unnamed cable station that had 4 seperate cable faults in a period of about a year. Yes most of these networks have redundancy to varying degrees but faults are actually quite common place.
Thats nice, but it doesn't work now does it? The POHMs would be the ones in Australia, not those of us back in Blighty.
Screw the usual conspiracy theory jokes. How about, "we'll have your service up once we send the ship out." I can't imagine anything that says "wait a long time" more.
This is my sig.
No Intarnet for yu0!!!
YUO FAEL 1T!!11ONE!
muh...
Wasn't there an article a while back about how the US had made or modified a sub to tap into this? Perhaps they were trying it again and in the rush to get home for Thanksgiving- OOPS!
The thing is that he tended to run the projects himself, including getting funding. The strain was immense, solving technical issues, managing the projects as well as the finance.
Wondering if anyone else experienced very poor DNS service last night? I had to put a bunch of my favourite sites into my hosts file, because their DNS was screwed. The only thing i could get it to resolve was google, and that was at a push. It was fine when I woke up this morning.
Just wondering if this might have been related?
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
if we cut france out of the loop? maybe it'll give us enough slack to fix the breaks...
please..
cut france outta the loop.
Yes, we feel terrible here in England that everyone on the continent and the US have been isolated and now have a crippled connection to the internet.
So....there was just one ring to screw them all?
You know what?
Don't even get me started on GWB. Though I am pleased to see most Americans agree with me on that one. Shame Blair doesn't. Prick.
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
Nope, the page says 4 pairs of fibre delivering 16 wavelengths each.
Ofcourse $1,440,000,000 / 4 = $360,000,000 is still heck of a lot of money.
/. ed the last of their cable capacity :-)
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
one can critize slashdot for all the fluff that is modded up and it is valid too.. but comments like the parent make reading it worthwhile.
This comment would probably be the funniest I have read today(Comment)
I like Brunel but was able to catch only part of his program on the BBC. I did, however vote for him. The above post provided me information I might have never have chaned across..
I thought the term 'Limey' was related to the drink 'Lager 'n Lime', and had either one or both connotations:
1. Since it is a uniquely English drink combination, it served to identify an Englishman to any non-English in the crowd. It might have originally been a result of trying to prevent scurvy; however, it still survived - at least into the 1980s - in every pub I have been to, in the Midlands (Cambridge and points North).
2. Since mostly women drink it, it serves to put down said Englishman as a 'girly-man', basically a term of derision. You were careful not to mention this. However, I witnessed male bashing of gentlemen who prefered 'Baby-Shams' and 'Lager and Lime' to the stouter ales and bitters - so there is something to be said for the sensitivity of this issue.
I think these are more closer to the truth of the meaning of 'Limey' - from the perspective of the occidental. That being said, in an effort to foster better relations with our English friends, while living in England I came to the conclusion that people everywhere are generally the same - the terminology is just different (loo vs. restroom, bar vs. pub, wanker vs. bloody wanker etc...)
(I was part of the peaceful American occupation of Great Britain during the Cold War in the 1980s - thus having several years of practical experience with this subject - and English pubs in general)
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
You are attempting to denote possession when you mention "Alan Cox' Welsh weblog".
However, the apostrophe comes after the 's' only if you are referring to a plural noun.
You can safely reference it as "Alan Cox's Welsh weblog"
When I took a "Special Topics in Computer Networking" class from Evi Nemeth, she told us some stories from the early wiring at CU Boulder. Here's Evi's tip for how to lay out a SONET ring:
1: Don't squish the ring into a line, even though it's cheaper to dig one trench than two.
2: Dig a trench, then put a conduit (with your fiber) in the bottom. Lay down a foot of dirt, then a bright orange plastic sheet that says "FIBER OPTIC CABLE: STOP DIGGING"
3: Lay down some more dirt, then another layer of this plastic
Instead, what CU did was:
1: Cut trenching costs by laying both East and West sides of the ring in a single trench.
2: Lay the two conduits side-by-side, then drape bright orange plastic on top of the pipes, then add dirt.
At this point, she said they might as well label the plastic as "STOP DIGGING, YOU'VE ALREADY TAKEN DOWN THE ENTIRE NETWORK"
Which, of course, they eventually did.
Funny thing is, the backhoe operator had the good sense to stop his work and contact Campus Networking. When the network tech came over, he picked up the fiber and looked at it to see if it was live. Now there's a guy with a black dot in one retina -- the tech, not the backhoe operator.
--
I was lucky enough to have a tour of and dinner on the SS Great Britain, which was also built by Brunel. It's even older than the Great Eastern, being launched in 1843. It was the FIRST ship to have a screw propeller. While only a fraction of the size of the Great Eastern at 3,443 tons, it is still a HUGE thing to see...and an engineering marvel. Truly the "space program" of its day.
It's presently a tourist attraction in Bristol, England.
http://www.ss-great-britain.com/
>The cable system is a dual, bi-directional ring configuration using DWDM multiplexing..
Those DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexors) are also neat tech.
Imagine one pice of fiber coming into a block of metal the size of a small cell phone. The fiber ends in a collimator which "aims" the beam into a filter.
Now these filters are the magic. They are made on circular pieces of clear material in a vacuum chamber. They have a process which puts a film onto both sides. Very tough to do it properly becuase how it goes on depends on how it performs. And dont get me started on how these things are cut into tiny small rectanlges.. The glass is under so much pressure that is looks like a pringle chip. Cutting it can lead to disaster...
Well each filter is done in a certain way to make it filter the light differently. The first filter basically chops the laser into a really wide band. Well this now refined light goes into another filter which has a certain ability to reflect some frequencies of light, and allow the one u want to go right through with real nice looking shape.
Imagine these are put at an angle inside the block... so the light bounces off filters... and some goes through right into other collimators! which have fiber attached.
Doing this passively is a real plus. They work in pairs so u know.
Imagine the light bouncing off the filters. Everything is angled correctly and hand made to "catch the light in each collimator"
----== [] [] ==-out-
-in-== [] [] ==---
anyway, Corning made real nice ones. I should know, i made some. We sold them to at&t, MCI, lucent, etc...
Then the bubble burst, they laid off everyone basically, the high tech testing equipment was taken back from ppl it was leased from, and u know the rest.
Don't know what you're referring to about President Bush. He won the election according to the Constitution (and all the newspaper recounts as well), and he was dealt a pretty shitty hand with the terrorist attacks on 9/11.
Hell, there are no rules here. We're trying to accomplish something. - Thomas Edison
I thought they made up for that when they bombed the Baldwins.
Yes, but generally this only happens when the people runnings things don't replace their backup/redundant thingie when the primary fails. Once you're down to only one link (or ideally, before then) you're supposed to replace all the broken stuff. duh.
Your argument is like saying, "Someone with a spare tire was stranded on the side of the road after losing one of his regular tires and his spare. Just shows how systems with build-in redundancy can still go badly wrong...."
duh. We knew that already. And when these things happen, it's almost always because of lack of maintenance on the part of the person running the show. Like in the car example, it's likely the person didn't have air in the spare.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
If this "Just shows how systems with build-in redundancy can still go badly wrong....", what did the Titanic 'just show'? Was it not this same thing???? [It would be the same error too - multiple water-tight chambers being opened to water still cause the whole thing to stop working]
Video Production Support
oh believe me we *do* celebrate the 4th july.
Ticket nr TT0002347
Read it and weep: http://www.forbes.com/home_europe/2003/11/10/cx_da _1110topnews.html
Michael Loves Me!
Excuse me do you actually believe that Al Gore invented the internet...? I mean to believe that you have to be what.... AMERICAN oh my not only are they xenophobes there now delusional.
Oh and PS Turin built the first computer, oh and also the brits invented radar, if i remember correctly you spent $5 million on trying to figure out a part we brits made while we slept. if i remember correctly we gave it to you.
g.turfrey@ntlworld.com
Also interesting is that the beach where TAT-14 comes ashore has been closed to the public for as long as I can remember, but I noticed on Friday that it's now open. It sure makes the area nicer to use for the public, but it's also something worth protecting from "Them".
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)