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Rats 'Cripple' NZ Web Access
An anonymous reader writes "Drat! It was the rat! Telephone, mobile and Internet access in New Zealand was disrupted over four hours after rats were found gnawing through cables. More than 100,000 customers were affected and even the country's stock exchange came to a standstill. Powerless to take action against the rats, Telecom New Zealand is seeking compensation from the electricity company it says is responsible for knocking out another pipeline which eliminated backup services. Nothing like a backup plan."
I work for their competitor. Most people in operations here had nothing but sympathy - that kind of coincidence is nothing short of one in a million.
And it just goes to show: Murphy rules, stuff breaks. At least in this country most people are willing to accept that...
-- Your mother uses Emacs.
"and Kiore rats were introduced by Maori settlers"
:)
They are also fat and delicious.
Mainly fruiti-vores, they are less interested in eating eggs etc than the black or brown rat.
Very mild mannered creatures. Typically enormously fat and slow moving.
They should be farmed not eradicated
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
One in a million? So telecom says. But you're talking about a loop going around the whole North Island. That's a lot of cable. At any point in the loop it is subject to being dug up, eaten by rats, or affected by an equipment malfunction. The odds of any of those are, what?, once every 30 days. You probably never notice any single outage because of the redundancy. But the odds of a dual failure, hence are 1/30days*1/30=1/900days=1/2.4 years. Hardly one in a million. For it to be that there would be a fault only once every thousand days. And that is not the telecom I know and, well, have to use.
--
Working to provide reliable VPS hosting
Years ago, my parents called me because the power to half of their house went dead.
I checked the breaker and it was fine, and power was also leaving it.
So I started tracing the wiring from the Garage back the the Main circuit Panel on the other side of the house.
Up into the attic I went, still finding no power in the 08 gauge feeder cable, until I got to the outside wall just above the mains panel.
At this point I was truly surprised, because somewhere inside that 36 inches of wall, there just had to be a break in the wire!
The next part was really FUN , since I had to use a sledge hammer to break open the stucco wall, outside and above the mains panel to see what was going wrong.
When I discovered the cause, I was totally shocked, a rat had chewed through the hot 08 gauge wire of the 3 wire cable!
I could see the teeth marks on the wire, and tiny copper chips laying below it on the fire block in the wall.
The rat didn't get electrocuted because it never touched the other conductors, which would have killed it instantly.
It's almost too weird for words, but I saved a 12 inch piece of cable where the break was to show to my clients (electrical contractor).
What a troll. Please mod the parent post a troll.
The ISPs Telecom and TelstraClear previously peered with all had their Auckland-Wellington routes on either Telecom or TelstraClear. No other ISPs, as far as I know, have their own cable linking Wellington and Auckland. So Even if Telecom was peered with other ISPs they would still have overloaded so much traffic onto TelstraClear's network that it would probally slow to a crawl. Therefore peering wouldn't be a great idea in this situation. Although I do agree that they should kept their peering agreement with the Auckland and Wellington peering exchanges.
-James
When Europeans arrived in New Zealand, they discovered that Maori were cannibals. They would carry out raiding parties on eachother's tribes and the captured were either enslaved or eaten.
So, I guess you could say that the Maori obviously found eachother to be fat and delicious, in addition to the rat.
(Another peculiar delicacy of the Maori people was (and still is) the droppings of a native bird. The bird droppings are sweet because it feeds off berries. You have to ask yourself: just how did they know to eat only those specific droppings? What other droppings did they try? And why, Oh God, did they try them in the first place???)