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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."
Binary independent redundancy is often not enough these days. Like this incident shows, a single backup system is not enough. You need at least four systems to have a somewhat reliable system.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
The real story is that the RIAA paid these rats to take down the lines, and if they have to take out some phone services to cut down on piracy, then so be it. Those sneaky sunsabitches, I'm watchin you RIAA/MPAA.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
And that's nothing like a backup plan...
Plans? We don't need no stinking plans!
This must hit a special nerve with New Zealanders, who are trying to eradicate rats wherever possible. There are three types of wild rats in New Zealand, and none of them really belong there: black rats were introduced in the 1860's, brown rats were introduced on Captain Cook's ship in 1760's, and Kiore rats were introduced by Maori settlers in the 960's (plus or minus).
Of course they're suing the power company. Lawyers won't sue the rats because of professional courtesy.
who ratted the out?
Yeah, blame the rats and the electric company for everyting. While you're at it, find the two-legged rats who couldn't bother to put in a redundant backup plan.
Telecom New Zealand is seeking compensation from the electricity company it says is responsible for knocking out another pipeline which eliminated backup services.
Surely the electricity company put clauses in the contract excluding them from liability for failures and damages caused by things outside of their control? I take it for granted that every big company offering services of any kind have clauses for those cases.
This happened on Monday. Today is Friday.
:)
It was a quiet day at work though
A good example why a monopoly is vulnerable, I was @ work during the outage, & so didnt really notice so much, but I hear it was very disruptive.
What are the odds of rats chewing through a main trunk cable on the same day a local power company cutting a second main trunk?
Go Away! Not for Sale
Thank god the sheep didn't rise up against their internet access or they'd have been in real trouble.
But the rodents will go unpunished
What?? How can they let them go unpunished? They need to at least go out and punish a few in a highly public manner to send the rest a message, kind of like when there is a shark attack and they go hunting for "the" shark that did it.... We can't let the rats get away with this!!
So Telecom is seeking compenstaion for fixing this. Fair enough you might say? The irony here is that Telecom has publicly stated they will not be paying *other* businesses for their losses due to the network going down.
To put this in perspective, much of the countrys EFTPOS system went down. Much of the countrys mobile network went down. Much of the countrys DSL network went down. That means, NO electronic sales transactions, NO websites, NO email, NO mobile calls. LOTS of lost productivity and sales here.
Even the friggin stock exchange went down - the 2nd time in a few weeks due to a Telecom fault! No wonder they don't want to compensate people - even Telecom doesn't have enough money for this.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
A dingo ate their cable.
Any other Puerto Rico players in the house thinking "man, and I thought having my 3 tobacco eaten by rats was bad, but internet, oh yeah".
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.
Indeed, there are economic repercussions from extra redundancy. That's where the free market steps it. It will result in redundancy equilibrium: the amount of redundancy the marketplace is willing to financially bare. In this case, there is a possibility that their two lines were not enough, and the redundancy equilibrium may now shift to three lines as a result of this systemic failure.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/NL/FC31E734EFD D0739CC2570290016D8F1
Telecom is an American owned company.
The local loop they use to fleece NZ residents who use their sub-standard "broadband" (Telecom once tried to market 128k plans as broadband..) is in fact publically owned. As the NZ Commerce Commision has no balls Telecom remains in control of this and thus continue to be a greedy monopoly.
The above article should remove any doubt of this.
to the rats.
Actually, I love lawyers. They taste like chicken.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
being the absolute best at finding cables, beating any other method by at least 2 orders of magnitude.
Like the most recent joke says "when lost, bury a short piece of cat5, then ask the backhoe operator the way home".
He will come and find the cat5, it would be a violation of Murphy's Law to do otherwise.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I run all of my data over cat5 cables, and I can rely on them ALWAYS to keep the rats away.
I *knew* we shouldn't have used Room 101 for the server room!
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I lost a day's work, but they still charged me for my DSL even though I couldn't use it - you figure out who's being ripped off here!
Damn... tapping into the farmer's electricity wasn't enough. Now those smart bastards want high-speed internet access.
Ben, the two of us need look no more
We both found what we were looking for
With a friend to call my own
I'll never be alone
And you my friend will see
You've got a friend in me
(You've got a friend in me)
Ben, you're always running here and there
(Here and there)
You feel you're not wanted anywhere
(Anywhere)
If you ever look behind
And don't like what you find
There's something you should know
You've got a place to go
(You've got a place to go)
I used to say, "I" and "me"
Now it's "us", now it's "we"
(I used to say, "I" and "me")
(Now it's "us", now it's "we")
Ben, most people would turn you away
I don't listen to a word they say
They don't see you as I do
I wish they would try to
I'm sure they'd think again
If they had a friend like Ben
(A friend)
Like Ben
(Like Ben)
Like Ben
The Internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack, but as implemented by the greedy idiots in control of Telecom and TelstraClear, the internet in New Zealand can't even withstand an assault by frickin rat and some clown with a power tool.
Its really embarrassing, and sad, that these corporations' policies effectively deny the public in New Zealand a robust network infrastructure - Telecom and TelstraClear purposely depeered from various internet exchanges through which they could have easily redirected traffic during this outage, rendering it a non-event, because they can't stand the idea that people might run VOIP systems, cutting into their monopoly profits.
Its just really pathetic that their action has resulted in the biggest network outage
that I can remember, and instead of realising they probably should work with other network providers to ensure the internet in New Zealand is resistant to this type of 'attack' they just want to blame the power company.
Telecom, you suck.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Fibre optic cables are relatively expensive, say $60k/km rural & rising to up to >$1m/km downtown, so beyond two diverse cables is usually justifiable only where the traffic is very large (hint- not NZ), or where geography favours it (think a mesh of cities).
The availability with two cables can be 5 9s. Overall availability depends on how risk there is (most likely risk - construction near the cable e.g. new housing estates), and how fast the operations is fixing faults. Fixing a fault may take 3 - 12 hours, and it is when Field Ops gets a bit slack in fixing things that the risk rises dramatically. Theoretically this is very rare, but these double faults do happen (think Optus Melbourne - Sydney about 5 years ago - and periodically others).
As for compensation. In general those who constructed other facilities have a responsibility to check for the presence of others external plant (gas, elec, fibre optic) - In OZ: Dial before you dig. If you don't do this, then you are liable - and be sued for at a minimum costs. If you have, and the records are off, then you are probably OK. So, in this case it may be that the electricity company or their contractor did not check for other services (or most likely checked, but stuffed up anyway!).
"They are also fat and delicious." The Maori people, or the rats?
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).
bloody cabling is so crappy here i cant get dsl :)
serves em right
go rats- umm thats the furry ones i mean not the 2 legged ones
It was French rats, with scuba gear.
What all the published articles fail to mention is that there is a third fibre running from one end of the country to the other. It is owned by Telstra, the competition. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that Telstra and Telecom have such a level of psychotic hatred for one another, that they cannot talk to each other except in a Court room. Thus the very idea of setting up the routers so that all three of the fibres are shared is such an anathema that it just won't happen without Government regulation and intervention. Needless to say the Government is essentially a bunch of ignorent wimps who can no more understand the technicalities of the situation than fly. So it won't happen and we will have to suffer the consequencies of serious telecom infrastructure failure from time to time.
It's time for the little peoples of the world to take back ownership of their infrastructures by whatever means necessary. Fighting talk may be, but many of us in the rest of the world are sick of being fleeced by the avaricious in the powerful countries. Oh shit! - I forgot - big countries make up excuses to invade little ones so they can steal their natural resources.
There seems to be something about the New Zealand psyche that just doesn't understand the concept of separate routing and protection of cables.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com