Correcting a comment by the OP, I'd note that Henry Spencer (formerly utzoo!henry) has good reason to believe that he was the (primary) model for the poster "Sandor at the Zoo." Not that I'm authoritative or anything, but I am inclined to agree, having read Henry's Usenet posts for many years...
What I found striking about this is that it wasn't
that long ago that a European report found that
the annual cost of spam was EU10B, or about $9.6B
in US dollars. In other words, according to two
very different sources spam is just as big a
problem as virii... When's the last time you saw
a major spam run reported on network TV?
A couple of posters have hit on one of the key points - redundancy has gotten quite hard for a small site to set up. Even back in 1996, it was next to impossible to get routable address space for a small company (e.g. a web commerce/content provider). The smallest allocation has been a/19 for a long time, and if you've got 10 web server systems it's pretty hard to justify that many addresses.
From the routing standpoint, the alternative is to advertise subnet blocks out a redundant connection. That is, you sign up for provider A and get a/24 block from them (for example). You then sign up for a backup connection from provider B and get them to announce the/24 block from provider A's space for you. This works, but it's considered unfriendly because it undoes route aggregation. Unfortunately, ARIN doesn't really provide any better solution for small sites.
At the next level, even if you get redundancy of ISPs, you may very well not have redundancy in your telco facilities. Fiber providers swap the actual fibers back and forth - I'll trade you a pair on my NY-Chicago route in exchange for one on your Chicago-Dallas - so even if you get your Provider A connection from Worlddomination and your Provider B connection from AT&CableTV, there's a measurable chance they're in the same bundle. Even if they aren't in the same bundle, they may well run through the same trench.
Thirdly, you don't know what providers A and B are doing for redundancy. Are they ordering all of their backbone circuits from diverse providers, and are they ensuring diverse physical routing of the fibers? On top of that, I recall reading on one occasion that telcos sometimes move circuits around, so you can order redundant circuits, have them installed correctly, and then have them moved on you later...
There's also been a lot of stuff flying around here about NAPs & MAEs. The MAEs and NAPs were quite important a few years ago, but since then the major providers have switched mostly to private peering arrangements, where their interconnect traffic doesn't go over the public peering points. Smaller providers still peer at those points, and some of them probably even peer with some of the big guys, but the major traffic goes via private DS3/OCx connections running off-NAP.
Lastly, vis-a-vis the redundancy of major backbone networks. It's been ages since I looked at them, but Boardwatch used to have maps of the various Tier 1/Tier 2 NSPs. Even back in 1997/1998, UUNET's US network looked like someone took a map of the US and scribbled all over it. They have a huge bloody lot of connections, and you can be they've got multiple redundancy out of virtually any city. (Disclaimer: never employed by UUNET or any related firm...) Yeah, I can see that some of the smallest national backbones (are there any left?) might only have 1 link into some cities, but even those guys set up fallback routing so that their traffic can get in and out.
Generally speaking, if your favorite site is not reachable, it's most likely something at the site's end of things. Second most likely is that it's at your end, if you're not using a major connectivity provider, or if you're using a DSL provider with known problems...
One of my projects, deferred for a couple of years, was something I called Interhist, the Internet Historical Preservation Society. I didn't have time to make it go back then, and never got enough interest from others, so we let the domain lapse... The 'what' of the project was to preserve ordinary documents (e-mail, Usenet postings & such) from ordinary people. The intended 'how' was to simply use live storage (i.e. hard disk) mirrored at a couple of locations, with a few standard forms for people to specify the terms on which we held their docs - i.e. don't release until I die, etc.
The 'why' is something I'd like to add to this thread. Specifically, I've read on a number of occasions of valuable historical finds that provide in detail a picture of ordinary life in a given historical era. Think Pompeii - what's always cited as so incredible is the slice of everyday Roman-era life that was preserved under the ash flow nearly intact. This led me to form the opinion that future historians would indeed find the records of ordinary people to be valuable, and therefore they are worth preserving now.
If anyone is interested in trying to help revive the interhist project, write me at scott@zorch.sf-bay.org (as soon as my home e-mail is fixed...:-( ).
Use whois (via geektools.com, which follows things through multiple registries) to get some contacts. Large ISPs most likely have postmaster@ and abuse@ routed into the front-line support organization. A typical structure is customer service (billing, signups, and so on), tech support (can't connect, what's my mailserver, and so on), NOC (basic service monitoring, fixing/reporting simple outages), then possibly a deeper net ops group (fixing BGP, things like that), a sysadmin group (running servers). Beyond those you get into engineering (building new infrastructure) and possibly development (custom coding). People beyond the NOC level are expensive enough that management doesn't want their time occupied by lower-level work, so they tend to be hidden. They are sometimes exposed in things like WHOIS entries, which is why that's a good route. Other than that, you need to be active in the communities where these folks hang out and just pay a lot of attention. For instance, the NANOG list is a good place to find network ops and engineering types. inet-access - if you can stand the volume - was another place I recall seeing a lot of ISP types. There are probably also some other (limited-access) fora with some of the "right" kind of people kicking around - if you're in the business, you'd probably want to find these anyway.
In early 2000, David Hughes' ISP (Fast Access Network, aka FAN [fan.net.au]) was acquired by Asia Online. David was part of that acquisition, and had various management duties at Asia Online that overlapped with the period that I was there. I left in November, myself. I'm guessing that David is restarting mSQL development in order to answer the "what do I do now?" question and that he is no longer with Asia Online, though I do not know that definitively.
Someone referred to an "antelope" on the website. That's most likely a buck deer, as David's long-standing nickname is "bambi".
Yeah, I wrote Janelle and asked about that. Her
reply was that it'd be good enough for the script
kiddies. This does strike me as an interesting
inconsistency, though, if we work through the various likely cases. For example, one implication is that what is stated is literally true, that the 'cracked' samples only sound better than 64k MP3s. What did the original material sound like? If it was (say) VBR with a minimum 128k encoding, the difference should be quite audible, and getting a 64k 'cracked' version may not be worth having. Anyhow, I find it curious.
Prior to Himalaya (ca. 1991) was Everest. More accurately, "Everest" (as in everest.tandem.com, which I set up) was the internal project name for the second set of MIPS-based Tandem systems. (The first set of MIPS-based systems was the Liberty project.) Memory of such ancient stuff fades, though...
Slashdot Mirror
Correcting a comment by the OP, I'd note that Henry Spencer (formerly utzoo!henry) has good reason to believe that he was the (primary) model for the poster "Sandor at the Zoo." Not that I'm authoritative or anything, but I am inclined to agree, having read Henry's Usenet posts for many years...
What I found striking about this is that it wasn't
that long ago that a European report found that
the annual cost of spam was EU10B, or about $9.6B
in US dollars. In other words, according to two
very different sources spam is just as big a
problem as virii... When's the last time you saw
a major spam run reported on network TV?
A couple of posters have hit on one of the key points - redundancy has gotten quite hard for a small site to set up. Even back in 1996, it was next to impossible to get routable address space for a small company (e.g. a web commerce/content provider). The smallest allocation has been a /19 for a long time, and if you've got 10 web server systems it's pretty hard to justify that many addresses.
/24 block from them (for example). You then sign up for a backup connection from provider B and get them to announce the /24 block from provider A's space for you. This works, but it's considered unfriendly because it undoes route aggregation. Unfortunately, ARIN doesn't really provide any better solution for small sites.
From the routing standpoint, the alternative is to advertise subnet blocks out a redundant connection. That is, you sign up for provider A and get a
At the next level, even if you get redundancy of ISPs, you may very well not have redundancy in your telco facilities. Fiber providers swap the actual fibers back and forth - I'll trade you a pair on my NY-Chicago route in exchange for one on your Chicago-Dallas - so even if you get your Provider A connection from Worlddomination and your Provider B connection from AT&CableTV, there's a measurable chance they're in the same bundle. Even if they aren't in the same bundle, they may well run through the same trench.
Thirdly, you don't know what providers A and B are doing for redundancy. Are they ordering all of their backbone circuits from diverse providers, and are they ensuring diverse physical routing of the fibers? On top of that, I recall reading on one occasion that telcos sometimes move circuits around, so you can order redundant circuits, have them installed correctly, and then have them moved on you later...
There's also been a lot of stuff flying around here about NAPs & MAEs. The MAEs and NAPs were quite important a few years ago, but since then the major providers have switched mostly to private peering arrangements, where their interconnect traffic doesn't go over the public peering points. Smaller providers still peer at those points, and some of them probably even peer with some of the big guys, but the major traffic goes via private DS3/OCx connections running off-NAP.
Lastly, vis-a-vis the redundancy of major backbone networks. It's been ages since I looked at them, but Boardwatch used to have maps of the various Tier 1/Tier 2 NSPs. Even back in 1997/1998, UUNET's US network looked like someone took a map of the US and scribbled all over it. They have a huge bloody lot of connections, and you can be they've got multiple redundancy out of virtually any city. (Disclaimer: never employed by UUNET or any related firm...) Yeah, I can see that some of the smallest national backbones (are there any left?) might only have 1 link into some cities, but even those guys set up fallback routing so that their traffic can get in and out.
Generally speaking, if your favorite site is not reachable, it's most likely something at the site's end of things. Second most likely is that it's at your end, if you're not using a major connectivity provider, or if you're using a DSL provider with known problems...
One of my projects, deferred for a couple of years, was something I called Interhist, the Internet Historical Preservation Society. I didn't have time to make it go back then, and never got enough interest from others, so we let the domain lapse... The 'what' of the project was to preserve ordinary documents (e-mail, Usenet postings & such) from ordinary people. The intended 'how' was to simply use live storage (i.e. hard disk) mirrored at a couple of locations, with a few standard forms for people to specify the terms on which we held their docs - i.e. don't release until I die, etc.
:-( ).
The 'why' is something I'd like to add to this thread. Specifically, I've read on a number of occasions of valuable historical finds that provide in detail a picture of ordinary life in a given historical era. Think Pompeii - what's always cited as so incredible is the slice of everyday Roman-era life that was preserved under the ash flow nearly intact. This led me to form the opinion that future historians would indeed find the records of ordinary people to be valuable, and therefore they are worth preserving now.
If anyone is interested in trying to help revive the interhist project, write me at scott@zorch.sf-bay.org (as soon as my home e-mail is fixed...
Use whois (via geektools.com, which follows things through multiple registries) to get some contacts. Large ISPs most likely have postmaster@ and abuse@ routed into the front-line support organization. A typical structure is customer service (billing, signups, and so on), tech support (can't connect, what's my mailserver, and so on), NOC (basic service monitoring, fixing/reporting simple outages), then possibly a deeper net ops group (fixing BGP, things like that), a sysadmin group (running servers). Beyond those you get into engineering (building new infrastructure) and possibly development (custom coding). People beyond the NOC level are expensive enough that management doesn't want their time occupied by lower-level work, so they tend to be hidden. They are sometimes exposed in things like WHOIS entries, which is why that's a good route. Other than that, you need to be active in the communities where these folks hang out and just pay a lot of attention. For instance, the NANOG list is a good place to find network ops and engineering types. inet-access - if you can stand the volume - was another place I recall seeing a lot of ISP types. There are probably also some other (limited-access) fora with some of the "right" kind of people kicking around - if you're in the business, you'd probably want to find these anyway.
In early 2000, David Hughes' ISP (Fast Access Network, aka FAN [fan.net.au]) was acquired by Asia Online. David was part of that acquisition, and had various management duties at Asia Online that overlapped with the period that I was there. I left in November, myself. I'm guessing that David is restarting mSQL development in order to answer the "what do I do now?" question and that he is no longer with Asia Online, though I do not know that definitively. Someone referred to an "antelope" on the website. That's most likely a buck deer, as David's long-standing nickname is "bambi".
Yeah, I wrote Janelle and asked about that. Her reply was that it'd be good enough for the script kiddies. This does strike me as an interesting inconsistency, though, if we work through the various likely cases. For example, one implication is that what is stated is literally true, that the 'cracked' samples only sound better than 64k MP3s. What did the original material sound like? If it was (say) VBR with a minimum 128k encoding, the difference should be quite audible, and getting a 64k 'cracked' version may not be worth having. Anyhow, I find it curious.
Prior to Himalaya (ca. 1991) was Everest. More accurately, "Everest" (as in everest.tandem.com, which I set up) was the internal project name for the second set of MIPS-based Tandem systems. (The first set of MIPS-based systems was the Liberty project.) Memory of such ancient stuff fades, though...