You know the old1 joke about the office computer guru whose job it is to help all the poor fools who don't know how to work their computers, who gets a frantic call from someone who tells him "I think I crashed the internet"? Ha ha, we all laugh,2 because it's such a silly idea, that someone sitting in your office could "crash" the internet...
Well, guess what. Somebody sitting in an office somewhere crashed the internet.3 Evidently this happened the week before last, but we didn't notice. You may not even have noticed. But Some People noticed, and they raised enough of a stink that the people who crashed it got it fixed. And that's when our problems began.
In theory, the internet is called "the internet" because there is no one central place that all the data has to go through. It's a huge network4 of computers that are all interlinked5, so if one computer gets shut off for a while, the internet still goes on. If one whole country of computers gets shut off for a while, the internet should still go on.6 In reality, when you send an email to someone, or look at someone's webpage (like mine!), your desktop computer does not talk directly to that person's desktop computer-- your message gets "routed" through a bunch of other computers, beginning with one of your ISP's servers and ending with theirs. Sometimes your message can go through ten or twenty other computers before reaching its destination. Some people can go "off-roading" and make their messages take an uninterrupted (but usually slow) path directly from one to the other, but most of the time we all let our data hitch a ride on one of the data "superhighways" called a "backbone." Universities usually have their own superfast backbone, and so does Yahoo! and AOL and other major service providers.
Somehow, there need to be "off-ramps" to connect one superhighway to another. And "east-west" superhighways that connect one "north-south" highway to another one. And, evidently, about two weeks ago, the people that run a major chunk of the superhighways got mad at the people that run a different major chunk of the superhighways, and so they closed all the off-ramp and connector roads between them.
Not good. But, as I said, we didn't notice. A week later, they restored connectivity. Then we noticed. Because, when that happened, we suddenly began having trouble accessing our University of Michigan accounts-- email, web pages, blog, Chad's research. And it hasn't been fixed. Our data to and from UM was being routed through one of the two companies involved in the dispute. It also has to hop on a "round the world" data superhighway to get all the way across the ocean and back. The problem could be on any one of the five different backbones our data travels from here to UM-- or on the connections between them.7
The point is, the Michigan and the Sydney networks are both fine, so we can't complain as paying customers. And, we have total working access to pretty much anything else on the internet, except the one place we need-- Michigan. Sigh.
Sorry, no new blog photos this week, since the connection cuts out every five or ten minutes. D has chosen to spend that time working on inconsequential things like her thesis.
Seven weeks left!
;)
- D
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NOTES
1"Old" in the sense of "popular in 2002."
2At least, those of us whose relationship
with the internet exceeds AOL or Internet Explorer were laughing.
3Don't worry, it wasn't you. We think.
4Hence, "net."
5Hence, "inter."
6Unless that one country that gets shut
down is the US, which owns and operates a hugely disproportionate number
of the computers and servers that make up the internet... but in theory,
even if that happened, what's left of the internet should still
work.
7Okay, to be honest, we do have some clue
where the problem is. It is possible to "ask" your computer whether
your data is going between it and some specified other computer and how
it is getting there (and how long it takes). This is
called "pinging" or "tracerouting" (yes, techie-heads out there, I know
that there is a difference, but I'm not talking to you) and
Chad has spent a good deal of time analyzing the ping plotter charts.
And sending them to the companies involved. I mean, what else is he
going to do with his time? He can't get to the UM computers to work...
Back to the GAA page!