Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

East Coast Internet Outage

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 265 posts

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#201

Post by bombcar »

jzer0cool wrote: post #135

When houses are created there are building codes to adhere to. For example, when there is a water pipe behind the walls a plumber (a good one) would also put a plate in front of it. In this way, once the walls are in place, drilling away into the wall, or nailing, would hit the metal plate, thus provides some safety mechanism. As another example, underground, in public areas are markings (or at least procedures) to i…

Old Joke: How do you get rescued from a desert island if all you have is some networking gear?

Simple! Bury a network cable and wait for the backhoe to show up.

Backhoes are VERY strong and will easily go through gas pipe let alone anything that might protect fiber. And if the fiber is not where the plans say it is, even calling 811 won't save you.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#202

Post by betterunix2 »

overkill28 wrote: post #194
neogodless wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm also not qualified to diagnose the problem, I would imagine it's something like this... The major internet connections are like superhighways, with major central routers acting like exchanges. If a major superhighway had an accident blocking traffic, there would be personnel stationed at exchanges to help re-route the traffic, though that often occurs too late to prevent a bunch of backups. At any rate, peo…

The odd thing about this situation though is the geographic location of Brooklyn: on an island. Why would a significant amount of traffic from outside Long Island be going across the harbor to Brooklyn, especially given all the major switching facilities in Manhattan (closer to shore).

What makes you think it is only connected to Manhattan? Long Island has submarine cables connected to New England, various points along the East Coast south of NYC, and several transatlantic cables.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#203

Post by midasuni »

FlyMoreRockets wrote: post #164
kridsdale1 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not take the simpler interpretation that millions of dollars of equipment was in the buildings that were destroyed, and it took a while for the network's self-healing algorithms to discover a new steady-state configuration that approximated the performance of what was suddenly lost?

Occam's razor: when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor Why is it that conspiracy theories seem to always require a more complex answer than the truth?

Conspiracy theories are more fun to read.

One thing they always fall down is the idea that government bureaucracy is so quick and competent that they could do something like installing mass surveillance at a moments notice while the country is in chaos without it leaking due the next 20 years

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#204

Post by Paul-ish »

rayiner wrote: post #171
lotsofpulp wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s awesome! How much is that, if you don’t mind sharing? I wish they had it in more places.

It’s expensive, $300/month. I try to justify it to myself by noting it’s on their business Metro-E network so it’s completely reliable and has amazing support. Also an entire /48 of static IPv6. It was $150/month for the first two years, which was much more palatable. Their model is expensive because they don’t wire while neighborhoods. For me they had to run fiber a quarter mile, down my street, and trench under my…

Did they charge you upfront for the installation?

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#205

Post by [deleted] »

gen220 wrote: post #36
dx87 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using different DNS servers? My work laptop was using 8.8.8.8 and is getting name resolution errors, but my personal computer is using 1.1.1.1 and working fine.

Interestingly enough, they’re both deferring DNS to our router, and the router is configured to use DNS servers dynamically provided by the ISP.

[deleted]

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#206

Post by jrochkind1 »

pbronez wrote: post #176
centimeter wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TCP doesn't know anything about route failure or rerouting. All it does is handle a few dropped or reordered packets here and there. In principle, you can have systems that very quickly route around damage like this, but in practice it happens so rarely that it's not worth it for consumer ISPs. I think it should exist, but the ISP space is so burdened with red tape that the only way anyone could compete with it was l…

Starting an ISP isn't all THAT hard. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/jared...

Wow, great story I hadn't heard!

> Mauch has been charging $65 a month for symmetrical 50Mbps service, $75 for 250Mbps, and $99 for 500Mbps,

That's less than Comcast consumer rates in Baltimore.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#207

Post by steve_adams_86 »

bombcar wrote: post #201
jzer0cool wrote: post #135

When houses are created there are building codes to adhere to. For example, when there is a water pipe behind the walls a plumber (a good one) would also put a plate in front of it. In this way, once the walls are in place, drilling away into the wall, or nailing, would hit the metal plate, thus provides some safety mechanism. As another example, underground, in public areas are markings (or at least procedures) to i…

Old Joke: How do you get rescued from a desert island if all you have is some networking gear? Simple! Bury a network cable and wait for the backhoe to show up. Backhoes are VERY strong and will easily go through gas pipe let alone anything that might protect fiber. And if the fiber is not where the plans say it is, even calling 811 won't save you.

Even worse is that (here in Canada at least) we have infrastructure surveyed, its GPS coords recorded, then manually entered into CAD (or similar) drawings using a lot of guess work. Things like metal detectors are used to more or less guess that a detected object is in fact a gas line or something, GPS location is recorded, then someone plays connect the dots in CAD. It's unreal. So many opportunities to introduce error, and the initial locating of the underground object could easily be incorrect.

I know newer infrastructure is more diligently recorded, but there is a TON of old crap in the ground ready to be ripped up.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#208

Post by ASalazarMX »

midasuni wrote: post #203
FlyMoreRockets wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occam's razor: when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor Why is it that conspiracy theories seem to always require a more complex answer than the truth?

Conspiracy theories are more fun to read. One thing they always fall down is the idea that government bureaucracy is so quick and competent that they could do something like installing mass surveillance at a moments notice while the country is in chaos without it leaking due the next 20 years

> installing mass surveillance

It didn't have to be installed, it was already, although in a pre-Snowden era, governments doing Internet surveillance was the conspiracy theory. My speculation is that more international traffic got routed through the existing surveillance infrastructure, causing a bottleneck that slowly got better.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#209

Post by rayiner »

Paul-ish wrote: post #204
rayiner wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s expensive, $300/month. I try to justify it to myself by noting it’s on their business Metro-E network so it’s completely reliable and has amazing support. Also an entire /48 of static IPv6. It was $150/month for the first two years, which was much more palatable. Their model is expensive because they don’t wire while neighborhoods. For me they had to run fiber a quarter mile, down my street, and trench under my…

Did they charge you upfront for the installation?

There was a $500 installation fee.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#210

Post by gknoy »

valbaca wrote: post #142
jzer0cool wrote: post #135

When houses are created there are building codes to adhere to. For example, when there is a water pipe behind the walls a plumber (a good one) would also put a plate in front of it. In this way, once the walls are in place, drilling away into the wall, or nailing, would hit the metal plate, thus provides some safety mechanism. As another example, underground, in public areas are markings (or at least procedures) to i…

Scale: wrapping all fiber optic cables in a protective metal sheath would be cost prohibitive. Whereas adding a metal sheet to prevent a house from flooding or someone from getting electrocuted makes sense. One idea, borrowed from some chainsaw safety pants, would be to wrap the cable in a fiber web sheath that tangles in whatever cutting equipment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5VSivQe760

TIL that Aramid fibers are not just something made up in bideo games. (: Thanks for sharing that.
Post reply on HN