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The 500-mile email (2002)

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Re: The 500-mile email (2002)

#101

Post by lloydde »

chernevik wrote: post #80
anonfunction wrote: post #74

Since I've seen a few comments about units not having lightseconds so here are a few ways to add the missing unit if you don't have it. 1) Add this line under the lightyear definition in /usr/share/misc/units.lib (or wherever `man units` says the standard units library is under the FILES section) lightsecond lightyear / 365.25 / 24 / 60 / 60 2) If you're on a mac and use homebrew just `brew install gnu-units` and the…

I did #2, then: sudo mv units macunits sudo ln -s $(which gunits) units

or use brew install option --with-default-names and put your homebrew at the start of your path.

Re: The 500-mile email (2002)

#102

Post by smoyer »

anonfunction wrote: post #74

Since I've seen a few comments about units not having lightseconds so here are a few ways to add the missing unit if you don't have it. 1) Add this line under the lightyear definition in /usr/share/misc/units.lib (or wherever `man units` says the standard units library is under the FILES section) lightsecond lightyear / 365.25 / 24 / 60 / 60 2) If you're on a mac and use homebrew just `brew install gnu-units` and the…

That's the speed of light in a vacuum ... through fiber-optic cable the speed of light is about two-thirds that value.

Re: The 500-mile email (2002)

#103

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

danbruc wrote: post #60

Another email incident at Microsoft worth reading [1]. [1] http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2004/04/08/10962...

Ha. There is no explanation of why the mailing lists were named "Bedlam" though, and I doubt non-native readers know what it refers to. To quote Wikipedia [0]:

"Bedlam may refer to:

Bethlem Royal Hospital, London hospital first to specialise in the mentally ill and origin of the word "bedlam" describing chaos or madness"

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedlam

Re: The 500-mile email (2002)

#104

Post by soyuka »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #95
tedunangst wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ls /usr/bin

Unless `units` doesn't happen to be installed by default, which is the case at least for Arch Linux. Though it doesn't contain `units` either, here's a Wikipedia list of the standardized (IEEE 1003.1-2008) unix commands. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_commands

Debian same here.

Re: The 500-mile email (2002)

#105

Post by nashashmi »

nchelluri wrote: post #67
Aissen wrote: post #66

Damn statisticians. They do know their job quite well.

It was a seriously accurate bug report. If only all users were so thoughtful.

> If only all users were so thoughtful.

But then it sent him off in a direction not worth going. He literally started to map out how far emails would go if they succeeded. The whole time the error was in the timeout instead.

Re: The 500-mile email (2002)

#106

Post by ceequof »

lloydde wrote: post #99
ErrantX wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FAQ answers this question. Basically; it was a long time ago, and the point of the story isn't in the detail. :) http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

And this is why we can't have nice stories. I felt for the author as I got deeper into the faq, and recognized this pattern of cynicism, then decided the author was so generous and thorough, not out of obligation (make the emails stop!), but because that is the type of detailed person he is -- and good at dinner parties too!

Writing stories for a technical audience is tricky. I've been doing it for going on 10 years now, and I'm still not very good at it.

A critical rule, however, is to omit detail, (a reader is unlikely to question an explanation they make up themselves) and most importantly, to omit details you know to be wrong. (It is impossible to nitpick a statement that is never said)

  An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100%
  switched.  An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting
  the POP and reaching a router on the far side.  So time to connect to a
  lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be
  governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by
  incidental router delays.
He knew this was largely wrong, and didn't really improve the story, yet he said it anyway. It should have been summarized in a single sentence, leaving out all the problematic assertions that the slashdot trolls leaped on.

Re: The 500-mile email (2002)

#107

Post by kazinator »

gabeio wrote: post #28
kazinator wrote: post #18

> And also being a good system administrator, I had written a sendmail.cf [...] Say what? Nobody writes a sendmail.cf from scratch, unless they are crazy. > ... that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark codes that had been used in Sendmail 5 Good system administrators stick to conservative, portable subsets of configuration and…

> Say what? Nobody writes a sendmail.cf from scratch, unless they are crazy. The point moreover was that he had a custom version of the config file (not just default).

Yes, sites have necessary customizations in sendmail.cf. These do not have to be rewrites that use shiny new syntax.

My biggest problem with the author was not that he uses his admin blunders as a basis to call himself a good sysadmin, but that he assumed that the stats people were idiots who don't know anything about `puters or networks.

I was not surprised by the 500 mile claim. It strikes me as obvious that the 500 miles has to do with some combination of network topology and propagation delays, those being approximately the same in every direction.

Yes, networking does work "that way": farther places take more time to reach than nearer ones, broadly speaking. (Of course, it's faster to reach something 12,000 km away with no packet switch in between than something 50 miles away with switching. That doesn't eliminate the generality.)

It was also obvious why they didn't report the problem instantly; you cannot instantly know that mail isn't reaching beyond 500 miles without gathering data and correlating to a map, which takes time. Instantly, you can only know data points like "I can't mail to users@example.com". You know that if a stats person gives you a number, it was based on data, and not just a couple of data points. The head of the stats department isn't going to give you a number that isn't factual and backed by science. Of course stats people pride themselves on their data analysis; they are not just going to relay a couple of data points with no analysis attached.

Re: The 500-mile email (2002)

#108

Post by bevacqua »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #103
danbruc wrote: post #60

Another email incident at Microsoft worth reading [1]. [1] http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2004/04/08/10962...

Ha. There is no explanation of why the mailing lists were named "Bedlam" though, and I doubt non-native readers know what it refers to. To quote Wikipedia [0]: "Bedlam may refer to: Bethlem Royal Hospital, London hospital first to specialise in the mentally ill and origin of the word "bedlam" describing chaos or madness" [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedlam

I'm a non-native speaker and I know what Bedlam means. Thanks to Ultima Online and Diablo :)

Re: The 500-mile email (2002)

#110

Post by bdevine »

nashashmi wrote: post #105
nchelluri wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a seriously accurate bug report. If only all users were so thoughtful.

> If only all users were so thoughtful. But then it sent him off in a direction not worth going. He literally started to map out how far emails would go if they succeeded. The whole time the error was in the timeout instead.

The mapping was done for the purpose of reproducing the error though. I wouldn't call that a wasted effort.
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