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We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)

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Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)

#101

Post by forgingahead »

comex wrote: post #27
abeppu wrote: post #19

The ending of this makes it sound super clean. 3 ms * speed of light => ~560 miles. "It all makes sense!" But ... isn't the speed of light through fiber actually like 2/3 of the speed of light in a vacuum? And that fiber isn't going to be laid out in a straight line exactly to the destination. So I think really there must have been a fair bit of uncertainty around that ~3ms to abort a connection.

The FAQ addresses this: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

My goodness, the questions people sent in. "I've never met a rich nitpicker" comes to mind.

Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)

#102

Post by franky47 »

techdragon wrote: post #98
sah2ed wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a joint autograph from both the protagonist—Trey Harris, and the antagonist—the consultant to the Stats department :) ? Trey Harris also on HN [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TreyHarris

Yes. Seriously... I’m willing to pay for the shipping and everything. I’ve told this story countless times to people over the years. This and the “OpenOffice can’t print on Tuesday” bug are two of my favourite troubleshooting stories.

HN thread for the OpenOffice story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171956

Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)

#103

Post by morganvachon »

welearnednothng wrote: post #60
staycoolboy wrote: post #58

The one thing that throws a wrench in this story for me: Lattes. Latte's in 1994? In North Carolina? No way. Maybe on the West Coast, but I moved to Cali in 1989 and they were a rarity until the mid-late 90's. There were only 425 starbucks in the US in 1994 (from their site). The "fancy coffee" craze was just a blip on the radar in the mid 90's but gaining momentum. ;-)

In ‘94 (if not earlier), I was drinking lattes at a mom and pop coffee shop in a tiny town in the Midwest. And at another indie coffee shop at the nearest major university campus. That place was open 24 hours and busy at all hours. I didn’t even know what Starbucks was, but I sure knew lattes and cappuccinos. So yeah, lattes in ‘94 in a major college town seems totally plausible.

Agreed, I graduated high school in 1995, and I was dating a college girl in Rome, Georgia. Our favorite hangout was a coffee shop that served, among other things, lattes and frappes.

Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)

#106

Post by throwaway8941 »

duckerude wrote: post #99
ornornor wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be aware that currencies are stuck with rates from several years ago and don’t update.

Running `sudo units_cur` does the trick for me. $ units Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2020-05-12 $ sudo units_cur $ units Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2020-07-09 (GNU units, packed by Debian)

In case anyone else needs this:

  # systemctl edit units-currency-update.service
  
  [Unit]
  Description=Update units(1) currency rates
  
  [Service]
  Type=oneshot
  Nice=19
  ExecStart=/usr/bin/units_cur
  
  # systemctl edit units-currency-update.timer
  
  [Unit]
  Description=Update units(1) currency rates
  
  [Timer]
  OnCalendar=daily
  AccuracySec=3h
  Persistent=true
  
  [Install]
  WantedBy=timers.target
  
  # systemctl daemon-reload
  # systemctl enable units-currency-update.timer

Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)

#109

Post by zemvpferreira »

techdragon wrote: post #98
sah2ed wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a joint autograph from both the protagonist—Trey Harris, and the antagonist—the consultant to the Stats department :) ? Trey Harris also on HN [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TreyHarris

Yes. Seriously... I’m willing to pay for the shipping and everything. I’ve told this story countless times to people over the years. This and the “OpenOffice can’t print on Tuesday” bug are two of my favourite troubleshooting stories.

I would also be ready to pay for a signed copy of this story. I’d frame it up in the office :)

Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)

#110

Post by martyvis »

Only the other week we were doing some testing on a new HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure) I'm doing the network for. At the end of the test period, we were having some storage sync issues. Everything seemed to PING ok, except my colleague happened to notice large jumbo frames over 8000 bytes were getting dropped. I double checked that we hadn't inadvertently changed network configuration. It was only by chance we had another test looking at transceiver signal levels that a customer engineer saw an alarm on RX level. It was then we remembered one test was to remove a module. I then noticed some error counts. We shutdown that particular link until we could visit the site. Sure enough, that fibre wasn't quite clicked in anymore. There was enough of a bridge across the fibre air gap for shall packets, but just wide enough so large packets statically couldn't be corrected enough to work.
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