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Who's in the corner?
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WTVN Radio • Columbus, Ohio • Sunday morning from 8 until 9 |
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Sunday, June 1, 2003 |
Random thought:
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What an incredible 52 hours!It was only Wednesday when the problem started, but it seems like I've been wrestling with this for weeks. One way to get people to sit up and take notice is to make their e-mail server and website go away. Between 10 and 11 Wednesday morning, an explosion and fire at a datacenter in Parsippany, New Jersey, caused the evacuation of Network Access Corporation, the company Akashik (my website host and the host for several clients and acquaintances) used to host its servers. Within 2 hours, the fire department allowed people back into the building, but power was off to some or all of the building for most of the day. Many of the servers came back on line normally. The 8th floor (I presume this was the location of the explosion and fire) remained unusable for longer. The server that blinn.com and technology-corner.com live on actually did come back on line, but Akashik's "nameserver" machine (the "traffic cop" of the operation) would not start. Because of that, nobody could reach the web or mail servers by using a domain name. According to Greg Moore of Akashik, because the nameserver had suffered a hard disk failure and would have to be rebuilt, he decided "to best make use of this downtime and shift accounts to another datacenter. ... The end result is that once the nameservers resolve, accounts will be on brand new servers sporting both twice the CPU power and RAM within a datacenter we've found to offer greater connectivity." Akashik had planned to make this move soon, although under much more controlled circumstances. As I mentioned to someone earlier in this ordeal, what we have is the equivalent of a "100-year flood". As of Friday morning at 8a.m. (Eastern), Greg reported that some domain name service (DNS) servers have started to direct traffic to the new datacenter. Roadrunner's DNS seems to always be at least 12 to 24 hours behind everyone else's DNS, so I didn't see any change. On Thursday, before I had been able to contact Greg and was uncertain what exactly was happening, I made arrangements to move some websites temporarily to a small server. I ordered DNS changes on Thursday morning. Thursday afternoon, Greg and I located each other and compared notes. It no longer made sense to use the smaller server, even temporarily, but I had already submitted the DNS changes. I submitted a second round of changes to restore the old information. Because of this, blinn.com and technology-corner.com may appear or disappear abruptly until Monday as first one change and then the other propagate through the system. Isn't the Internet supposed to be impervious to things like this?Yes, and the Internet is. Individual machines are not. That is not a contradiction. Communications on the Internet are routed by intelligent devices so that the failure of a router in Columbus, for example, won't affect traffic from Cleveland to Cincinnati. The traffic may travel from Cleveland to Pittsburgh and then to Cincinnati, but it will get there. (In fact, I can connect to a client's Unix system that's no more than 2500 feet from my office, but the connection is made through from Columbus to Washington to New York to Chicago and back to Columbus.) Cut any individual cable and the Internet's redundancy routes around the cut. That's why large datacenters (such as Network Access) maintain multiple connections to the Internet. Most datacenters buy service from MCI, Sprint, Broadwing, AT&T, and others. A massive failure at any one provider won't leave them without service. But a well-placed back-hoe cut will. All of the cables enter the building at one place. Cut there and you will have taken the datacenter off the network. An explosion and fire will do the same thing. The Technology Corner website became available again early Friday evening. More silly code names: Panther and LonghornPanther is Apple's follow-on for OS X 10.2 and Longhorn will be the next version of Windows. Because (in my estimation) Apple's development stumbled badly in the '90s, Microsoft's Windows got far ahead of Apple's operating system. Multi-windowing and advanced memory management are just two areas where Microsoft had the edge until Apple shipped OS X. The two are much closer now in capabilities. Windows XP has a few tricks OS X can't touch and OS X beats Windows XP in several other areas. These are the two operating systems most of us use -- at least on the desktop. Linux is becoming more popular, but only a true geek would replace either OS X or Windows with Linux as a desktop operating system. In a little less than a month, Apple will roll out Panther. (Does one roll out a panther or just open the cage and stand back?) You won't see Longhorn until 2005 and by then Apple is likely to have produced another iteration of OS X. (Lion? Tiger? Domestic short hair?) By 2005, if Apple continues the progress it's been making lately, Windows XP could begin to look a little shopworn. Microsoft still leads Apple by a wide margin -- 80% to 90% of computer users run Windows. But Apple systems are much more affordable than ever before and the underlying Unix operating system make it possible to use Apple computers in ways that haven't been possible until now. Microsoft says it won't even have an interim release of Windows (those who predicted it tended to call it "Shorthorn") There will be a technical preview (misnamed an "alpha") distributed at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in October, Apple is said to be working on improving start-up, log-in, and program launch times, all of which are significantly slower than what Windows owners expect. File encryption and decryption is another area where Apple is working to catch up. Microsoft has been quite about most of what it's working on, but representatives have shared some information at recent conferences. The user interface will be modified and a new application programming interface (API) will replace dozens (maybe hundreds) of existing files. The question is -- will the panther eat the longhorn or will it be trampled? Kodak adds Applied Science FictionKodak is buying the assets of Applied Science Fiction, one of my favorite companies if for no other reason than its name. ASF's products include Digital PIC, Digital ICE, and Digital ICE3. These are technologies for film and flatbed scanners that automate restoration and correction of damaged images and Digital PIC rapidly develops standard color negative film without chemical mixing or plumbing. The process simultaneously renders digital image files that can be used to print photographs. Kodak will integrate Applied Science Fiction's technologies and personnel into its Consumer Imaging business. Specific details about product plans are "currently under development and will be disclosed at a later date." (I believe that translates to "Well, we just bought this stuff. Now what do we do with it?") Nerdly NewsIomega's invisible disk driveIomega is well known for Zip disks, Jaz drives, and other storage devices. Now the company offers one you can't see. Iomega had a big hit with the Zip disk. The Zip 250 was less of a hit. With 650MB CDs costing less than 50 cents, a 750MB Zip disk (about $9) just doesn't make a lot of sense. For the last 5 years or so, Iomega has been behind the technology curve. Now Iomega is offering a 30-day free trial of on-line storage. Iomega iStorage Online allows users to store 50MB of data online for $2.49 a month. This is a far lower price than what most online storage companies ask. To store 1GB of data, you'll pay just $18. This compares to $50 per month for equivalent storage from backup.com. Backup.com offers additional automatic backup, which Iomega initially appears not to offer; the options is available, though, and is included in the on-line description you'll find at http://www.iomega.com/istorage/index.html (see the Flash presentation). Whether Iomega can make money with these prices is an unanswered question. But it seems to offer a better chance than Iomega's hardware. The Iomega iStorage Online trial offer is available to anyone in the US with access to the Internet. Regular iStorage accounts range from $2.49 per month (50MB) to $17.95 per month (1GB), with 100MB, 250MB and 500MB capacities also available. Purchasers of 12-month annual subscriptions get two free months and a 30-day money back guarantee. Earthlink tries to block spamEarthlink has activated spamBlocker to help users dump junk mail. If you're an Earthlink subscriber, you've probably heard from the company. You'll need to download some software from www.earthlink.net/spamblocker/ to make it work. EarthLink has a history of fighting spam. In addition to technical solutions like spamBlocker, EarthLink has filed suit against spammers and the company supports legislation that would control spam. The company says spamBlocker is the latest feature introduced to empower subscribers against intrusive Internet advertising. Last year EarthLink introduced Pop-Up Blocker, a tool that stops pop-up ads. Like EarthLink's Pop-Up Blocker, spamBlocker is an optional feature. Customers can modify the tool depending upon the amount of unsolicited email they want to receive in their inbox. Let us know what you think about this program! Write to: |
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