BBC Website seems to be down

That never happens. With that, and the mobile networks bust for much of the day, I smell a conspiracy.

 

Back on for me now too oddly enough. It must have been a blip. It was definitely not responding for a period of several minutes at least.

 

Get Dim onto it , it is a conspiracy
The banks three weeks ago. Yesterday 02, today the BBC

They are conditioning us for the massive failure during the Olympics
OR Some group are testing distuption in stages ready for the big one

I know it is serious but quite funny, girl on the news tonight, I could not phone my
parents for 24hrs or any of my friends

Back in 60s only Doctors or really well off people had phones at home
If you wanted to phone someone urgent, it was a telegram first to arrange use of doctors phone to recieve it
Then queue outside a phone box, put your penny in and press button A,
When I was at sea it was for months, all communication was by letter, received at next port of call, possibly six weeks away, In subs it was a twenty word communication once a month :-)
You had to arrange with a florist before you left, if you wanted some flowers delilvered to your girlfriend on her birthday six weeks later

How on earth did we survive ?

Jack McHammocklashing

 

Aaaah - 'tis like sweeet music to mine ears Jack.
Missed you and your rants. I read a post holiday thread of yours but Iv'e lost it again. Are you recovering or are you about to book a holiday to aid recovery? (ssssh this time)
Nice to have you back, any little bags of of unpacked sunshine stll left in your suitcase?
Please may I have one - name your price bonny lad; name your price.
I'm desperate,
Jenny

 

http://www.gadgehit.com/2012/07/12/bbc-website-crash-leaves-millions-without-iplayer/

 

I did notice it was offline for a bit, but had no trouble later. I tend to download stuff I want to watch in the day when speeds are quicker.

Did find the wrong prog on one of the things I wanted to watch though.

 

The only pack of sunshine I had left I spent today on the Grandkids

It was dry today, still cloudy and cold, so we took them on a picnic, about 500 yds from the house
Well wrapped up, we went to the woods, had a bottle of juice each, sandwiches and crisps, then the eight year old took us to the Witches corner of the forest :-) all exciting stuff for the three year olds and five year old, tramping through the swamps with crocodiles (flooded forest floor) then home again, Julie on her disability scooter with two three year olds clinging on, five year old stood on the back, Me and eight year old cycling behind, OMG I have not cycled for years, and I am suffering now
, 500 YDS and I am knackered
We had a great holiday, I paid for the taxi tranfers, flights and accomodation, but not for the food and day trips, so I am feeling a bit guilty that I put this expence on them all :-(
Though they all said it was a GREAT holiday

To be honest it was, the flights were Human, ie 08:30 out, and on the beach with a litre of wine at 13:30 eu time return 12:30 and in the house with a cuppa of tea at 14:30 uk time, None of the kicked out of accomodation at 10:00 with three suitcases for a flight at 02:00 the next morning etc

It all went quite well concidering, three families total eleven people, three accomodations, etc, and we all more or less did our own thing, Though I must admit there were a Few flash ups (altercations)

I was considering taking them all on a cruise, but the onboard spend is ridiculous
ie:- cruise £1.2k a person onboard spend £1k, which Julie and I can manage each
I can manage the £13k for the cruise but not the additional £11k onboard spend, and it would be too much to expect young ordinary working families to pay.

The only downside was the Mosquitoes, they ate me to death and I have BAD reactions to the bites, they left the kiddies alone though so it must be down to alcohol content in the blood, Alcoholic Mosquitoes :-)

Ooops of on me COSINES again xxxxxxx tangents

Jack McH

 

there might be a lot more disruptions

a huge CME (sun flare - coronal mass ejection) is heading this way and should smack earth on the 14th (saturday) ... this one is classed as an X-class

if what they predict is true, lots of electronic systems will go bonkers

http://iswa.gsfc.nasa.gov:8080/Iswa...mp=2038-01-23 00:44:00&window=-1&cygnetId=261

 

Good morning Dim,
my little ray of early morning sunshine. I've looked at the catherine wheel but confess I didn't understand it. Maybe it's just as well. An elecris light show (like the northern lights) would make a change from the wall to wall monotonous grey.
Jenny

 

We had a massive CME a few months or so ago and we were supposed to be bracing ourselves. I don't want to jinx anything, but that time, nothing happened.

I know it can, and has in the past, but generally speaking we're lucky at the non-polar regions. We have a forcefield that would be the envy of any sci-fi starship captain. For the megatonnes of charged particles that come from the sun in a CME, IF they hit us, first they will encounter our magnetic field. There's a thing called Fleming's law that sorts that bit out. He did all the electromagnetic maths, but basically the charge is deflected around our magnetic field. That bit will upset anyone trying to navigate on an old fashioned compass, as earth's magnetic field will temporarily contort under pressure. Most of the charged particles will then be deflected towards the poles.

After that first line of defence, next is the atmosphere. Charged particles can hurtle through space without too much resistance, but as soon as they hit our atmosphere, they begin to react, ionising the molecules at the top, creating a plasma that glows, hence the northern and southern lights which contrary to popular belief, are there almost all the time, all over the atmosphere, but only at any really significant levels at the poles.

Any radiation that still hasn't been deflected and/or absorbed by the top of the atmosphere then has to make its way through more than 20 miles of wet air, where it will be diffused to such an extent that it is mostly harmless.

As for our IT infrastructure, t'interweb, which has its origins in the cold war when nuclear war was considered a very real possibility. That's why there is no single point of failure. If one route between you and the GC web server breaks, you're computer and the a DNS's along the way will find another route. That route may take your signal up to satellites, or deep under the ground, or on 'surface cables'. It may take a radio link, a fibre optic link and/or a conventional electrical link, and it may do stretches as an analogue modulated signal or a switched mode digital signal. It is designed so that if an airburst disrupts the overground and satellite routes, then the signal will go underground, whereas if a groundburst busts the subterranean signals, then your signal will reach for the sky. All this is why the internet as a whole never breaks, and nowadays more and more communications infrastructure uses the internet backbone. Individual servers can be bust, but the infrastructure is very resilient indeed, which is why a CME is unlikely to cause a global communication outage. Remember Canada a few years back? We heard about that while it was happening, which is proof of the resilience of the infrastructure.

All that said, the biggest risk comes from us mere humans, but oddly enough, not the ones that would want to cause any disruption. The biggest risk always comes from those responsible for mitigating the risk. BBC's outage was down to a load balancing server failure. That's bad network design. The banks, we know, was a software change blunder. O2, we don't know yet.

A few years ago, I was being shown around a data centre owned by a certain massive and well known company who my company was thinking of hiring for an extremely high value contract. They were bragging about their dual resilience and all the rest of it. They had two high bandwidth connections to the outside world, both emerging from opposite ends of their datacentre. I ask to see a map of their cables and the manager went very nervous, but showed me because he had to under the circumstances. The cable left the building at opposite ends, then converged at a certain point. I asked the question that the manager of the datacentre hoped I wouldn't. What happens if the gas company dig up the road at this point here? The answer, which the chap didn't want to or need to give was that several multi-billion pound customers would immediately be cut off.

 

I still remember the days in South Africa where you cranked the handle on the telephone, and an operator would answer and put you through to whoever you wanted to call ....

there were certain rings for each person (example ... 4 short rings were our home's number) .... anyone on the network could pick up their phone and listen to your conversation

 

here's food for thought .... don't know how true it is, but if so, there will be lots more 'disruptions and distractions'

http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=20491