Re: Unscheduled outage of SkirtCafe

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crfriend
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Re: Unscheduled outage of SkirtCafe

Post by crfriend »

Good evening Lads (or at least it's evening here),

We had a roughly 4 1/4 hour outage of the forum this morning from 09:09 EDT to 13:24 EDT (add four for UTC) down to unknown causes. Nothing appeared on the hosting provider's status page on the matter although I suspect it had to do with vastly more than us.

My monitoring system at home alerted me to the situation at 09:09 via e-mail which I received at work and verified that not just the web service was dead, so was SSH. Had the situation continued by the time I got home I would have barked loudly at the hosting provider, but the situation returned to normal at 13:24 when again I was alerted but in a meeting and not paying attention (work being, well, work).

All seems to be normal now, so I'll call the fire "out".

By the by, if anyone (else) got spam in a private message in Romanian, don't worry; the auto-defences shot the miscreant in my absence and I've mopped up as much of the mess as I could easily find without rifling through everyone's in-box.

Cheers from the New World.
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r.m.anderson
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Re: Unscheduled outage of SkirtCafe

Post by r.m.anderson »

Wonder witch hunt political party (Russkies are US) is responsible for this ?
Or just maybe it was a little dust on the main frame exciting some static electricity ?
"YES SKIRTING MATTERS"!
"Kilt-On" -or- as the case may be "Skirt-On" !
WHY ?
Isn't wearing a kilt enough?
Well a skirt will do in a pinch!
Make mine short and don't you dare think of pinching there !
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crfriend
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Re: Unscheduled outage of SkirtCafe

Post by crfriend »

r.m.anderson wrote:Wonder witch hunt political party (Russkies are US) is responsible for this ?
Or just maybe it was a little dust on the main frame exciting some static electricity ?
More likely a backhoe in a strategic location severing a sliver of glass. Wherever it was it wasn't local to my place because I saw the same problem from home, work, and Providence.
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r.m.anderson
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Re: Unscheduled outage of SkirtCafe

Post by r.m.anderson »

I have seen power equipment slice through 100 pairs of telephone cable and if it had not been for the color coding
the repairs would have very time consuming - - -

BUT tell me how do you splice fiber optic ends together or is it just as simple as melting the ends together and voila done ?

Glad you were able to mop up the Sorcerers Apprentice work (hack?) from the mother country (Romania).
"YES SKIRTING MATTERS"!
"Kilt-On" -or- as the case may be "Skirt-On" !
WHY ?
Isn't wearing a kilt enough?
Well a skirt will do in a pinch!
Make mine short and don't you dare think of pinching there !
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crfriend
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Re: Unscheduled outage of SkirtCafe

Post by crfriend »

r.m.anderson wrote:BUT tell me how do you splice fiber optic ends together or is it just as simple as melting the ends together and voila done ?
This involves making sure you have enough slack to work with, else it's going to be two splices (each of which will cause a discontinuity), find out how far back from the severed point the damage goes in each direction, making a controlled cut there, then optically polishing the ends of the fibre (this is a precision job, but jigs are available which allow the operation to actually be done by humans), perfectly aligning the ends, and them permanently affixing them in that position and protecting the splice point(s). The result is an optically working length of fibre albeit now showing some greater signal attenuation (less light passing) than before.
Glad you were able to mop up the Sorcerers Apprentice work (hack?) from the mother country (Romania).
It wasn't a hack or a break-in, it was a then-believed-valid registration, which then used the PM facility to transmit junk instead of posting it publicly. If it'd had a URL in it I'd have reported the incident to my upstream guidance (StopForumSpam.com) for blocking, but without something hard to go on I'm not willing to go that. However, at least one other individual did, the IP address made it into the feed, and my stuff did the rest.

That something got through didn't really surprise me. This is actually a very "open society", so we're prone to this sort of abuse, and the number of robot-registrations has been through the roof recently with a couple of dozen just a few days ago.
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Re: Unscheduled outage of SkirtCafe

Post by denimini »

An unscheduled outage on this forum sounds like someone unepectedly meeting parents when skirted. I am pleased that it turned out less traumatic.
Anthony, a denim miniskirt wearer in Outback Australia
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Re: Unscheduled outage of SkirtCafe

Post by skirtedbrit »

I wondered what had happened as I tried several times to log in. Got in by googling skirtcafe and clicking on ' board index '.

P.S. I am in the UK
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Re: Unscheduled outage of SkirtCafe

Post by beachlion »

I was at the beach so I had no idea of this mishap.
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Re: Unscheduled outage of SkirtCafe

Post by skirtyscot »

I too was unaware, being on my bicycle. Of which, more later. A scheduled outage was involved. :!:
Keep on skirting,

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Re: Unscheduled outage of SkirtCafe

Post by bridkid »

denimini wrote:An unscheduled outage on this forum sounds like someone unepectedly meeting parents when skirted. I am pleased that it turned out less traumatic.
Haha! Yes, you are right, having been there... :shock:
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shadowfax
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Re: Unscheduled outage of SkirtCafe

Post by shadowfax »

crfriend wrote:
r.m.anderson wrote:BUT tell me how do you splice fiber optic ends together or is it just as simple as melting the ends together and voila done ?
This involves making sure you have enough slack to work with, else it's going to be two splices (each of which will cause a discontinuity), find out how far back from the severed point the damage goes in each direction, making a controlled cut there, then optically polishing the ends of the fibre (this is a precision job, but jigs are available which allow the operation to actually be done by humans), perfectly aligning the ends, and them permanently affixing them in that position and protecting the splice point(s). The result is an optically working length of fibre albeit now showing some greater signal attenuation (less light passing) than before.
IMHO I believe that most datacomms companies would use a fusion splicer to repair a broken fibre such as the machines from Fujikura. As far as I know, there is no need to optically polish the broken ends of the fibre, just cleave them cleanly then the fusion splicer will align them and fire an arc to melt them together. No need for polishing. The splice is checked by shining a laser diagonally across the splice. The splicer will report on any bad splices so they can be redone. The splice is supported by heat-shrink tubing with an inbuilt support wire. I think that the fusion splicer will heat the tubing to shrink it down too. The individual fibre splices in their heat-shrink tubing, in the multi-core cable, would be supported in a plastic-moulded cable joint.
It's been some years since I last used a Fujikura so they may do an even better job nowadays. :)
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Re: Unscheduled outage of SkirtCafe

Post by crfriend »

shadowfax wrote:It's been some years since I last used a Fujikura so they may do an even better job nowadays. :)
It's been half a decade since I last used glass for anything, so it's entirely probable that my information are out of date. The data-rates where I work now don't need fibre; good ol' copper does just fine.

Where I was previously was trying to go the cheap route with 10 Gb links and copper before it was ready for prime-time. I advised against it, favouring instead fibre, got shot down, and then subsequently blamed when the copper solution turned into a fiasco. I spent 12 years there, and was abjectly miserable for 10 of them.
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