From: Adrian.Waterworth@newcastle.ac.uk (Adrian Waterworth)
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Martyr gets silly! (So...what's new?)
Summary: A silly long story and a silly song!
Keywords: Networks. Partitions. E-mail. 3-week ABEND.
Date: 28 Jul 92 15:14:28 GMT
Organization: University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, NE1 7RU

Martyr has wandered back to the bar and bought himself another drink.
After taking a couple of sips, a mischievous grin begins to form and
he steps forwards into an open area of floor-space where he executes
an amazingly florid bow to the nearby patrons. Grabbing an empty
chair, he spins it about and sits down heavily - back to front -
before beginning to declaim in a loud (but not too loud) voice...

"Come all who wish to hear a sad and sorry tale, for I promised unto a
certain fair damsel that I would tell this story when the chance came
to pass. It is a story of great sadness and loss, of isolation and the
inability to communicate, of silence and the pain of being mute..."

"In short, it's the tale of a network partition, but that doesn't
sound half as interesting, does it???"

"Anyway, are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin..."

"It was most emphatically NOT a dark and stormy night. In fact, it was
a Tuesday morning, about 10:15-ish (BST) on the 25th of June and the
weather was quite clement. Somewhere, in a dark and civil-engineer
haunted edifice known as 'The Cassie Building', a group of workmen
were going about their appointed business: stripping asbestos out of
ducts and wall-spaces and ensuring that it was disposed of properly.
One of these workmen, being a bright and right-thinking sort of chap,
had been using a Stihl-saw (as in one of those pretty disk-bladed
stone cutting gadgets) to cut his way into some conduit or other. At
least, that was what we assume that he had been doing. I mean, let's
face it, if the guy wants to play with one of those things then who
are we to complain? So long as he doesn't come round here and start
attacking people with it, we can all just get on with our lives,
right?"

"Whatever...he was mucking about with this gizmo when he suddenly
encountered a thick cable. Being a bright little fellow, he laid about
this cable for all he was worth and managed to cut a little nick in
it. Unfortunately, said cable was the armour-clad, heat-proof,
water-proof, unfortunately-not-idiot-with-Stihl-saw-proof, 12-core
fibre-optic cable that connects all of the offices in my building and
one or two others with the main campus network hub here in Newcastle.
The net (pardon the pun!) result? Just about the most extreme network
partition that it is possible to get. Nothing was getting to us and
nothing was getting out. We were totally isolated (electronically
speaking) from the rest of the campus, let alone the rest of the
country or the rest of the world. More to the point, we didn't, at
that time, actually _know_ what it was that had caused the problem."

"Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, things _really_ started to go
downhill. We called up the guys who installed the network and asked
them to come out with their OTDR (Optical Time-Domain Reflectometer)
to locate the break. It turned out that the nearest OTDR to us was in
Southampton and couldn't reach us for a few days. When it finally did
arrive, either the machine was broken, or the engineer who came with
it was totally incompetent. It was left to our on-site network bods to
carry off the OTDR signal maps of the campus network and compare them
with the original maps in an attempt to locate the break the hard way.
This they duly did (no thanks to that dumb engineer) and the break was
confirmed as being in Cassie. Ah...but...Cassie was being stripped of
asbestos!  There was no access to the building until the all-clear was
given by a medical officer. So we waited...and we waited...and
eventually the part of the building we needed access to was cleared."

"Plain sailing from now on, right? Wrong! Of course, the contractors
who were removing the asbestos were to pay for the repair to the
network cable. After all, it was their fault that the guy sliced into
it in the first place. Unfortunately, the cost of the repair was going
to be in the region of 5000 pounds plus tax (at 17.5%) - the cost of
running a new cable (500-and-something metres) and re-splicing the
twelve connections at each end. For that amount of money, the
contractor had to call up their insurance company, who had to send out
a little man, who probably knew absolutely nothing about networks or
fibre-optics but who was supposed to assess the damage. I presume
that he did this and that the financial side was eventually sorted
out, because three weeks later, we were finally reconnected to the
outside world. Hallelujah!!"

"The point of this story, well...I don't suppose there was one. But if
any of you tried to e-mail me during that time and had your messages
bounced, you now know why!"

"Of course, telling this story will also allow me to post the
following little item. It was penned by yours truly on the eighth or
ninth day of isolation. Just goes to show you that poetry and parody
come very easily when you're actually living through the events in
question!"

Martyr then picks up a guitar from somewhere, remembers that he can't
play guitar, puts it down again and asks for suitable accompaniment
from Eddie or anyone else who can manage it. The haunting melody of
Simon and Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence" fills the air and Martyr
sings in a voice surprisingly high and clear for someone who looks
like a well-groomed grizzly bear...

		Our little network has gone down.
		The entire system's gone to town.
		We transmit without receiving.
		Our network packets are not leaving,
		But our repeater tells us everything's OK
		- No bl**dy way -
		There's just the sound of silence.

		Fibre optics, laser beams.
		It's not as nice as it all seems.
		NFS is not replying.
		All our Sun-3's are simply dying
		For the want of a file-system somewhere
		No-one can share
		Across the sound of silence.

		And there's nothing we can do.
		Even our e-mail can't get through.
		Our mailboxes are not growing
		And our outbound mail ain't going
		And there isn't even any news to read
		- We've lost our feed
		Thanks to the sound of silence.

		So we sit here feeling meek.
		In isolation since last week.
		For our network we are yearning,
		With all those Usenet flames a-burning
		And you never really know how much you care
		'Til it's not there
		Within the sound of silence.

"Thank you for listening!"

<Gulp!>

<Whizz!>

<CRAAAASSSSSHHH!>

	and Martyr, leaning too far back on his chair, discovers the
hazards of gravity.

<THUD!>
				Martyr.

		\----------------------------------------/
		 |  Adrian.Waterworth@newcastle.ac.uk	|
		/ ---------------------------------------\
Newsgroups: alt.callahans