Journalist can't get email. Net at risk!

Fri Nov 28 13:59:56 2003

Can the net take the strain?

On Tuesday, BBC Technology Pundit Bill Thompson arrived home from work to find that his Internet had broken.

According to Bill Thompson - "the entire NTL network had gone down.". Hmm. Well, I have NTL and I was using it on Tuesday night. Ok, DNS was a little broken, which also meant that their webcaches were broken, oh, and you cant just not use the webcaches as they intercept outgoing traffic automatically. However it wasn't the case that their whole network was down.

Oh, and the Bill Thompson article (at least at the current time), says that the cable broke at 16:00 on Monday.

Ok, further down the article he made some better points, like that companies that rely on their email servers should check that not only will they still work in the even of a power cut, but also that all of the infrastructure required to reach them will also work in the even of a power failure. UPSs on switches and ADSL modems and things like that are essential if you expect to be able to contact your running servers in the event of a power cut. Maybe more companies need to think about this, or maybe they are thinking about it, but only at low levels, and the budgets are not there until after the disaster. Hmm, maybe IT departments need to stage power cuts regularly.