Backhoe, n. <bak-ho>. A
massive,
piloted
machine/
vehicle used for
excavation. It has a
large bucket and uses this to
dig.
This
story was related to me during the
Sendmail tutorial at
LISA 99 in
Seattle,
Washington,
USA. During his
tutorial,
Eric Allman told us the
following (my apologies for how badly I'm probably messing it up):
Once upon a time, on the
Berkeley campus, there was an
earthquake. Just prior to this
earthquake, a
backhoe cut through the only
link connecting Berkeley to the
outside world. Because of the
earthquake, the
workers were unwilling to get back in the
trench to figure out the
extent of the
damage. So the
fibre break went unfixed for
three days.
Did I say this was the
only link to the
outside world? Not quite. You see,
routers have
evolved to become
almost sentient. When they
discover that a
link is
down, they
immediately begin
sniffing (here, he sniffs around in the
air) to find a new
route. What did they find?
Lo and behold, a
professor's home
PC was connected to the
campus network via an
ISDN connection, and was
coincidentally networked to his
wife's
PC, which had a
dial-up account with a local
ISP. The
routers then
begin to
send all of
Berkeley's
traffic through this (33.6? 56k?)
modem connection. So, for these
three days,
Berkeley is
connected through this
insane route.
The
moral of the
story is then
this:
Backhoes are the only known natural enemy of fibre.