I don't know what the bloody hell happened yesterday. Every day since mid-January I have done the bloggo in a set order, ending up with sending an email to various usenet newsgroups with a potted version of what has been in the day's blog-stories.
Now, I am actually finding this quite interesting from the point of view of False Memory Syndrome, because I can actually remember doing yesterday's usenet email. But last night I got a quick missive from Karl S. saying "Oi U useless ********. Where's me usenet post?" No, actually I am lying. He actually wrote something far more genteel, and was concerned that something had gone wrong.
So I checked my `sent` box, and to my amazement, I couldn't find anything in there. But still I have a perfectly compos mentis memory of having sent it.
Weird huh?
It's not weird, it is just one more sign that you are on the wrong side of 50.
ReplyDeleteIt started happening to me a little over 9 years back.
Just because you sent the Usenet article to your local Usenet server does not mean that it had to have been propagated on, or even that it was posted onto that server. Usenet these days is counted as a non-essential service by most ISPs, and a real pain in the arse by every single one of them.
ReplyDeleteBack when I was in the ISP business, we always reckoned Usenet to be an unmitigated bastard of a service to maintain. We were operating on something of a shoestring budget; the mainstay of the operation was Transtec 2U rackmount Linux servers; basically a PC tower case turned on its side, with rack mounting kit fitted.
Rackmount Linux did for pretty much all of the operation, except for the big Oracle database server which needed a multiplicity of disks for all the gubbins that Oracle installs like to have on separate disk devices, and for the Usenet server. Those two went onto Sun Microsystems kit, which was and remains about double the price of equivalent Linux kit.
Sun servers were needed because of the incredible, staggering amount of data that comes down a Usenet feed; only a Sun had the disk speed to keep up with that flow, and perform some useful sorting work and anti-spam as well (dropping everything binary from the dodgier porn groups, for instance, and spotting bulk spammers in the act and ditching their garbage).
So, if your ISP fumbled the Usenet service briefly, your posting could well vanish into the aether (or rather get dumped into /dev/null) as part of the process of getting the server back up and running again. Like I say, if email gets dropped or bounced people get angry, if web goes flakey people whine, if the DNS goes tits-up you get the weirdest error reports ever since nobody save us sysadmins understands it, and if the Usenet server dies, nobody gives a damn until they've got a spare minute whereupon the trainee gets some grubby notes shoved at him and trundles off to run Perl scripts at random until the NNTP server grumbles back to life.