DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I thought P*B’s DSL network was puking again. I could get online, but only just. All my remote connections were in slow-motion.

Normally I just reboot my DSL hardware. This time, I didn’t, because the problem appeared to be in Pac Bell’s network. I was getting 2-second ping times as soon as I got past my own router.

The P*B tech suggested, to no one’s surprise, that I reboot the DSL hardware. I did — it didn’t help. I unplugged my switch… no joy. I unplugged my webserver… and suddenly the line cleared. Immediately, ping times dropped to their normal, 10-ms range.

“So there’s something wrong with your server,” the P*B tech said. “Are you running NT?”

Err, no.

I scanned some processes and didn’t see anything amiss. It didn’t occur to me to check my bandwidth graphs until much later. Finally I realized that one of the websites I host was getting about 10x as much traffic as normal. The site offers street maps of popular travel destinations.

Referer info wasn’t helpful; many users were clicking through from Yahoo, to view maps of Manhattan. But that Yahoo placement has been there for a year…. why would it suddenly begin generating so much traffic? Why are so many people suddenly interested in maps of Manhattan?

It was at this point that a coworker told me via IRC to check the news, that an apparent terrorist attack had taken down both the towers of the World Trade Center.

The New York Times put it into perspective: this is the Pearl Harbor of our generation. Forty years from now we’ll be talking about where we were when we learned of this attack. I feel trivial and misguided to have been wrestling with webserver bandwidth at a time when hundreds of thousands of lives were altered, or ended, by this tragedy. My thoughts and prayers go out to those people.