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Off topic: It Pings a Bell
Here is a funny "news-clip" I wrote which is available on my homepage,
which is really "qorem or vegidim" nowadays. Comments, suggestions,
spelling/grammar errors corrections, etc. are welcome. Enjoy!
It Pings a Bell
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By Shlomi Fish
SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Yahoo! Inc. announced today that it will establish a
special Internet server that will be used exclusively for an Internet
service called "ping". The host, which will bear the hostname "pingme.net"
was raised with colaboration with other well-known companies including Sun,
Excite, Digital, Walnut Creek CD-ROMs, and even MIT university.
"Ping" is an internet service used in the Internet, to detect if a host is
alive and is accessible from the network. However, ping is often used for
the opposite purpose - to check if the local host is connected to a
different part of the network: the organization's LAN, the network outside
the LAN, a different country, another subnet, etc.
Therefore, well-known hostnames (such as "www.yahoo.com", "sunsite.unc.edu"
and "rtfm.mit.edu") are commonly pinged by network administrators in order
to verify that their computers can reach the external network. As a result
the extra network traffic from the ping packets became quite a burden on
the respective sites. "Imagine that one hundred people approached you every
day asking you to pinch them so they'll know they are not dreaming.", says
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.
"There had been times where 20% of our network activity consisted of
ping-related packets, and we've decided it's high time we got it off our
backs. We contacted the other companies involved here and they agreed to
back it up and publicize it."
The special server, which Yahoo plan it to be "pinged" instead of
www.yahoo.com and the other hosts, is a super-fast Pentium Pro 266 MHz,
which will be installed at a strategical position on the Internet backbone.
Moreover, it will run a special version of the Linux operating system,
which was specially designed to handle ping queries.
In this version, which was nicknamed "PingBSD" by its devlopers at Yahoo,
most of the unnecessary functionality was coded out of the system kernel.
The kernel was also optimized to handle ICMP transactions faster, ICMP
being the underlying protocol of "ping". Needless to say, most of the usual
Internet services (i.e HTTP, FTP, finger, telnet) are not present on the
server.
Yahoo intends to make the newly developed OS free for public use, so other
companies can establish their own ping-sites other than "pingme.net". Yahoo
hopes that one day there will be a centralized ping site in any country and
in any major subnet.
As a final note: after Linus Torvalds, the initial developer of Linux and
the man who headed the Linux Project until recently, heard of the news he
made this comment to our reporter: "Althought I approve of the so-called
'PingBSD' and every other use people can find to Linux, it has surprised me
a little. People around here kicked their asses so Linux will support every
possible service or piece of hardware. And now the Yahoo guys made a
version that supports practically nothing."
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Shlomi Fish Smart Link Ltd.
Home E-mail: shlomif@ibm.net Work E-mail: shlomi@slink.co.il
Home Page: http://www.slink.co.il/~shlomi
"If I had not been insane already, I would have long ago driven myself mad."
The Enemy and how I Helped to Fight it.
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