Water Buffalo in TCP Towers

Night had fallen on TCP Towers. It was as silent as a NOC with a dead UPS in a power cut. But wait, is that the sound of typing from the tower ? Let us look closer. Yes, high up within the tower, a dim light can be seen. Peering into the gloom we can just see a lone troll hunched over a keyboard, illuminated only by the glow of the monitor before it.

As our eyes adjust to the darkness, we see that it is Simon the Stressed feverishly typing away. Moving closer, we can hear Simon muttering under his breath.

"Grumblesmurf Informix gunk. I thought we hired that contractor to do his own work and not badly copy mine.

[clack, clack, thunk]

Oh no, not again. This code shouldn't be working, but it does. Now, where is that grumblesmurfing manual I need ?"

Simon clickety-clacks some more on his keyboard.

"[sigh] now, I've seen this code before somewhere. Either I've got deja vu looking at code or that contractor has been blindly copying again."

More clickety-clacks issue forth until finally came the fluttering of a manual flying through the air, ending in a solid thunk.

"Oh Fsck it. I'm not getting anywhere with this"

Suddenly, an unusual sound comes from the machine room:

"Mooooo"

Simon looks up a little surprised at this "Hmmm, I've not gone without sleep long enough to start hearing things. That really sounded like a large bovine creature of some sort".

"Mooooo"

"Strange, We've not installed any Microsoft software on our machines; none of them should be acting like cows"

"Moooooooo"

"Again ? I'm sure we've not installed any cows within our machine room recently"

With this thought, Simon gets up and looks inside the machine room. And sees a large water buffalo standing in there. At this point, Simon's brain goes in several loops as he tries to work out how a water buffalo got into the machine room. The water buffalo itself is trying to work this out. It is a very confused beast right now. It was happily munching on some grass in a field and suddenly it is in a confined space with lots of things going "whirrrrr". It then sees the shape of troll and panics.

"Mooooooooo" *CRASH*

"Opps, there goes half the modems"

"Moooooooooo" *BANG*

"Oh uh, there goes the other half. Time for a fault report:"

==== Start fault report

TCP Fault Report 666.1-Jul-96

==================================================================
Ticket Status            : OPEN
Ticket Opened            : 05:30:25 on 1-Jul-96 by simes
Ticket Closed            :
Fault Start Time         : 05:25 1-Jul-96
Final Length of Fault    :
Final Cause of Fault     : TCPHWF - TCP Hardware failure
Reported By              : simes
==================================================================
 
Description:
No dial-in access to Southampton POP. No Freestyle customers can access any
services for the forseeable future.
 
Action Taken:

05:30 1-Jul-96: Emergency LARTs given out to Trolls.

05:29 1-Jul-96: Water buffalo tramples other half of modem rack

05:28 1-Jul-96: Water buffalo sees TCP Trolls getting closer and panics
                 even more.

05:27 1-Jul-96: Water buffalo tramples half of modem rack

05:26 1-Jul-96: Water buffalo sees TCP Trolls and panics

05:25 1-Jul-96: First noticed water buffalo wandering around machine room
 
Notes:

Unfortunately, our disaster plan did not allow for escaped water buffalo in the
machine room. This over-sight will be corrected as soon as possible. In the
meantime we are checking with our insurance company if we are covered in
situations involving water buffalo. From the initial comments, they appear to
have a water buffula exclusion clause.

==== End fault report

After the Water Buffalo was LARTed from the Tower by the Trolls, Simon the stressed set about finding how it happened.

"Hm, there doesn't appear to be any buffalo shaped holes in the windows. The door was secured by the last Troll out. The electric fence was in place and connected to the national grid. Even the pits with pungi sticks were ready. So how did that water buffalo get in ?"

Phil the peeved (the network troll) made a worrying discovery; Cisco routers had a bug within the IOS. When they are sent a BRD (Bovine Routing Discovery) packet the router generates a bovine creature, instead of generating the route to the nearest one. The BRD code is fairly buggy and so always generates water buffalo when it is receives a BRD packet. So....

sigh its been an interesting week.

Posted on 1st July 1996