[time-nuts] Off Topic in the Extreme

[Bob Camp]

Hi

 

Back up again on email. It's completely unclear who or what took things
down. It's also unclear what fixed it. All I can be sure of is I neither
broke it or fixed it. It came back up today at around 10.

 

I had an "interesting" conversation with an advanced tech support supervisor
at Century Link / Embarq. According to this gentleman, their lines are only
guaranteed to pass port 80 traffic (HTTP). Anything other than that is "not
covered by the service agreement". The only thing they will guarantee you
can get to is their web site. Past that, if it's broke they have no
responsibility what so ever for fixing it. That's not referring to port or
traffic blocking. They all swear they don't and would never do that. 

 

Since timing and the like are going to things other than port 80, and using
protocols other than http does, I assume his statements = no timing traffic
support. 

 

The guy could easily have been mistaken, that sort of thing does happen
around midnight. If what he said is true, any sort of system that relied on
their network for time would be *very* much in trouble if something subtle
broke. Being broke in a way that passes one thing and not another is
unusual, but not impossible. Crazy stuff ..

 

Bob