(no subject)

[roadrunnertwice]

Did an Akamai repeater get hit by lightning or something? The whole internet is slower than shit this weekend.

Comments

[salieri.livejournal.com]

Usually when someone uses a term I don't understand, I'm too embarrassed to ask what it means. However, a google search for "akamai repeater" gives this very livejournal post as the first hit. So since I'm not the only one who's lost, what's an "akamai repeater?"

[gyladia.livejournal.com]

I got: Akamai being "a company that provides a distributed computing platform for global Internet content and application delivery"

And I looked up repeater with the internet.

"An Internet repeater is a system which enables amateur (ham) radio users to talk to each other over the Internet, without the use of RF links, leased lines, or satellites"

For some reason I was expecting a reference to star wars, because it really sounds like a type of blaster.

[roadrunnertwice]

Pe-cheeeew! —Yeah, just substitute "thing" for "repeater" and the post makes more sense. Sorry.

[roadrunnertwice]

Ahahahaaaaaaaehhhh. I probably used the wrong term for it? Sometimes I talk about shit without remembering to translate from whatever moon-language the inside of my head uses.

Akamai is a, um, content mirroring and load-balancing service, and a lot of important websites do this thing where certain parts of the site get served from whatever Akamai... thing (mirror?) is closest to you. And I think I remember there being an incident where some Akamai stuff went down and it wrecked a little havoc, but I may be mistaken.

Anyway, what ACTUALLY happened today was that the family router occasionally forgets about the existence of certain servers (with a special enmity for the Timberland Library), and I think it managed to forget about one of those Akamai mirrors. Or all of 'em. Or something else important. I dunno; it made the internet suck and then I power-cycled the thing and the problem went away.