tip: web requests should not be measured in Hz [hertz] as that is only used for periodic frequencies, which random events (like requests hitting a web server) are not!
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@heavyimage @moof @4censord @sophie I heard a story from my “computer networking” professor in around 1985 of having been to Xerox PARC when Ethernet was brand new, and they’d tapped into the main network cable in the hallway ceiling, attached a simple amplifier and an electric motor and a piece of string. The busier the network, the faster the string twirled.
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@moof @4censord @sophie
One of my jobs during my “I’m contemplating my third switch of academic majors, perhaps I should take some time off from school to think about this” wanderjahren was babysitting the larval Internet at night.(push digression)
I would call the phone company and complain about high-bandwidth (a whole 56K!) phone lines. Occasionally I would have to disturb a night-watchman and talk them through looking at the light panel on the Interface Message Processor (IMP — larval switches or gateways in today’s thinking). Very rarely I’d talk them through toggling the 16-word boot loader that would boot the IMP from a neighbor through the modem.
(pop digression)Logs were printed by an inkjet printer — silent, save for line-feeds.
I could hear certain patterns of line feeds and (coupled with the time of day and time of year) know which IMP needed help without looking at the log before the monitoring host alarm timeout.
(push digression)
Time of day and time of year? What?In the southern US during those days, many phone lines were carried by microwave — I’m sure the towers for these have all been replaced by cell towers (more likely fiber buried along a rail line).
During the spring, as the sun rose, the damp would rise from the rivers and lakes. The mist would interfere with the microwaves, and I could watch in the log as the sun rose and phone lines failed in a line from east to west.
(pop digression)This pattern also had a characteristic pattern of line-feeds.
(push to possibly apocryphal digression)
That’s not the only meteorological phenomenon visible in network traffic logs. I heard it said that David Mills, the creator of the Network Time Protocol (NTP), could tell when a heat-wave hit the American Midwest, because the sun would heat the copper wires carrying phone signals, they’d expand, and the altered distance across the United States would show up in NTP packet timing.
(pop from digression)@lain_7 @moof @4censord @sophie
I don't know about the copper used for data transmission, but it's fairly well known that changing local temperature will change the local timekeeping properties of common computers. See e.g., https://austinsnerdythings.com/2025/11/24/worlds-most-stable-raspberry-pi-81-better-ntp-with-thermal-management/ where there's a clear daily cycle in the "frequency offset" that is inversely correlated with local CPU temperature.
I have measured the same thing myself.
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@moof But wouldn't it be more prone to just rainy day exploits, upon cloud integration?
@numodular @moof Boo! Boo! (Well done.)
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@lain_7 @moof @4censord @sophie
I don't know about the copper used for data transmission, but it's fairly well known that changing local temperature will change the local timekeeping properties of common computers. See e.g., https://austinsnerdythings.com/2025/11/24/worlds-most-stable-raspberry-pi-81-better-ntp-with-thermal-management/ where there's a clear daily cycle in the "frequency offset" that is inversely correlated with local CPU temperature.
I have measured the same thing myself.
@stylus @moof @4censord @sophie
Yes “real time clocks” in chips are notoriously bad. The time I was talking about (notice the use of copper, not fiber) preceded the widespread use of reliable time-keeping even in main frames (no cellular net to distribute time-of-day from an atomic clock somewhere) which is why a protocol was developed (NTP) to distribute an approximation of click time suitable for distributed applications.
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@stylus @moof @4censord @sophie
Yes “real time clocks” in chips are notoriously bad. The time I was talking about (notice the use of copper, not fiber) preceded the widespread use of reliable time-keeping even in main frames (no cellular net to distribute time-of-day from an atomic clock somewhere) which is why a protocol was developed (NTP) to distribute an approximation of click time suitable for distributed applications.
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@4censord @sophie I remember talking to someone in the late 90s, early 00s that told me a colleague had tied in a sound generator to their company’s smtp servers, and it would play forest sounds in the background all day in the sysadmin office. I seem to recall that the amount of rain was tied to the load, and different bird calls represented different types and sizes of mail.
It was done in such a way as to be a pleasant background sound, but at the same time, when something went wrong, the sysops would hear it long before monitoring flagged it.
I suspect this system eventually died a death due to moving to a cloud provider, but it does show that monitoring can be something other than visual…
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@heavyimage @moof @4censord @sophie I heard a story from my “computer networking” professor in around 1985 of having been to Xerox PARC when Ethernet was brand new, and they’d tapped into the main network cable in the hallway ceiling, attached a simple amplifier and an electric motor and a piece of string. The busier the network, the faster the string twirled.
@irvingreid @moof @4censord @sophie I think maybe this is what I was thinking of!
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@4censord @sophie I remember talking to someone in the late 90s, early 00s that told me a colleague had tied in a sound generator to their company’s smtp servers, and it would play forest sounds in the background all day in the sysadmin office. I seem to recall that the amount of rain was tied to the load, and different bird calls represented different types and sizes of mail.
It was done in such a way as to be a pleasant background sound, but at the same time, when something went wrong, the sysops would hear it long before monitoring flagged it.
I suspect this system eventually died a death due to moving to a cloud provider, but it does show that monitoring can be something other than visual…
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@4censord @sophie I remember talking to someone in the late 90s, early 00s that told me a colleague had tied in a sound generator to their company’s smtp servers, and it would play forest sounds in the background all day in the sysadmin office. I seem to recall that the amount of rain was tied to the load, and different bird calls represented different types and sizes of mail.
It was done in such a way as to be a pleasant background sound, but at the same time, when something went wrong, the sysops would hear it long before monitoring flagged it.
I suspect this system eventually died a death due to moving to a cloud provider, but it does show that monitoring can be something other than visual…
@moof @4censord @sophie The EDSAC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDSAC) could have a wire attached from the accumulator to a speaker, allowing operators to listen to programs as they ran. For example, while it was generating primes you could hear it counting them out.
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@moof @4censord @sophie The EDSAC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDSAC) could have a wire attached from the accumulator to a speaker, allowing operators to listen to programs as they ran. For example, while it was generating primes you could hear it counting them out.
@moof @4censord @sophie I was part of a group project at university to build an EDSAC simulator. We had no idea what the original sounded like, so threw stuff at the serial port and hoped for the best. Eventually we got one of the original designers (David Wheeler, if memory serves) to come and listen to it; he said it didn't sound much like the original but clearly served the same function, so we were happy enough with that.
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@4censord @sophie I remember talking to someone in the late 90s, early 00s that told me a colleague had tied in a sound generator to their company’s smtp servers, and it would play forest sounds in the background all day in the sysadmin office. I seem to recall that the amount of rain was tied to the load, and different bird calls represented different types and sizes of mail.
It was done in such a way as to be a pleasant background sound, but at the same time, when something went wrong, the sysops would hear it long before monitoring flagged it.
I suspect this system eventually died a death due to moving to a cloud provider, but it does show that monitoring can be something other than visual…
@moof was the "something's wrong," sound a dying crow or something. terrible sqwawking. good use of alternative monitoring modes though *smile*
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@4censord @sophie I remember talking to someone in the late 90s, early 00s that told me a colleague had tied in a sound generator to their company’s smtp servers, and it would play forest sounds in the background all day in the sysadmin office. I seem to recall that the amount of rain was tied to the load, and different bird calls represented different types and sizes of mail.
It was done in such a way as to be a pleasant background sound, but at the same time, when something went wrong, the sysops would hear it long before monitoring flagged it.
I suspect this system eventually died a death due to moving to a cloud provider, but it does show that monitoring can be something other than visual…
@moof @4censord @sophie I remember reading a story about a networking department monitoring network load in the coax era by swapping a terminator for a small electric motor with a long strip of plastic attached. More network load == faster spinning motor == wildly dancing plastic strip.
There’s also a http log visualiser based on pong that I forgot the name of. That is mighty fun to run on a Ubuntu mirror. On the hour, *WILD* pong assault.
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@4censord @sophie I remember talking to someone in the late 90s, early 00s that told me a colleague had tied in a sound generator to their company’s smtp servers, and it would play forest sounds in the background all day in the sysadmin office. I seem to recall that the amount of rain was tied to the load, and different bird calls represented different types and sizes of mail.
It was done in such a way as to be a pleasant background sound, but at the same time, when something went wrong, the sysops would hear it long before monitoring flagged it.
I suspect this system eventually died a death due to moving to a cloud provider, but it does show that monitoring can be something other than visual…
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@moof was the "something's wrong," sound a dying crow or something. terrible sqwawking. good use of alternative monitoring modes though *smile*
@bigpawedbear Generally I think it was a change in the pattern of birdsong. Every email was a chirp or tweet. If you had a whole burst of emails all of a sudden, you would hear it as a cacophony. If you heard a lot more, say, crows than, say, bluejays, that could be indicative of a larger number of MIME-encoded emails over a certain size, and the general mix of sounds would sound a little… off. That should be enough to start looking at monitoring and logs
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@bigpawedbear Generally I think it was a change in the pattern of birdsong. Every email was a chirp or tweet. If you had a whole burst of emails all of a sudden, you would hear it as a cacophony. If you heard a lot more, say, crows than, say, bluejays, that could be indicative of a larger number of MIME-encoded emails over a certain size, and the general mix of sounds would sound a little… off. That should be enough to start looking at monitoring and logs
@moof ah, so if you suddenly had a murder of crows, it would be signs that something was aflap *smile*
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@sophie and use clicks to indicate each one!
geiger counter here we gooo!! -
@4censord @sophie I remember talking to someone in the late 90s, early 00s that told me a colleague had tied in a sound generator to their company’s smtp servers, and it would play forest sounds in the background all day in the sysadmin office. I seem to recall that the amount of rain was tied to the load, and different bird calls represented different types and sizes of mail.
It was done in such a way as to be a pleasant background sound, but at the same time, when something went wrong, the sysops would hear it long before monitoring flagged it.
I suspect this system eventually died a death due to moving to a cloud provider, but it does show that monitoring can be something other than visual…
Nuclear power stations have a criticality alarm which sounds all the time, it's when it stops that there is a problem and you really don't want to be there.
It is apparently more jarring when it stops compared to starting a new sound.
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@moof @4censord @sophie A friend of mine showed me the idea ages ago: https://pestilenz.org/~bauerm/shoestring/2004/06/30#netsound
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@4censord @sophie I remember talking to someone in the late 90s, early 00s that told me a colleague had tied in a sound generator to their company’s smtp servers, and it would play forest sounds in the background all day in the sysadmin office. I seem to recall that the amount of rain was tied to the load, and different bird calls represented different types and sizes of mail.
It was done in such a way as to be a pleasant background sound, but at the same time, when something went wrong, the sysops would hear it long before monitoring flagged it.
I suspect this system eventually died a death due to moving to a cloud provider, but it does show that monitoring can be something other than visual…
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As far as I know, this is not true. What is true is that the Trino Vercellese nuclear power station in Italy had acoustic transducers (basically microphones) mounted at several important points in the primary circuit, with the sound being piped to speakers in the control room, and after a few months the operators found that they could infer the state of the plant more quickly and reliably from that sound than from the instruments and gages. It makes the sound effects in STAR TREK (1966) suddenly seem a lot more reasonable.
