At 04:02 12/31/1999 -0800, I Am Not An Isp wrote:
However, the phone system is almost completely useless. He has two phones in his office and cannot call one from the other. (Although he says they are on different exchanges, so they might not hit the same CO.) Dial tone is there, but after dialing numbers, just dead air. Which is weird, because when I called him it rang and he picked up, no static or anything. (We do have a switch in NZ, but we have to ride the local PTT to the destination phone.)
This is causing unusual failure modes for some systems, especially ISDN routers which are common in .nz and .au.
I wonder if this is due to the fact that everyone in the time zone is picking up the phone and looking for a dial tone, or calling all their friends to see if they survived. Our local phone company circulated a recommendation to avoid picking up the phone at midnight. A couple of million people doing this would cause some undesirable effects (fast busies, no dial tone and so on). Seeing the grocery store last night, it wouldn't surprise me if most did this anyway. And of course, they will blame the ensuing failure on Y2K. Can't win. :) *********************************************************** Andrea Abrahamsen (nee Di Lecce) (416) 935-6485 SMC Platform Specialist, Network Operations Rogers Cablesystems Inc. 1 Mount Pleasant Road, Toronto, M4Y 2Y5 ***********************************************************