4 September 2005
Bruce Jackson
Serving Buffalo Report
Buffalo Report was down from slightly after 1:00 p.m. Thursday, September 1, through slightly after midnight Sunday, September 4. Our server is in downtown New Orleans and when the city lost power we went dark.
The server has an auxiliary generator, but the generator is on the 11th floor and the 55-gallon drums of kerosene were in the basement garage. Along with everything else, the elevators were out.
By late Saturday night or early Sunday morning they got a generator and the drums in the same place and everything was back up.
After we sent notes to our mailing list about the outage and after we posted a brief note about it when we got back on line, several people wrote to ask why Buffalo Report, which is edited two miles from the Canadian border, is coming out of New Orleans.
It has to do with the nature of cyberspace.
Cyberspace
There is no "place" as we know it in cyberspace. Information of course exists on physical computers somewhere, but the location of those computers doesn't matter to someone looking for or using information that is on the web. Some cyberspace is totally self-enclosed: all the computers in a building, say, with no connections to the outside world. But the world wide web doesn't exist in a building. It exists anyplace it exists. Something that is available is available anywhere is equally everywhere. There are places you cannot go because cyberdoors block the way, but if you have the key—a password—the door opens for you.
That is abstract, as, in its way, the web is abstract. If you want to get a sense of how the web works, take a look at this page on the "HowStuffWorks web site, or The Animated Internet on LearntheNet.com.
Here, for the writers of those letters, is a very simplified explanation of how I think Buffalo Report gets from my screen to your screen, and how an office on the eleventh floor of an office building in New Orleans got into the process.
Physical space
For all practical purposes, there are only four physical places for users of the world wide web, four places where information comes out of cyberspace and touches ground. First is the place where the information is composed and sent to a place where it is made available. In the case of Buffalo Report, that place is my desk in Buffalo, New York.
Second is the computer through which we connect to the Internet, our ISP, or Internet Service Provider. Your computer's modem connects your computer to the ISP via a dial-up connection, plugging into a jack, or via a cable. You can do email through your ISP and you can browse the web through it.
Web pages—the screens you see on your browser when you type in the URL, uniform resource locator—are all located on a computer somewhere. That can be the same computer as the one on which it is created, but that is uncommon. The usual arrangement is for those files to be gathered on a large computer with a huge amount of memory, one that can handle a great deal of traffic. That computer, or computer array, the third physical place, is usually called a "server."
The server receives files from the originator, puts them online, and gives them to anyone who comes asking the right question. That question is always in terms of the URL—the Universal Resource Locator. The URL is the equivalent of a complete telephone number: country code, area code, individual phone number. Punch those into a telephone and within seconds a specific telephone somewhere in the world rings. Type a URL into your computer's browser and a vast invisible and unobtrusive network takes you to the place you want to go. The information is moved using hypertext transfer protocol—http. The urls you and I use to access sites on the world wide web all begin with the command http://, which tells your browser what kind of thing you want it to look at and how you want it to do the looking.
When someone like you or I wants to set up a web site, we either do it through an established computer system to which we have access (all of my academically-based web sites are on the university computer where I work) or through a commercial server, the owners of which we pay a fee for hosting our site and, sometimes, an additional fee based on the number of visits our site gets (all my non-academic sites are on a server not connected at all with the university where I work).
Because every point on the internet is everywhere at once, a server can be anywhere. The only requirement is that it can be found by the traffic control system of the internet, and that it is accessible to people posting pages on their web sites. Physically, it could be in the next room or halfway around the world. There is no difference for the person inputting data or the person reading or downloading it. Buffalo Report, for example, has regular readers all around the world. They all enter the same simple instruction in their browser to reach us: http://buffaloreport.com .
Buffalo Report on the web
When I started publishing Buffalo Report in March 2002, I was determined that it be free, that it never have ads or subscriptions. I'd recently quit a weekly newspaper where editorial decisions were made in part on the basis of the publisher's relationships with advertisers. It had been ugly, so I was determined that if I did this, it would be in a way that Buffalo Report would never be beholden to anybody.
That meant I needed a server I could afford, one that also provided certain other services, such as email forwarding.
I did what anyone does nowadays: I told Google what I was looking for. Google gave me the urls of several firms that had the services I wanted. I looked at their pages, found one that seemed simple enough for me (I'd never done a web page before), and Buffalo Report was soon online.
I never knew where Buffalo Report's server was until I started getting emails from readers Thursday night saying the site was down. I usually take one or two such emails as a momentary communications glitch and I pay them no mind, but there were a bunch of these and they continued. I wondered if the problem had something to do with the mess down on the Gulf. I looked up the server's site and found a message saying they were having some problems because they were located on the eleventh floor of an office building at 650 Pydras street in downtown New Orleans and the whole city was without power but they hoped to have their standby generator going shortly. Later there was another message saying they didn't know when they'd be up but they were working on it. I don't know how they were getting those messages out—perhaps they were linking through battery-powered transmitters to a satellite that put them through another system. As I said, with things on the web, you never know how anything got there; all you know is what you see.
Before this week, as far as I was concerned, Buffalo Report's server existed everywhere and anywhere and nowhere, just like everything else on the world wide web. Now I know exactly where they are, and so do you.
Copyright 2005 by Buffalo Report, Inc.