Hacker News Reader

Comment by longwave | Hacker News Reader

This reminded me of the best TCP timeout story I've ever heard, the case of the 500-mile email: http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

View on HN

Great story with the added bonus of showing me the GNU Units command. What a fantastic program, no more Googling when I need to convert stuff.

Indeed, I just checked OSX - sadly, units doesn't know about millilightseconds ("586 units, 56 prefixes").

"milli lightsecond" should do it.

"milli lightsecond" doesn't work on OSX unfortunately (under 10.6 at least). One value which does work is "3 c-millisecond".

(I learned this by reading the /usr/share/misc/units.lib file and finding the lightyear definition: "c-yr")

Ah, whoops, I assumed it was GNU Units. Thanks and c-millisecond is cute.

GNU Units (available in Homebrew) is much more complete than the OS X version.

Much better: "2562 units, 85 prefixes, 66 nonlinear units"

Since it took me a moment to figure it out, heres how to install it:

brew install gnu-units

then run as: gunits

So it lives happily besides the default units command.

It still won't let me convert 'bytes / square mm' to my prefered data density format, 'libraries of congress / football field'. So it needs work.

It does, amusingly, know about nanoacres, a unit of measurement sometimes employed when describing chip die surface area.

Take a look at qalculator. You won't even remember about Units after it.

Also good: http://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/

Or were you using GNU Units the whole time?

http://revealingerrors.com/google_miscalculator

And since we're adding random related things, lcamtuf's museum of broken packets is an old, but always interesting read: http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/mobp/

Good read. I guess now we'd be interested in hearing your 2nd best TCP timeout story.

I realise you're trying to be facetious, but probably this one: http://mina.naguib.ca/blog/2012/10/22/the-little-ssh-that-so...

thats a great set of TCP timeout stories, enjoyed reading. In what circles do you travel that you comea cross multiple niche stories like this?

Not the OP but both have been posted on HN before..

That was quite impressive, not sure I would have found that out.

I know I'm stretching my luck, but since those were great reads - do you have a 3rd best TCP timeout story? :)

Here is one on IPv6 not TCP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709952

For more stories, see the hacker news discussion on that SSH packet corruption issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709438

What makes this story so great is how determined they were to find the real problem even though it was already "fixed" by changing the routes. Who knows how much anguish this person has spared other people by not giving up until the problem was truly solved. Doing it with such skill and ingenuity was the icing on the cake, I could read these kind of stories all day.

That may be the most well researched bug report I have ever heard of.... and from a user too

Reply on news.ycombinator.com