Nachricht Nummer : 545 Übertragungszeit : 3 min 49 sec Nachricht von : WAM@ZAMIR-ZG.ztn.zer.de (Wam) Antworten an : wam@zamir-zg.ztn.zer.de Betrifft : Zagreb Diary 17 November 1994 Kopienempfänger : /REG/NEWS/DIARY/WAM, /SOC/CULTURE/YUGOSLAVIA, /SOC/CULTURE/CROATIA, /SOC/CULTURE/BOSNA-HERZGVNA, /CL/EUROPA/BALKAN, /APC/YUGO/ANTIWAR Erstellungsdatum : 19.11.1994 17:24:00 W+1 Zagreb Diary, 17 November, 1994 Dobar Dan, Today, my dear diary, a story of a sysop which was nearly on the end of his nerves. And not only since I heard on my answering machine this morning the voice of my son telling me that he really feels sick and like to see and hear me. He has high fever and I hope it is just one of this children things, but I would really like to be with him today, only 2000 Kilometre is far. I have at least the free possibility to go if I want I must be honest, lot's of people I know haven't. You, diary, must imagine that ZaMir-Zg isn't so big as it may be imagined by a lot of people. It is just a simple fido-a-like system (the original program is made the famous German computer hackers of CCC, can you imagine), on a few diskless machines which we connected to our best knowledge with a novel network. I suppose to know all that technics, since I am one of the sysops, but really much time to go deep into it I haven't. We hope we get a direct InterNet connection soon but for the time being all goes over two simple telephone lines in and out. If you see the handmade wiring your heart if your are technical will beat three times faster, but it works. Last week one of the other ZaMir system was Off-line for a while, their telephone line wasn't working. After a few days they found out that their telephone line went under their carpet and since people are running in and out this small wire had given up his heavy work. They thought that they hadn't pay their bill or even worst. We have the luxury in ZaMir that we have two telephone lines which are relative stable. So today I was sitting behind the console in what we with a proud word call our computer room. Some experimenting remotely from home hang our main system again so I had to go. I try to build in some routines to answer faq about "why there is war" and "who is fighting against whom" and so. After a long phonecall from our computer with the exchange host in Germany (we exchange via Germany mail with Beograd) slowly a small mystery started to take place. Before the phonecall we had about 90 megabyte left over on our main harddisk, but in a few minutes I saw it going down and suddenly all the machines started to make all kind of screaming noises. I watch the system slowly dying and I had to react on this cries for help. Just on that moment ofcourse half of our users in Zagreb wanted to collect their mail, so the noise of the machines was accompanied with a concert of two ringing old fashion phones. What o what happened. The sweat started to run down my back, I didn't do this did I and I looked at the message that our Novel network could work anymore because of harddisk problems. What kind of digital bomb was placed in our computer, was one of the thoughts I had. So on the only terminal I could get working I started to check all the conferences and found nearly at the bottom of the list the one who was responsible for this electronic very free avant-garde concert for 5 computers and 2 telephones. What could it be else than a Serbian song, or rather shit it is a Serbian song, which is responsible, oh, shit, couldn't it be at least Croatian or Slovenian, so it didn't look so biased. 200 na sat (200 per hour), one of the top hits in seems in Serbia at the moment, or so. Somebody liked to blast up our creative communication and send some nice tunes over the line. Music for when you working, so to say. If you know that digital music can't precisely be called compact if you consider their lengths of their files, you can imagine that a file from a Compact Disk at least is a few megabyte long. And yes, even when the net is anarchistic organised there are a few rules, and one rules is that files should not be longer than say 63 Kbytes. The sender of this hit knew this or rather his programme knew it, so all the music came in 48 or so packages of 62 Kbytes. On our system a lot of people are reading the information (or rather scanning I think) from this conferences and since we have only two line and a few hundred users, we don't like them to do that on- line, blocking the way in for all the others. Another nice software programme from Germany helps us that people can fast collect their mail and read it off-line on their own computer. In order to keep the on-line time short all the conferences which they like to read are putted aside in a special file, which they download, for each person one. This song went with other words to all those people and in no time all the 90 Mbytes which we still had was filled up with music. The rest of the afternoon I spend to remove all the song messages out of the waiting files. If somebody in Split need 2 hours telephone time to download his or her information I can imagine that her or he is little bit, let's say slightly disappointed when he or she found out that it is this song. At least that was what I thought at that moment. And to avoid that other people had the same first brain-wave as I, namely either sending the whole song back to sender, or even worst running outside buying the first CD with Croatian music I can find and mail it back on the net to start a virtual discotheque. Realising that that didn't even fitted on our harddisk, even after removing our cultural present, I forgot about it and cool down. The next moment the system started phoning Sarajevo and Sarajevo reacted positive after 10 calls, they are still on-line, although the news told that the building in which the computer stands was hit. I watch the exchange and remembered that I was a bit laying in my diary some days ago. The computer on the other side is not any longer a laptop, Eric has brought in the summer a new desktop system. A bigger target so to say. Last but not least I had the time to start paying more attention to the contents of the files which I had been fighting against for the last hours. Even when I had a super computer with sound blaster and all the crazy stuff on board, than I still couldn't enjoy the song, a few packages were missing. Hopefully that wouldn't come tomorrow as Ps. Mir za somewhere in or around Hrvatska, Wam --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Zagreb Diary can be found on a lot of different electronic networks, it is copyright free and can be ported to any network or other means of communication you like, but please drop my a line, you can reach by sending a message to WAM@ZAMIR- ZG.ztn.zer.de. Zagreb Diary is dedicated to Tyche, Pjort and Rik, so that they found out what there father have been doing all that time in Zagreb. ## CrossPoint v3.02 ##