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Comment by ghayes

4 years ago

Agree, I will always upvote it because it’s a good story for those who haven’t read it, and it begets really good comments and other war stories from seasoned devs.

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ghayes

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KennyBlanken  4 years ago

What baffles me is that nobody seems to have called out the fact that the story is utter nonsense.

I posted a longer explanation in a lower level comment, but the biggest problem is that the author has a fundamental misunderstanding of both the speed of propagation, and how TCP works.

There is no way any of what he wrote actually happened, including "sendmail defaults to a few ms timeout."

  • Svetlitski  4 years ago

    All of this is addressed in the FAQ about the story: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

    • MertsA  4 years ago

      I can believe there was a bizarre bug setting the timeout to zero and that there was a small delay handling the timeout leading to only quite low latency connections working. I don't for a second believe that the author didn't intentionally dream up a large chunk of this story. The FAQ claims that it wasn't actually 3 milliseconds and that he came up with this time by calculating the "adjusted" time for a given distance. But then he also claims that he took the timeout and used units to confirm the 500 miles. This is a blatant tautology, the speed of light had very little to do with this, the "epiphany" moment was definitely made up. Then there's the handwaving away the problem that sendmail V5 wouldn't have worked at all with a V8 config file. "Oh Sun must have patched their version to run like that".

      That whole FAQ reads very much as "I didn't lie, I just made up all the details". I'm less convinced of the veracity of the story after reading his explanations of all the holes in his story.