[WAY OT]: concern over public peering points...

Thu Jul 8 23:34:50 UTC 2004

In message <5AFA5A2C102DAB4692ABC1E87E0780CA089B205E at OCCLUST02EVS1.ugd.att.com>
, "Stewart, William C (Bill), RTSLS" writes:
>
>Steve wrote:
>> water - 8" of it
>Scary stuff - was that at Murray Hill?

Yes, in Building 5.  There was also a long length of thick coax down 
the hill to the main complex -- it wasn't easy to get nice, standard 
fiber in 1982 -- that was the original Murray Hill backbone.  Yes, coax 
between widely-separated buildings -- great for ground loops....  That 
was the first link in what came to be known as the "wet backbone" -- 
wet because the cage in the basement containing the repeaters was 
occasionally flooded with fluids considerably nastier than water...  
(We won't even discuss the time an electrician accidentally cut through 
one of the legs of this (thick, yellow, coax) backbone, and decided to 
splice it with wire nuts and electrical tape.  This was cira 1989.)

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb