Cable cut didn’t send Oz Transit of Venus feed dark

Network config, not backhoe mayhem

As the world readied to spent hours cyber-slacking to watch the Transit of Venus yesterday, a careless backhoe was being accused of sending NASA’s Alice Springs feed offline.

The cable cut, 20 Km south of the Territorian town of Mataranka, knocked a large slab of the largely-empty state offline, including Alice Springs and Tennant Creek.

Mataranka, near the cable cut

By a curious coincidence, the NASA feed from Centralian Middle School crashed at pretty much the same time – but according to The Herald Sun it was not, as assumed at the time, because of the cable cut. Rather, a misconfigured IP address in the school’s network (rather hilariously called an “intellectual property address” in the Herald Sun piece) caused the outage.

By the time Telstra was working on the cable cut, the school had fixed its network. ®