BT also said that the Paddington fire and flood had affected no more than 30 exchanges.
BT has clarified the chain of events. As it currently understands the incident, flooding caused an electrical fire. The fire brigade attended and "addressed" the fire, a spokeswoman said. The root cause of the major outage is thought to be the flooding.
We have received the following communication from BT Openreach regarding a National Datastream service outage affecting upto 37,500 circuits.
Description of Outage: Several BBLCs terminating to Reading and Harbour Exchange are down. All datastream customers terminating on rdg-0-dsl, he-1-dsl, and he-2-dsl, are affected by this outage. |
Geographic location of affected services: (where possible to define). Due to the nature of our network affected exchanges could be anywhere in the UK |
Customers may experience issues with their ADSL connection, the router will be able to sync and obtain a connection , yet traffic will not pass (Web/Email/VoIP services will be unavailable).
Updates when received from BT Openreach will be posted here.
** 12:17 : 437 exchanges have been confirmed as affected by this outage, Customer Services have received a document detailing affected exchanges.
** 12:30 : BT have taken the decision to close North Paddington Exchange due to flooding , LLU services provided by Tiscali at this exchange only are experiencing the same issues as above.
We are aware of a fire at a BT site in North Paddington, London and this is likely to affect the routing of calls that would have passed through that node. This will affect all communication providers that route through this node.
We have no reports of this affecting any of our users at present but are closely monitoring the situation and have contingency plans in place.
***Update 11:20***
We have lost connection to one exchange but our voice routes have been rerouted where necessary so no ill effects should be seen by any users. We will however leave this status update ‘at risk’ pending updates.
STD codes effected via BT Customer Services:-
Dialling codes affected: 01132 01142 01159 01162 01179 01189 01204 01206 01209 012135 012174 01223 01224 01225 01227 01229 01233 01235 01236 01241 01243 01244 01248 01252 01254 01255 01268 01273 01274 01276 01277 01278 01279 01284 01293 01297 01303 01304 01306 01322 01327 01329 01332 01341 01343 01344 01354 01372 01376 01382 01403 01407 014124 014188 01423 01424 01428 01443 01452 01460 01474 01480 01487 01488 01489 01491 01494 01495 015123 015152 015172 01526 01548 01580 01603 01604 016140 016163 01621 01622 01626 01628 01634 01635 01638 01642 01676 01678 01690 01702 01707 01708 01727 01733 01736 01747 01749 01752 01772 01786 01787 01788 01789 01792 01794 01795 01803 01825 01842 01865 01869 01892 01902 01903 01908 01909 019141 019143 019148 01920 01923 01924 01925 01926 01932 01945 01953 01983 01992 01993 0203073 0203075 0203112 0203144 0203204 0203205 0203206 0203214 0203219 0203230 0203238 0203275 0207052 0207121 0207159 0207165 0207168 0207209 0207221 0207224 0207225 0207229 0207240 0207258 02072620207266 0207286 0207287 0207289 0207292 0207307 0207317 0207319 0207328 0207353 0207355 0207371 0207372 02073770207384 0207394 0207399 0207402 0207408 0207409 0207419 0207431 0207432 0207433 0207434 0207435 0207436 02074370207439 0207443 0207447 0207449 0207460 0207474 0207478 0207483 0207486 0207487 0207491 0207493 0207494 02074950207499 0207534 0207535 0207537 0207538 0207563 0207569 0207581 0207584 0207586 0207589 0207590 0207591 02076020207603 0207604 0207613 0207616 0207624 0207625 0207629 0207638 0207647 0207681 0207692 0207706 0207722 0207723 0207724 0207725 0207734 0207794 0207813 0207823 0207837 0207851 0207907 0207916 0207935 0207987 0208301 0208309 0208346 0208399 0208400 0208466 0208503 0208563 0208567 0208573 0208596 0208653 0208686 0208699 0208723 0208726 0208735 0208741 0208742 0208747 0208748 0208759 0208803 0208834 0208846 0208892 0208968 0208987 0208993 0208994 0208995 0208996 0238020 0238040 0238042 0238047 0238066 0238077 0238084 0238087 0239229 0239232 0239281 0247660 0292047 Estimated time to resolve: 2hrs We are aware of a temporary problem in the London and surrounding area that may be causing some users difficulties accessing the Internet. Our engineers are working to resolve this problem and we apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.Wed 31/03/2010 at 11am Ongoing 
Problem in the London and surrounding area (20CN and 21CN)
Still, Gnutella hit a nerve. Napster had been sued three months before, and many file sharers were rightfully fearing that the music industry would eventually prevail in court and force Napster to switch off its servers. With Gnutella, no such switch existed, as the client was allowing direct P2P connections without the help of any centralized server. Add to it the fact that Gnutella, unlike Napster, allowed users to swap videos and software as well as MP3s, and you begin to see why many immediately viewed Gnutella as the next step in P2P file sharing.
A step, one should add, that made Frankel’s employer AOL more than a little nervous. It only took the Internet giant a day to force Frankel and his colleagues to take down Gnutella – but even that was too long, as countless sites quickly started to first mirror, then build upon Frankel’s official Gnutella client. There’s always been a little bit of mystery surrounding the exact happenings of those days, but some people have been musing that a person with a surprising amount of insider knowledge showed up in one of the first IRC chat rooms dedicated to Gnutella soon after AOL pulled the plug, only to provide some very detailed information about the inner workings of the client’s P2P protocol.
Speaking of IRC: Early versions of the software didn’t really have any way for users to connect, save for entering another user’s IP address, which is why IRC quickly became an integral part of the early days of Gnutella. It was also in those IRC chat rooms that the myth of Gnutella as a seemingly invincible P2P protocol was born, and the fact that AOL tried but couldn’t contain the software seemed to fit right into that picture. Gnutella was one of the very first P2P apps I ever wrote about, so I lurked in those chat rooms as well, where people were cheering the fact that someone finally found a file sharing solution that couldn’t be shut down. I still remember one IRC user saying: “We’ve started a damn cult again!”
Only Gnutella wasn’t really ready to be a cult. The network routed search requests from peer to peer, leading to an exponential growth of traffic as its network became bigger. Napster programmer Jordan Ritter described the problem early on in a paper titled “Why Gnutella Can’t Scale. No, Really,” and Frankel himself, who has hardly ever gone on the record about Gnutella, once stated that he was fully aware of “how poorly it would scale” when he released the client.
Still, Gnutella captured the imagination of many, one of them being Mark Gorton, founder of the New York-based Lime Group. Gorton was at the time pursuing a vision of automating businesses through structured data, and Gnutella, as something that could, for example, distribute real estate listings wrapped in XML, seemed to fit that image quite nicely. Early versions of the Gnutella client of Gorton’s LimeWire venture were still written with this vision in mind, hoping to build a P2P network that could eventually be used to do all kinds of things with which we’re now familiar on the web, thanks to web services.
LimeWire’s engineers joined a growing group of developers loosely connected through web sites like the long-defunct Gnutella.wego.com (whose admin Gene Kan tragically committed suicide in 2002) and mailing lists like the one for the Gnutella Developer Forum, and one of the first issues to be tackled was scalability. The introduction of a two-tiered system of ordinary clients and so-called Ultrapeers helped grow both the network as a whole and each user’s search horizon. The idea was also later adopted by the developers of KaZaA, whose own take on this two-tiered approach still lives on in Skype’s P2P network.
Technical improvements like these helped Gnutella to grow, but the competition was quick to catch up. Bram Cohen unveiled a first version of BitTorrent only two years after Frankel had published Gnutella, and BitTorrent quickly became the file sharing client of choice for sharing videos online. Part of BitTorrent’s quick rise to fame was its modular simplicity: Cohen had outsourced much of the search and indexing of files to torrent web sites, only handling the actual distribution of data within the client. Gnutella on the other hand was meant to work without any web server. That made it much more invincible, but also much less accessible to users who migrated from apps and clients to a world of web services.
Another issue that has plagued Gnutella from the beginning is not technical, but legal. The protocol was supposed to outsmart trigger-happy lawyers, but the mere fact that there wasn’t a central switch to turn off the Gnutella network didn’t stop rights holders from going after people and companies associated with it. Lawsuits and legal threats forced Morpheus, Xolox, Bearshare and a number of other companies and developers to throw the towel.
LimeWire got sued by the music industry as well in 2006, but that hasn’t stopped the company from continuing with the development and monetization of its client. LimeWire’s client also utilizes BitTorrent these days, but LimeWire’s VP of Product Management Jason Herskowitz told me during a phone conversation that Gnutella has “worked really well” for the company, and that its engineers are looking into ways to make Gnutella once again more attractive to developers by exposing some of its functionality through web services. “There is still a long future ahead for Gnutella,” he predicted.
Not everyone agrees with that outlook. Adam Fisk, who was hired by LimeWire as one of its first developers in the summer of 2000, but left the company in 2004 to eventually start his own P2P venture dubbed Littleshot, believes that some core assumptions of the Gnutella protocol are outdated. “I don’t think that distributed P2P search makes any sense,” he told me, explaining that the very server-less search functionality that made Gnutella superior to Napster also ended up being its biggest burden, and that it would be much easier to have servers handle search and just use P2P to deliver data – a recipe that has already helped BitTorrent succeed.
Sure, LimeWire and some other Gnutella clients could still stick around for a long time, Fisk admitted, but he was skeptical that we would ever see any significant new project based on Gnutella. “That would be shocking,” he said.
Mirror
