We start this week with an interesting question my friend Dan O'Neill (La Jolla, Calif.) raised in a list we both subscribe to. Dan remotely manages some 16,000 networked embedded Linux servers around the world (how cool is that?) as part of his business. Dan's problem is this:

"Where can I find a live or nearly live discussion of network outage problems? The unofficial #nanog [North American Network Operators Group] IRC channel has been overrun with kiddies for years so that's not valuable anymore.

"At 8:30pm PDT I noticed that transit across the Internet was exceptionally slow. A look at Keynote reported problems between Cogent, Internap, XO and others with packet loss between 3.5% and 6%. By 9 p.m. the problem had gotten worse with Savvis and Qwest reporting similar loss percentages. At 2 a.m. Friday (I happened to wake up and thought I'd check) Internap and Qwest are reporting 6.5% packet loss.

"I smell a DDOS problem on the greater Interwebs but can find no discussion of the issue anywhere. Nothing on Twitter other than ridiculous Tweets of "my Internet is down" or "Comcast sucks" -- information-less blather. Google search of the Web and blogs also shows no conversations. Pointers to the real-time Web of useful conversations about Internet status would be appreciated."

I'm guessing that this is a problem many people have wrestled with, so, anyone got any good suggestions for Dan?

My other topic for this week comes from some development work I've been doing using SAP's Xcelsius (I discussed the last update of this product a few weeks ago).

I was having a problem understanding the actual content of HTTP requests I was sending from my Xcelsius model and what I was getting back. The gods of development must have been watching over me because just as I thought, "There must be a really good monitoring proxy for this kind of stuff," my friend Rumico, who runs the excellent Everything Xcelsius Web site, posted an article on the LinkedIn Xcelsius Gurus group about a tool called Fiddler.

Fiddler, written by Eric Lawrence (a Microsoft employee though this is not a Microsoft product), is described as "a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and 'fiddle' with incoming or outgoing data."