As COVID-19 continues to spread, forcing employees to work from home, the services of ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services a.k.a. unified communications as a service (UCaaS) providers are experiencing increased traffic.

ThousandEyes is monitoring how these increases affect outages and the performance these providers undergo. It will provide Network World a roundup of interesting events of  the week in the delivery of these services, and Network World will provide a summary here. Stop back next week for another update.

Update April  6

Outages for ISPs globally were down 9.13% during the week of March 30 from the week before, whereas U.S. outages were down 16.7%, dropping from 120 to 100. Worldwide the outages were also down, from 252 to 229. Public cloud outages rose worldwide from 22 to 25, and in the U.S. there was one outage, up from zero the previous week.

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The internet generates massive amounts of computer-to-computer traffic, and insuring all that traffic can be delivered anywhere in the world requires the aggregation of a vast array of high-speed networks collectively known as the internet backbone, but how does that work?

What is the internet backbone?

Like any other network, the internet consists of access links that move traffic to high-bandwidth routers that move traffic from its source over the best available path toward its destination. This core is made up of individual high-speed fiber-optic networks that peer with each other to create the internet backbone.

The individual core networks are privately owned by Tier 1 internet service providers (ISP), giant carriers whose networks are tied together. These providers include AT&T, CenturyLink, Cogent Communications, Deutsche Telekom, Global Telecom and Technology (GTT), NTT Communications, Sprint, Tata Communications, Telecom Italia Sparkle, Telia Carrier, and Verizon.

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In Linux, the uniq command can help find out the individual users who are logged into a given server, but it’s not a straightforward process.

Yes, using the command on its own yields a list of who’s logged in, but it can list individual users more than once depending on what they’re doing.

There are ways to get around this by sorting the results of uniq so they deliver only once the names of all the users. This 2-Minute Linux Tip video by Network World’s Unix as a Second Language blogger Sandra Henry Stocker shows how to do just that. Click below.