News : Explaining the computer communication gap

It is difficult, at times, to explain how computers work, and why they don't. As computer users, most of us only know that it's exasperating when we do everything the computer (and computer experts) tell us to do, and still our computer does not do what we expect.

We have been experiencing a variety of these headaches as we moved our web site to a larger server.

I should explain briefly what that means. A server is, to put it simply, a very big computer that allows other computers to share information with it. When we began Vinton Today, we had a small server that met our needs well. But as the web site traffic grew (and grew and grew and grew) the little server got too small. So we moved to a new server which should be big enough to allow for years of growth.

Here is our new problem: While the address that you use to get to Vinton Today is the same, the numeric address that the servers use to find our server is different. And for some reason, the customers of the Farmers Mutual Telephone Cooperative of Shellsburg (FMTCS) have not been able to access the new Vinton Today server. It took us several days to figure this out, and now we can begin trying to fix it. Our computer guy said that it’s a matter of giving the FMTCS people some numbers to input into their server.

The funny thing about this is that our computer is working properly. And those with the FMTCS service (Provided by USA Communications) have a service that is also working properly. But for some hard-to-explain reason, our server is not communicating with theirs. We apologize and trust this problem will soon be solved.

Something utterly un-computer-related happened on Friday that may help me explain this.

I was making plans to visit John and Ellen Olson, who were among the FMTCS customers who have not been able to access our site. I thought that maybe by seeing what they saw when they tried to find Vinton Today, I could help our tech guy ID the problem.

As I was about to leave, the phone rang. My kid was calling to say the car wouldn't start. So on the way to the Olsons', we stopped to check out the car.

After inspecting the battery connections, and observing that everything should work, I tried the old non-mechanics technique for which I am quasi-famous among my family: I jiggled the handle. I put the car from drive into neutral. It started. The problem is that the safety switch that tells the car's engine that the car is in park, and can safely be started, has gone bad. I could have spent hours changing the battery and repairing all of the other ignition-related parts of the car (or rather paid someone who knows how to do it), and it still wouldn't start because of the little communication gap.

We have lots of old cars (mostly because they are cheaper to replace when they encounter deer or teenage drivers) which means we have lots of old car problems, like this one. I have learned that most of our big headaches with cars are simply caused by some tiny, silly problem with some very small and insignificant part.

While the technology is different, the reason that FMTCS customers cannot see the Vinton Today web site is because of this little communication gap between their server and ours. Now that we realize what the problem is, it should be easy to fix. There is nothing you, as a computer user, need to do because the problem is not with your computer.

So, the next time we have a computer problem at Vinton Today, maybe you will see me looking under the hood of my car for an answer, or at least for a way to explain the problem.