143: Netderping
Derpy was sipping coffee and waxing nostalgic. “Do you remember,” she asked, “when it was mostly just me coming here, and you not so much going to Equestria? The first time, you know, I brought you over to Twilight’s and she got so freaked out about me bringing you home.”
“I do remember. It was a long time ago. Is this just idle remembrance?”
“Not exactly. I think it’s funny how Twilight’s changed over the years.”
Karyn nodded to invite more information. “You don’t say?”
“Yes. Why, this week, she practically wants you there.”
“You don’t say. Or rather, you do say, and I suspect that everything you said was leading up to the fact that Twilight wants a favor and you want me to do it.”
With no response, Derpy put her muzzle in her coffee cup to hide her blush.
“Well, it’s not like I mind,” Karyn continued. Can you give me details?”
“Somehow or other, Twilight got wind of the fact that I have a computer now. Maybe somepony saw it on a visit to my house and word got around. But I think she’s curious about one of her own.”
“I’ll be willing to help, but I don’t want it to become a precedent. I can’t be computer sales and support to an entire dimension. Although…”
As Karyn got on her back, Derpy said, “Yes?”
“It would be an interesting challenge to network them. Yours and hers, I mean. See if I could get you two e-mail or IM or something. There aren’t a whole lot of uses for a computer off network, not that I’m used to.”
“Maybe we could be better friends if we had that.”
They teleported to Equestria and made good time to Twilight’s castle, where they sat and conferred about the computer.
“If you like,” Karyn was saying, “I can spec one out for you, but I’ll need you to get Earth money in some way, because they won’t accept bits.”
Twilight had offered drinks, but since Karyn and Derpy had just had coffee, they declined. Twilight sipped at hers. “Actually, I was planning on duplicating Derpy’s by magic. It would be easiest if I just made an exact copy.”
“You don’t think that’s cheating and unfair?”
“Why? I’m not taking hers away, I’m just making a brand new one.”
Karyn thought about arguing, but realized that she had been on the other end of the “You wouldn’t download a car” debate. She just never expected to have a practical application for the ethical question.
“There’s one thing that we don’t have in Equestria, and that’s an Ethernet cable. I’ll have to get one if I want to network them.”
Twilight asked what that was. After an explanation, she said, “I don’t know that we need that.”
“No, it’ll be good. And it’s the one interesting thing I see about this little experiment. I set up computers all the time. Making a network will be a good learning experience, even if it’s only two computers. Now, the cabling itself could be a thorny issue. You’re a ways away from Derpy. Normally on Earth, we’d run cables through the air or bury them underground. I’m not sure if you want to do that, but the other option would be wireless repeaters every so often between here and there.”
Derpy understood some of what Karyn had said, and looked forward to Twilight being in the dark for once. But she had picked it up from the context and said, “The burial option might be the best. Out of sight.”
“I think so too, but getting somepony to dig…hm. This might not be possible after all.”
“Why’s that?”
“If I remember, Ethernet has a maximum length of about a hundred meters. There must be cabling that can handle more, fiber optic probably, but then I’ll need a more complex switch.”
Derpy shuffled over with her bag. “There must be a way to make it work magically.”
“Good thinking,” said Twilight. “What if I expended an area of space underground between Derpy’s house and here such that the actual distance is only fifty meters or so?”
Karyn looked at her, agog. “If you can pull that off, we’ll try it. I don’t know if that will mess with the signal, but we’ll give it a go.”
Now it was Twilight’s turn to scowl. “I don’t think I can do it. Not from here. There are limits of that kind of space magnification. But we could do it from the library, and that would be a more appropriate place for a computer anyway. Come on, let’s go for a walk.”
Something nagged at Karyn, but Derpy was already following Twilight in the air, so Karyn had to get on her back to keep up, and the thought was lost.
Neither of the two was a fast or steady flyer, and they stayed at a good distance to avoid crashing into each other. It let Derpy have a private conversation with Karyn.
“I’m sorry to take your day off and make you do work. If you want to drag your hooves—I mean your feet—on this, it’ll be OK.”
“No, I’m genuinely interested. I do want to try out building a two-station network, and besides, Twilight’s a good friend to have. Setting this up could help.”
Derpy nodded, which lost her some altitude. She pumped to regain it. “Like you said, if we can e-mail each other.”
“And more than that, just doing the work for her might lead her to do more favors for us. A princess has a lot of power.
“But more than that, I think it could be good for ponies if technology spread throughout. As I said, I don’t want to do it all, but who knows, maybe somewhere out there is a colt or filly whose cutie mark is going to be an RJ45 connector. If they see what you and Twilight have, you could be trendsetters.”
As they headed for land, Derpy said, “That would be nice, to be ahead of others instead of lagging behind.”
They entered, and Karyn looked for the best place to run a line. She found a knothole near the base of the tree that she could knock through with her finger. So long as it could be protected from weather, it would be the perfect opening to the outside.
That triggered her memory again, and the nagging thought came back in full. Forgetting computers, she stood up and said, “Hang on, I thought this tree was destroyed at the same time that your castle came into existence. How are they both here now?”
Twilight was diagramming out how she wanted the screen set up, and she looked up. “Destroyed. What—Oh.” She dropped her quill and stared for a moment, then turned away to face the window, but not fast enough. Karyn had seen the mist in her eyes.
“I’m sorry!”
Coming alert, Derpy said, “What? What happened? What did Karyn say? Or was it me?”
“No, it wasn’t you. I brought up a painful memory that I shouldn’t have.”
“It’s all right,” Twilight, said, but her voice had a rough edge to it. “A long time now, those wounds should have scabbed over by now. Yes, the original Golden Oaks Library was destroyed.”
“What was this?” asked Derpy. “Destroyed? How? When? I thought this was always here.”
“You don’t remember the battle against Tirek?”
“Tirek, Tirek…Oh! You mean the Great and Powerful Tirek-sie! When she took over town and put it under a glass dome.”
Twilight sputtered out a laugh, and that brought her out of her momentary funk. “No, that was a walk on the beach compared to this. You don’t remember when he nearly took over Equestria? He stole all the unicorn magic and pegasus flight?”
“Nope. Maybe I was out of town?”
Karyn was about to argue, since she had distinctly remembered seeing Derpy be affected by Tirek’s powers. Then she realized that this was another one of Derpy’s repressed memories. Whether or not it was better for her to confront things like that, she couldn’t say. But she wasn’t going to be the one to poke at them.
The problem was how to make Twilight understand this, because she was the type who would pursue a point until she was sure. Already she was countering. “It wasn’t just Ponyville, though. Everypony in Equestria was hit.”
“As far as you know,” said Karyn. “Maybe some of the outlying areas were too obscure for him to notice. Derpy might have been on a long-distance delivery. After all, you can’t be everywhere.”
“I suppose. But how do you know about it?”
Karyn wasn’t sure how much Twilight knew about Equestria being shown on Earth as a TV show. She decided to be cute about it. “The tales of the battle you had with him are known even in my world.”
“Why don’t you take me through what you know? Sometimes those tales can get garbled when they’re told and retold.”
It had been a while since Karyn had seen the episode in question, but she thought back. “I remember that you and Tirek had an epic fight that ranged all over the area, with blasts of magic going back and forth. He aimed at you and you dodged, it hit the tree and burned it to a cinder instantly. Owlowiscious barely made it out.”
“Correct in essence.”
“But I also remember your friends uprooting the remains of the tree and using it as a chandelier in your new castle. We didn’t go into those rooms, so I didn’t see it there. Did that not happen?”
Twilight chuckled. “Now that’s a funnier memory. I remember that Spike held me away from the castle all day while they decorated, and they spent all that time uprooting it and hanging it and decorating it. I was proud of myself for keeping a straight face and being genuinely grateful. What I didn’t tell them is that I’d spent a good deal of time forming a regrowth spell. Another two, three months, I would have had it.”
“So how did you get this one?”
“Well, that wasn’t the only tree in Equestria. I found another oak, quite a sturdy one, had it transplanted here and hollowed out. It was still growing, so I did a little bonsai work in full scale to make it close to what the old one would have been. I should probably have called this New Golden Oaks or something, but I was attached to the name.
“Of course, the tree was an emotional loss, but what really hurt were the loss of the books. The libraries at Canterlot and the Crystal Empire were happy to donate copies of the ones they had, but I’m afraid there were some unique ones. They’re lost forever.”
Frowning, Karyn said, “As an IT person, that disturbs me. Offends me, even. When we get this set up, I may have to work on getting you a scanner and a good backup system. Information should never be destroyed. If you had a daily feed to, say, Derpy’s house, you could have recovered all that.”
“But did anypony read them?” Both heads turned to Derpy, who had asked the question. “I mean, if they were popular, there would have been more than one copy. They were probably obscure books, weren’t they?”
“Does it matter? Even if only Twilight was going to read it, maybe fifty years from now, that’s something lost.”
“But was it something worthy. Everything has to go eventually. Twilight, can I ask why you rebuilt the library here? Why not do it in your castle? You have plenty of room. That would have been the real New Golden Oaks. Even though it wouldn’t have been golden. Or an oak. I’m getting distracted. Why not move on instead of moving back?”
Twilight took a while to phrase her response. “Moving on is good, but not all at once, like that. The better way is for things to grow and diminish, like the seasons. It’s parabolic.”
“It’s what?”
Twilight always had writing material close by. She floated over an inked quill and some scrap paper. Quickly she sketched a grid and a simple y=-x^2. “This is a parabola, a function in math.”
“Ooh, I was never good at math. I bet Dinky would understand.”
“Well, you don’t have to know the math behind it. Just see how it’s like a hill or a hump? I’m using that as a metaphor for things in life. They grow, they build, they peak, they trail off.”
Derpy took the paper and looked it over. Satisfied, Twilight talked to Karyn about the logistics of rigging the network cable. Over and over, Derpy traced the figure with the tip of her hoof. In the background she heard Karyn talking to Twilight, mentioning that she would need to find high-grade cable suitable for outdoors, and that she should rig a patch inside the library so that there wouldn’t be tension on the line.
“…py? Derpy?”
“Hm?”
“You spaced out there. Are you ready?” Karyn had stood up.
“Huh? Yeah, I did space out. I was thinking about this thing Twilight showed me.”
“Well, I need you to take me back to Earth so I can find an Ethernet cable for the network.”
“Oh, sure. Won’t that be expensive, though?”
“No, I’ll just buy it and return it once Twilight’s made a duplicate. It’ll go on my credit card, but come right off again. No fuss.”
“OK.” Derpy flew back to Earth. After that it was a short drive to a computer store that Karyn knew was open on Sundays. But she was surprised when Derpy declined to come in with her. Usually Derpy liked seeing the insides of stores.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Hey, did you know about that parabola thing Twilight showed me?”
“Well, I knew the figure, but I never thought about it as a life lesson. Why?”
“Do you think that’ll happen to us?”
“What do you mean?”
“Will our friendship be like that and diminish and fade out?”
Since she hadn’t started the car yet, Karyn slapped in her Bluetooth and turned to face Derpy directly. “Listen, don’t let that silly piece of paper get to you. Besides, it’s just math. If magic can stretch this cable from Twilight’s place to yours, it can keep us together.”
“But I’m talking about our friendship.”
“Don’t you know that friendship is magic?”
Derpy smiled at that. “Thanks.”
“Come on, enough of this sappy stuff. Time’s moving, even back in Equestria. Let’s get there so I can work on this for Twilight.”
Back the way they had come and back into the library. Twilight welcomed them back. “I’ve been working on the stretching spell while you were gone. I think I can get it underground at the same time I warp its existence in space.”
“Great. Let me just feed through this end, which we want to remain in real space. Once the cable is set I’ll terminate it. I brought my crimper from home.”
There followed a slow walk to Derpy’s house, with Karyn feeding out the cable and Twilight casting her spell. It was weird to feel a roll that only held a hundred meters making a single turn over such a long distance. There was still a lot of slack when they reached Derpy’s house and Karyn stripped the wire.
“I don’t understand what you’re doing,” said Twilight.
“Well, the eight individual wires within the cable have to go all in a row touching these metal contacts in the terminator, which then go to the computer. So I have to untwist them and get them flat.”
“Why are they twisted?”
“Each twist carries opposite signals to stop electromagnetic interference.” Karyn looked up. “Hm. I wonder if that even exists in Equestria without electricity. Well, you still have lightning, so it must.”
“Oh, clever, very clever. You probably already had rope-twisters, so it was the same idea. So how does it work when we get them plugged in? Do they just connect automatically?”
“No, we’ll need a switch to route the traffic between them. I can get one of those, and we’ll put it in Derpy’s house, nicely out of the way.”
Twilight showed doubt for the first time. “Why not keep it back at the library?”
“If it ever needs repair, I’ll have to be the one to do it. And I’m at Derpy’s house far more often than I’m at the library.”
“Good thought.”
There was, of course, no knot in Derpy’s house, so Twilight had to be sent outside to drill a hole for the wire to pass through. As she found the best spot, Karyn said to Derpy, “While what I said is true, I also want your computer to be the server and Twilight’s to be the client. You should get to feel more important than her for once.”
Derpy smiled at that, but then it was time to get to work. Karyn went inside with the crimping tool, and Derpy served as assistant, passing her the terminator and taking away the cutoffs as she needed. The switch was rigged up in a closet and powered on the same solar battery that ran her own computer. When the door was closed, there was no evidence of it. Karyn was quite proud of her design.
“So what happens now?” asked Twilight.
“We’ve done the hardware side of it, but now I’ve got to configure the software. I’ll set up a domain with e-mail addresses for the both of you, and I’ll make shared folders so you can drop documents and such in for each other to read. Derpy can show you how to use the writing software. I think you’ll be happy.”
“I’m definitely interested in this new way of doing things. It’s just like when I got the castle. That was something new as well.”
“But you wanted to go back. You wanted to regrow the tree where you lived all those years. That makes sense to me. Similarly, you shouldn’t get too obsessed with the computer and forget about talking to friends in person.”
Twilight breathed deep and paced across the room. Karyn recognized the move at once as one that many of her professors used when they wanted to phrase a point properly. She wondered if Twilight had ever done any teaching of her own over the years. Derpy didn’t understand that she was supposed to pay attention, but she was listening to Twilight anyway.
“Of course I wouldn’t do that,” she said. “It’s all about finding balance between the old and the new. Of course, everypony’s different, and some look more to the past and some look more to the future. The curious thing about you two is that it’s Derpy, the older pony, who’s more about the future, and Karyn, the younger, who wants to keep reliving the past. But I think that’s why you’re so good for each other. Each one has something that the other one needs.”
Derpy was very grateful, and practically fawned over Twilight with praise and thanks for what she’d said. Karyn was more reserved, and kept working. “So when you’re on your computer, Twilight, you’ll see screens very similar. Of course, Derpy has to use her hoof to move the mouse, while you can just magic it around. Be careful, though, because it’s an optical sensor on the bottom, and I don’t know if the glow of your magic will throw it off. Be gentle.”
“Got it.”
They continued to go over details of working the computer until Twilight felt confident enough to start playing around on her own. “That’s the best way to learn, anyway,” said Karyn. “It’s how I did it.”
“I can’t thank you enough for taking time out of your day with Derpy to help me out for this. You know that any time you need anything, feel free to ask.”
Karyn waved it off, but Derpy said, “You want to let us start bringing ponies on tours of Earth again?” Karyn bit her lip at Derpy’s brashness. She was thinking of this too, but didn’t want to press the subject so bluntly. It would have been better to introduce the idea slowly.
For her part, Twilight just laughed and patted Derpy on the head with a wing. “I won’t go that far, not yet. There are a lot of things I’m still worried about.” She got serious all of a sudden. “But let me say this. I know that you’ve also worried about whether or not the separation of our worlds would necessitate cutting you two off. So I’ll make a promise on my honor as a princess. No matter what happens, Derpy Hooves, you will always have access to travel to Earth. I crafted the spell to do so, but now I grant its rights to you. The bond of friendship that you have with Karyn is too strong to ever be broken, certainly not by the Princess of Friendship.”
Derpy was all smiles, flying around the room. Karyn was more stoic, feeling almost as if she’d been knighted. “We’ll try to use our friendship responsibly,” was all she could think to say.
“Just as I will with my computer. Well, I’m champing at the bit to try it out. See you later.”
She left, and Derpy and Karyn were left alone. “Isn’t that great, Karyn? Now, no matter what happens, we’ll be together forever.”
“Yes, we will. If I could gain such a good friendship every time I set up a computer, I’d have all the friends I’d ever hope for.”
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Nice aplication of a resonant alcubierre bubble. Theres a trick to sorting out the ends so that the cable can go through them. You dont. You Klein the bubble and put the cable outside it. Its not the cables fault that reality think its Inside.
Is just, a pity Karen wasnt round earlier in the series, and set up the library computer before Tirek. Otherwise that spacetime distortion couldve been abused to link to the past computer, pulling the information through.
Still working on Light Of Other Days back projection to allow installation before existance.
Wasnt too sure on the success of oak coppicing, as in the stump and roots couldnt have been carbonised as they were extracted for the chandelier. Certainly Sycamore regrow like crazy from that sort of damage.
and on the next chapter Twilight now has to deal with pop up ads on her computer even thought there is no internet.
There has been an issue I've had with Twilight's decision to not allow any kind of intellectual or cultural exchange between the two worlds but until now, I've just felt it was a minor thing. However, this chapter changed that for me.
The Equestrians - with the tours and now with Twilight getting this laptop - have been taking in human culture and technology without giving anything in return. Karen simply glossed over this issue with that "you wouldn't download a car" thing but it runs deeper than being a simple copyright issue.This is blatant technological theft. Humans have spent billions of dollars and tens of thousands of engineering and scientific man-hours to develop the computer so that Twilight - the sole pony preventing any form of meaningful intellectual exchange - could take that research and engineering for her personal use. Doesn't anybody see the hypocrisy there? Equestria becomes more prosperous with Twilight's research into it and we get nothing in return because of Twilight's very own policies. Why doesn't Karen take umbrage with that?
I mean, there are so many ways to give back without revealing yourselves. Even if they simply dropped one of the magic gem-things they use at a university research institution with written instructions on its use, that would at least be less morally wrong. It would be (indirectly) a two-sided exchange of technology rather than the blatant one-sided one there is right now.
And before you ask, when Derpy got a computer it was different. They was no chance for reverse engineering (since I doubt Twilight knows about the computer's "Terms of Use" and is even less likely to follow them) so it was simply a gift from a friend which wouldn't change Equestria as a whole.
"I also want your computer to be the server and Twilight’s to be the client."
Neither computer in this situation would need to act as a server. What Karyn is setting up is just an ad-hoc peer-to-peer network. With only two nodes, there wouldn't be much point in setting up DHCP, and a router would handle that better. DNS isn't really necessary when there are only 2 computers world-wide; you can remember a single IP. They wouldn't need a domain (and therefore a domain controller) since a Workgroup is perfectly suited for this. The only other thing that's been brought up that would need a server is email, and I can't think of any mail servers that could run on a client OS, so that would need an actual server anyway.
For that server, since there are so few computers involved, a spare PC running Ubuntu server could cover their mail server needs, and handle DHCP and DNS without any real costs once you have the computers. Using Windows Server would probably not be a good idea, as it's a bit out of Karen's budget and wouldn't be something she can magically copy and return.
What? Karen was right; this IS an interesting IT exercise. Is there something wrong with a sysadmin geeking out over the idea of setting up Twilight Sparkle's network?
At least Twilight's space warping spell saved her from having to get a hold of a $1000 (for the cheap ones) fiber termination kit.
6000950 we were going to mention how consumer equipment isn't really meant for server duties, but alas, I've been Hanzo'd .
Actually, there is a bit of older software that can run on PCs that can provide rudimentary messaging, specifically Bulletin Board software. Not sure if they still run on modern operating systems though...
6000950
Maybe not magically, but she could do it digitally.
Also, I'm glad that everyone is glossing over the fact that I completely handwaved/retconned why my story still included the library despite being set many years in the future, just to pay attention to the IT stuff. All I can say is:
6000950
There are lots of ways to run a mail server on “client” OS’s. Current OS X with the “server” package added through the App Store, Windows with any of the standard UNIX mail servers installed through Cygwin, or any variety of Linux. The hard part is really going to be installing new software through systems like Cygwin or apt-get that expect continuous Internet access—Karyn will have to figure out how do offline installations from a USB stick or something.