[113505] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Fiber cut in SF area
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher Hart)
Mon Apr 13 22:13:50 2009
In-Reply-To: <63ac96a50904131901h1dab5c76o788fa440b9c3641@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:11:26 -0700
From: Christopher Hart <christopher.p.hart@gmail.com>
To: Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Rofl Matt,
I was recently laid off from my job for 'economic' reasons, what you say is
deadly accurate.
Bravo! :)
On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 7:01 PM, Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com>wrote:
> On 4/13/09, George William Herbert <gherbert@retro.com> wrote:
> > Matthew Petach wrote:
> > >> George William Herbert <gherbert@retro.com> wrote:
> > >> Matthew Petach writes:
>
> [much material snipped in the interests of saving precious electron
> resources...]
>
> > This was all in one geographical area. Diversity out of area will get
> > you around single points like that, if you know the overall topology
> > of the fiber networks around the US and chose locations carefully.
> >
> > But even that won't protect you against common mode vendor hardware
> > failures, or a largescale BGP outage, or the routing chaos that comes
> > with a very serious regional net outage (exchange points, major
> > undersea cable cuts, etc)....
> >
> > There may be 4 or 5 nines, but the 1 at the end has your name on it.
>
> Ultimately, I think a .sig line I saw years back summed it up very
> succinctly:
>
> "Earth is a single point of failure."
>
> Below that, you're right, we're all just quibbling about which digits to
> put
> to the right of the decimal point. If the entire west coast of the US
> drops
> into the ocean, yes, having my data backed up on different continents
> will help; but I'll be swimming with the sharks at that point, and won't
> really be able to care much, so the extent of my disaster planning
> tends to peter out around the point where entire states disappear,
> and most definitely doesn't even wander into the realm of entire continents
> getting cut off, or the planet getting incinerated in a massive solar
> flare.
>
> Fundamentally, though, I think it's actually good we have outages
> periodically; they help keep us employed. When networks run too
> smoothly, management tends to look upon us as unnecessary
> overhead that can be trimmed back during the next round of
> layoffs. The more they realize we're the only bulwark against
> the impending forces of chaos you mentioned above, the less
> likely they are to trim us off the payroll.
>
> Matt
>
> Note--tongue was firmly planted in cheek; no slight was intended
> against those who may have lost jobs recently; post was intended
> for humourous consumption only; any resemblence to useful
> content was purely coincidental and not condoned by any present
> or past employer. Repeated exposure may be habit forming. Do
> not read while operating heavy machinery.
>
>
--
Respectfully,
Chris Hart
George Carlin<http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/george_carlin.html>
- "Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up
on
the roof and gets stu...
