[125272] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Solar Flux (was: Re: China prefix hijack)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Leigh Porter)
Sun Apr 11 16:40:11 2010
From: "Leigh Porter" <leigh.porter@ukbroadband.com>
To: "Warren Bailey" <wbailey@gci.com>, <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu>,
<wavetossed@googlemail.com>
Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:39:39 +0100
Cc: vixie@isc.org, rs@seastrom.com, nanog@merit.edu
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
There is a guy who walks aroung Hyde Park Corner in London with a =
sandwich board that says "its going to get worse".
Perhaps Ill go and talk to him next weekend and see what he thinks.
--=20
Leigh
--- original message ---
From: "Warren Bailey" <wbailey@gci.com>
Subject: Re: Solar Flux (was: Re: China prefix hijack)
Date: 11th April 2010
Time: 9:14:50 pm
Are we thinking its going to get worse??
Did anyone else see the intelsat spacecraft failure last week??
Sent using my GCI BlackBerry
----- Original Message -----
From: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu>
To: Michael Dillon <wavetossed@googlemail.com>
Cc: Paul Vixie <vixie@isc.org>; Robert E. Seastrom <rs@seastrom.com>; =
nanog@merit.edu <nanog@merit.edu>
Sent: Sun Apr 11 08:36:05 2010
Subject: Re: Solar Flux (was: Re: China prefix hijack)
On Sun, 11 Apr 2010 16:58:40 BST, Michael Dillon said:
> Would a Faraday cage be sufficient to protect against cosmic ray =
bit-flipping
> and how could you retrofit a Faraday cage onto a rack or two of gear?
Scientists build neutrino detectors in mines 8,000 feet underground =
because
that much rock provides *partial* shielding against cosmic rays causing
spurious detection events.
Fortunately, the sun emits almost no cosmic rays.
It does however spew a lot of less energetic particles that will cause
single-bit upsets in electronic gear. Time to double-check that all your
gear has ECC ram - the problem with the UltraSparc CPUs last time was =
that
they had some cache chips built by IBM. IBM said "Use these chips in an
ECC config", but Sun didn't. The ions hit, and the resulting bit-flips
crashed the machines. Incidentally, Sun sued IBM over that, and the =
judge
basically said "Well, IBM *told* you not to do that up front. Suit =
dismissed".
One of the other big issues will be noise on satellite and microwave =
links
screwing your S/N ratio.
The one that scares me? Inducted currents on long runs of copper. You =
get a
200-300 mile 765Kva transmission line, and a solar flare hits, the =
Earth's
magnetic field gets dented, so the field lines move relative to the =
stationary
copper cable, and suddenly you have several thousand extra amps popping =
out one
end of that cable. Ka-blam. The big danger there is that many =
substations are
not designed for that - so it would basically *permanently* destroy that
substation and they'd get to replace it. And of course, that's a =
several-weeks
repair even if it's the only one - and in that sort of case, there will =
be
*dozens* of step-down transformers blown up the same afternoon.
How long can you run on diesel? ;)
