[5227] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: BBN outage
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Dillon)
Fri Oct 11 22:12:19 1996
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 18:50:45 -0700 (PDT)
From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <CMM-RU.1.0.845075672.rob@solar.rjl.com>
On Fri, 11 Oct 1996, Rob Liebschutz wrote:
> I just spoke to their NOC and was told that a power switch that is
> supposed to be able to switch them between 3 different power utilities
> failed at 12:30 this morning (friday). They bought and installed 2
> large diesel generators today and are hoping to be back up using the
> generators within 30 minutes.
Perhaps there is a lesson in redundancy here. Based on this account it
would appear that although they had arranged for 3 power sources that
there were two mistakes made. One was that switching between sources
relied on a single piece of hardware thus negating the redundancy of 3
sources. The other was that they did not have alternate types of power
source, i.e. they did not have generators on site but expected that 3
different utility power sources was adequate redundancy.
Some NOC engineers (or perhaps NOC managers) aren't paranoid enough.
Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com
