"Hypothetical" Datacenter Overheating

Thu Jan 18 16:23:38 UTC 2024

On 1/17/24 20:06, Tom Beecher wrote:
>
>     If these chillers are connected to BACnet or similar network, then
>     I wouldn't rule out the possibility of an attack.
>
>
> Don't insinuate something like this without evidence. Completely 
> unreasonable and inappropriate.
>
I wasn't meaning to insinuate anything; it's as much of a reasonable 
possibility as any other these days.

Perhaps I should have worded it differently: "if my small data centers' 
chillers were connected to some building management network such as 
BACnet and all of them went down concurrently I would be investigating 
my building management network for signs of intrusion in addition to 
checking other items, such as shared points of failure in things like 
chilled water pumps, electrical supply, emergency shut-off circuits, 
chiller/closed-loop configurations for various temperature, pressure, 
and flow set points, etc."  Bit more wordy, but doesn't have the same 
implication.  But I would think it unreasonable, if I were to find 
myself in this situation in my own operations, to rule any possibility 
out that can explain simultaneous shutdowns.

And this week we did have a chiller go out on freeze warning, but the DC 
temp never made it quite up to 80F before the temperature raised back 
into double digits and the chiller restarted.