Security of Equipment in poorly-secured locations.

Tue May 4 20:04:01 UTC 2004

On Tue, 4 May 2004, Jay Hennigan wrote:

> Subject: Re: "Network Card Theft Causes Internet Outage"
> Of course, it's just as likely that a Verizon employee lifted them as
> a colocation customer, and either is far more likely than terrorists.

So, say that your equipment, sitting in a shared facility, suffered
'tampering' of some description.  What would you do to prevent that
happening in the first place, or failing that, to have a positive
description to hand to the local authorities?

To start off, what we've done with our gear thats located in a shared
facility is to change the locks on our racks so the facility rack key
(which everyone has a copy of) doesn't work.  The administrators of the
facility have a copy of our rack key in order to do any remote hands work
that we need though.

What has been suggested (but not implemented) for our gear is to have a
network camera on the inside of each rack activated by the racks being
opened (for some vague definition of 'opened').  Easily defeated by
lifting the floor tiles and disconnecting the uplink cable of course, but
reasonable peace of mind against the casual equipment lifter.

--
  Bruce Campbell.
  Sysadmin/Etc.