Katrina: directNIC Stays Online - Blog + Images

Wed Aug 31 15:05:11 UTC 2005

> Granted there are a lot of things that go into this. In a disaster 
> situation, it's important to make sure that your machines and 
> network continue operating, but what about provisioning to make sure
> you can keep NOC staff there?

We, as a society, do know how to solve this problem.
It's called, the military. Most people live under the 
delusion that an army's main job is to shoot guns and
bombs at people. But the reality is that the main
work of the armed forces is to mobilize, people, food,
water, equipment and communications into an area where
all these things are not available. The shooting part 
is incidental to the work that most people are doing.

A lot of this logistics work is done by people who
aren't on the firing line so it gets overlooked easily.
And much of the work happens long before the shooting
starts when people plan how to deploy stuff and then
practise doing it so they know that it will work when
the crunch comes. There is no reason why corporations
or network operators couldn't apply lessons learned
from the military.

--Michael Dillon