Is your ISP Influenza-ready?

Tue Apr 18 18:43:47 UTC 2006

Hello;

On Apr 18, 2006, at 1:53 PM, David W. Hankins wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 02:05:41PM -0400, Jared Mauch wrote:
>> 	Back to the original question, how well could you cope for such
>> an event?  It's always challenging to think about what would happen
>> as sometimes it includes the unexpected.
>
> All the guidance suggests you're going to lose as much as 40% of your
> workforce.
>
> Well, what intrigues me, is: which 40?  I don't think the virus is  
> going
> to select sales, marketing, and Tech support in that order (unless  
> it's
> an STD epidemic, har har).  Were that the case we might actually look
> forward to such outbreaks.

The most likely disease vector is, from what I have heard, airline  
travel.
Assorted people from all over are brought together for a meal (or, at  
least,
bogus pretzels) in a confined space for a few hours, then released  
back into
the general population.

So the NANOG and IETF crowd would probably be the first to go. Since  
I travel
a lot, and to the same meetings, I can't say that that this seems  
like a good
idea to me.

If any of this actually starts happening, we all may become very  
interested in
video conferencing.

Regards
Marshall

>
> On the other hand, at *every* substantially sized network I've worked
> at, the Network Engineering types that might reasonably do something
> useful in such an emergency situation are generally:
>
> 1) A close-knit group, going to lunches together and cohabitating
>    cubicles so as to avoid exposure to aforementioned sales,  
> marketing,
>    and tech support or customer service.  Indeed, at a few places I
>    worked, they even spent most every weekend together.  For all
>    the rest of the world decrying geeks as socially inept, they are
>    highly efficient at social assimilation of their own kind.
>
> 2) Given a 'low desirability' office space.  No windows, usually poor
>    air circulation.  It is often called "The Back Room" or similar, or
>    is located in a space you wouldn't expect to find humans.  This  
> isn't
>    (usually) anyone being mean: engineers seem to like dark corners,
>    something about making it easier to read monitors, and locations  
> that
>    provide fewer interruptions due to unlikelyhood of foot traffic.
>
> 3) Better at taking care of their networks than themselves.  Or at  
> least,
>    more willing to - too frequent is the case I see an engineer,  
> hacking,
>    coughing, and wheezing at his monitor, plucking away at the  
> keyboard
>    deep into the night.
>
> So there you have it.  They're likely to come to work even though  
> they're
> sick (presuming they don't know it's a lethal virus), where they  
> work and
> spend all their face-to-face time in close quarters with  
> recirculated air
> with the rest of the company's engineers.
>
> It's like someone intentionally optimized this function  
> specifically to
> be the most pessimal.
>
> So I think it's actually highly probable that a meatspace-viral vector
> would take out the entire engineering staff at most service providers
> I've worked at if only one of them caught the bug.  I have to imagine
> this is representative of other work environments.  We all seem to  
> share
> the same collective experience in this sense, at least the folks I've
> talked to.
>
> And that loss would be way under 40% of the total company's staff, a
> mere blip really.
>
>
> So, which 40% can you afford to lose?  How likely is it that the 60%
> that's left behind will be able to do the job?  Will they need step- 
> by-
> step instructions so that even an untrained monkey can muddle through?
>
> -- 
> David W. Hankins		"If you don't do it right the first time,
> Software Engineer			you'll just have to do it again."
> Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.		-- Jack T. Hankins