Fiber cut in SF area

Matthew Petach mpetach at netflight.com
Tue Apr 14 02:01:36 UTC 2009


On 4/13/09, George William Herbert <gherbert at retro.com> wrote:
>  Matthew Petach wrote:
>  >> George William Herbert <gherbert at retro.com> wrote:
>  >>  Matthew Petach writes:

[much material snipped in the interests of saving precious electron
resources...]

>  This was all in one geographical area.  Diversity out of area will get
>  you around single points like that, if you know the overall topology
>  of the fiber networks around the US and chose locations carefully.
>
>  But even that won't protect you against common mode vendor hardware
>  failures, or a largescale BGP outage, or the routing chaos that comes
>  with a very serious regional net outage (exchange points, major
>  undersea cable cuts, etc)....
>
>  There may be 4 or 5 nines, but the 1 at the end has your name on it.

Ultimately, I think a .sig line I saw years back summed it up very
succinctly:

"Earth is a single point of failure."

Below that, you're right, we're all just quibbling about which digits to put
to the right of the decimal point.  If the entire west coast of the US drops
into the ocean, yes, having my data backed up on different continents
will help; but I'll be swimming with the sharks at that point, and won't
really be able to care much, so the extent of my disaster planning
tends to peter out around the point where entire states disappear,
and most definitely doesn't even wander into the realm of entire continents
getting cut off, or the planet getting incinerated in a massive solar flare.

Fundamentally, though, I think it's actually good we have outages
periodically; they help keep us employed.  When networks run too
smoothly, management tends to look upon us as unnecessary
overhead that can be trimmed back during the next round of
layoffs.  The more they realize we're the only bulwark against
the impending forces of chaos you mentioned above, the less
likely they are to trim us off the payroll.

Matt

Note--tongue was firmly planted in cheek; no slight was intended
against those who may have lost jobs recently; post was intended
for humourous consumption only; any resemblence to useful
content was purely coincidental and not condoned by any present
or past employer.  Repeated exposure may be habit forming.  Do
not read while operating heavy machinery.




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