Fiber cut in SF area

Tue Apr 14 02:11:26 UTC 2009

Rofl Matt,

I was recently laid off from my job for 'economic' reasons, what you say is
deadly accurate.
Bravo! :)

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 7:01 PM, Matthew Petach <mpetach at netflight.com>wrote:

> 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.
>
>

-- 
Respectfully,

Chris Hart

George Carlin<http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/george_carlin.html>
- "Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up
on
the roof and gets stu...