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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: generators, etc....
At 08:11 PM 10/12/96 -0500, Sean Donelan wrote: > >Stuff happens. No one can predict or plan for everything. But you can >have procedures in place to combat the biggest problem in diasasters, poor >communication. Partial knowledge about the real situation happens when >the real information isn't made available. Techies sometimes get too >wrapped up in the hardware, redudant fiber, generators, bomb-resistant >shelters; and forget about keeping people informed. > Here's what the latest issue of RISKS Digest [18.52] had to say. - paul [snip] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 13:48:41 -0700 From: "Peter G. Neumann" <[email protected]> Subject: Rats take down Stanford power and Silicon Valley Internet service Two rats crawled through an underground cable conduit into a cabinet of power switching gear adjacent to the Stanford University cogeneration plant, and caused an explosion that cut off power to the Stanford area beginning around 7:30pm on Thursday evening, 10 Oct 1996, and continuing until 3:30pm Friday afternoon. The BBN Planet hub (Internet Point of Presence, or PoP) at the Stanford University Data Center remained in operation for a few hours on standby battery power, but then gave out around 9pm Thursday; it came back up around 4:30pm, an hour after Stanford restored power. To name just a few, Bay-Area BARNet users at Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, Apple, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Lawrence Livermore (partially), and SRI were cut off from the Internet. The *Los Angeles Times* and *San Francisco Chronicle* on-line sites were also off the air. Because I had no Internet access yesterday, I held up RISKS-18.52 -- thus enabling me to include this item adding to our RISKS archives collection of rodent-induced outages. (Long-time readers recall that SRI alone has contributed four fresh-fried squirrels resulting in power outages.) [Sources: On-line messages and a front-page *San Francisco Chronicle*, 12 Oct 1996 item] Evidently, the horse is out of the BARNet, and the rats found the weak lynx. They sure put a ro-dent in the day for many BayAreans. Perhaps your mouse will click on a tale of its own. At any rate, this is just one more saga in the weak-link-in-the-infrastructure department. But I'm surprised that power-system technology has not found a way to develop rodent-tolerant circuits. [With SysAdmins and others pacing the halls at SRI waiting for whatever, Doug Moran remarked that keeping around a few fresh-frozen electrofried rodents is allegedly standard practice for purveyors of power; it is then very easy to have a fallback alibi when no other cause can be found.] ------------------------------ [snip] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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