[Reader-list] Powerfailure: Thanks :) (fwd)

[Menso Heus]

Hi,

Recently I visited a lecture on the vulnerability of our ICT & electricity
network in The Netherlands. The lecture was quite disappointing,
politicians saying "We don't really know what the risk is but we think
it's not that big" and other arguments such as "The internet was build to
continue to work even when a part breaks down, so we're safe!"

One of the biggest things missing in the debate was the mention of
electricity: what good is *any* computer network if there's no power to
feed the machines?

Below follows a posting by Paul Wouters to the Hippies From Hell
mailinglist: a power cut hit Amsterdam because of overheating (it was only
32 degrees!). Not really special you might think, yet the thing is that
the area Paul was working at was the Amsterdam Science Park, the location
of the Amsterdam Internet eXchange (AMS-IX). Since they were also hit by
the power cut practically all of the internet stopped working in The
Netherlands.

Ofcourse we techies were raising this exact topic @ the debate mentioned
earlier, we know two 14 year old guys with a toe-nail clipper can break
down a lot of things in a short period of time.... ofcourse, they wouldn't
listen and wanted to do research first... hope this rang a bell in the
right places :)

Menso

-- 
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People are divided into two groups--the righteous and the unrighteous--and
the righteous do the dividing.			- Lord Cohen
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 19:04:38 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Paul Wouters <paul at xtdnet.nl>
To: discussion at hippiesfromhell.org
Subject: Powerfailure: Thanks :)

Lots of you won't be able to read this right now, since a large place
in Amsterdam is cut off from power. Lots of internet sites are down,
as this accident seemed to have struck the NIKHEF/CWI complex that
houses the fault tolerant AMS-IX Internet Exchange.

The NOS only has a brief mention of this incident in Dutch:
http://www.omroep.nl/nos/nieuws/binnenland/nieuws/2001/juli/050701/stroomstoring.html

Apparently the reaosn is overheating. It seems we can't handle 32 degress
celcius here in the NL :)

For those in the know about the Dutch tapping room, which claims that it
"never goes down" in its specification, they are currently down with the
rest of the AMS-IX :)

So whoever has no power now, it's for a good cause :)

Paul