[Coco] Re: coco3.com down?!?

[William Astle]

tonym wrote:
> Well, considering what alot of internet firms had to go through here
> last year, after the hurricane, there is no excuse for a few-hours outage.
> I'm not EVEN going to get into what firms in and New Orleans had to go through.
> 
> I know we had the ISP down here on generators for about 5-7 weeks.
> 
> Biggest problem was FINDING fuel, as most gas stations had no power themselves!
> We had to drive about 3-4 hours north, hauling drums of fuel down. One of the owner's
> brothers had a diesel truck with twin tanks - we filled the second with gas, which we syphoned out once we got back, as well as the 5-6 drums in the bed! It was a most interesting time indeed....
> 
> But we managed to keep it up....about 99.81% uptime during the 5-7 weeks
> of no utility power.

I don't dispute that barring unusual circumstances or coincidental 
equipment failure (which happens more often than anyone would like to 
admit), there should be no significant downtime due to loss of mains. In 
an ideal world.

I can't speak to the hurricane problems since I didn't follow the 
details closely enough, being north of the 49th and thus being a long 
way from anywhere a hurricane is likely to wreak havoc. However, I did 
follow the situation during the blackout a couple years ago.

I'm sure you can agree that organizations like MCI are professional and 
that they have the gear to handle long outages (generators, etc.). There 
were several instances of POPs run by the big guys like MCI going down 
for hours or longer because the mains failed and the generator failed to 
start. And this is gear that is tested regularly.

You managed to make everything work and stay up with almost no downtime 
during a major crisis and that is to be applauded and, indeed, expected. 
However, my point is that it *is* possible to have taken all 
*reasonable* measures to handle a crisis and still be caught out due to 
unplanned equipment failure and so on.

Note that I am not saying that the incident that sparked this discussion 
falls into that category. More likely it was the bean counters or upper 
management that trumped the actual professionals that actually make 
things work. Sometimes the pros need to have an emergency happen before 
they are able to get management to loosen up the cash to handle emergencies.

In any event, I think this reply takes this thread far enough off topic 
that we should probably let it die soon. :)

-- 
William Astle
finger lost at l-w.ca for further information

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