No Power, Internet, or Cell Phone Service

[Mossman]

Well, I'm no expert on the subject, but I've done a bit of research into it, and interviewed a few people who were experts (for my magazine and on my show), and what I've gathered is; the state of our national electrical grid is pretty fragile as it is. It's antiquated and under-maintained, with almost no back-up infrastructure. In the northeast, it's particularly bad. There's almost no inventory of replacement transformers, and they're all made in (you guessed it): China! We don't even have the ability to manufacture these things anymore (not that we could manufacture them without electricity, anyway). If enough of our transformers got blown out, due to an EMP attack, solar flare event, or just straight-up failure, it wouldn't take months, or years to get the grid back up. It would take decades... Of course, we'll probably get taken over by China in that event, so it's pretty much game over.

[Mossman]

Well, I'd bet that 30 minutes of battery backup would handle >90% of power outages without the customers being aware,
except maybe in California (or other 3rd world countries.)

Haha.... yeah.


I gotta get out of this country.

[mickey]

If we let the engineers have carte blanche to design the systems, cellphones would cost $500 a month just for service to cover all the infrastructure costs And if they let the money guys make the decisions ( which happens more often than not ), you end up with situations like this email thread describes. I've seen some carrier class racks of equipment co-located in faculties I recently worked at with literally no power backup at all. I also recently started working in the healthcare IS field, where you'd think that it would be Area-51 like security 24/7, but some of the stuff you see out there makes you just scratch your head

You've reminded me of a high tech company in east Tennessee that lost all their networking at 4am every morning Monday thru Friday but it came back around 4:30 every morning.
They were threatening to sue us because (they felt) it had to be our fault. So one day we had a tech standing there at 4am. When he phoned in his report he was laughing so hard he
could scarcely speak. Seems the high tech company's janitors came on at 4am. In order to get a place to plug in their coffee pot, they unplugged "something". By 4:30 they had had their
coffee, unplugged their coffee pot & plugged "something" back in. The "something" turned out to be the cabinet containing all their modems, routers, etc.

[uwmcscott]

You've reminded me of a high tech company in east Tennessee that lost all their networking at 4am every morning Monday thru Friday but it came back around 4:30 every morning.
They were threatening to sue us because (they felt) it had to be our fault. So one day we had a tech standing there at 4am. When he phoned in his report he was laughing so hard he
could scarcely speak. Seems the high tech company's janitors came on at 4am. In order to get a place to plug in their coffee pot, they unplugged "something". By 4:30 they had had their
coffee, unplugged their coffee pot & plugged "something" back in. The "something" turned out to be the cabinet containing all their modems, routers, etc.

That kind of stuff happens way more often than people think. I came to work one day many years ago to find about half of the servers down on my local campus and all the network/server guys gone. I am not an infrastructure or network engineer by trade but I know enough to be dangerous. Since i was the closest thing they had, I began with most of the typical steps, but it was really strange because about half of the stuff was off in the rack, and the other half was on. I got facilities involved thinking maybe we lost a power phase, I had our vendor online, etc.

In the end the culprit was a ultra cheap power strip that had tripped an internal breaker. At some point as gear got added to the rack, someone decided it would be a good idea to buy a $5 Harbor Freight 6 outlet strip and zip tie it to the back of the rack where no one could see it, plug it in to a non power conditioned/non power backed up circuit, and then fill it up with gear.

What's really surprising to me is that stuff doesn't break more often to be honest. IS systems have become so complex and interconnected these days and the leadership so transient that many large organizations have no clear "big picture" of what their overall infrastructure looks like. There is constant turnover, constant change, and multiple contractors/consultants involved in just about every big project and half the time there is no one person or data source that covers it all.