University of Twente NOC Destroyed

JanJoost writes "Around 08.00 CET today the University of Twente Network Operations Center, which amongst other things hosts a SURFnet PoP as well as security.debian.org and non-us.debian.org, caught fire. The UT, which hosted the HAL in august last year is completely unreachable and is not likely to come back up any time soon. The fire department has given up every hope on protecting the server area and is now trying to protect the surrounding buildings. More information can be found at the Telegraaf, Planet Internet and Twentsche Courant. Pictures can be found here and here. It's a shame to see a great infrastructure go down in flames like this."

Comments

More info

[Strike]

From debian-devel, here's a slightly (only slightly) more informative blurb

Re:More info

[Stonehead]

Hey, I posted that to debian-devel. Scary to see it get Slashdot headlines, since this posting from Wichert Akkerman himself is more 'official'.
He's now probably busy setting up klecker.debian.org as the next security.debian.org host. Don't get yourself trojaned, please people, don't panic and just wait for the official Debian announcement that everything has been fixed again. Or play around with inofficial mirrors like these, and there are more. But I feel a bit stupid myself, because - unlike Wichert - I have done nothing myself except forwarding the news and act like a karma whore.

Photo's

[fearlezz]

More images can be found on http://www.bsdfreaks.nl/files/brand.htm

Debian Security mirror

[lemmen]

In case one might be interested, Essent mirrored security.debian.org.

You can use debian.essentkabel.com to download the latest security updates (in case you haven't already). Please note this is NOT an official mirror.

More Pictures from the webcam

[CuriousGeorge113]

Here's some statics taken from their webcam. Someone might want to mirror these before they get slash'd. Webcam PicsPics

Also, here's what seems to be the only close up I could find of the fire. pics

Update from SARA (SURFnet NOC)

[mdav]

Here's an update from SARA (that's where I work), the network operator for SURFnet. SURFnet is very busy ordering new equipment and fixing the 2 x 10 Gbit/s lamda's to Enschede. We hope to restore connectivity a.s.a.p. Greetings, Marco

Re:Priorities

[bzzzt]

No, no and no.

The university doesn't insure itself agains this kind of disaster because they are able to set aside enough money to cover the cost themselves and don't have to pay the insurer's profit.

Now how they are going to deal with this and their financial troubles (they're almost broke) is another issue...

LFS mirror affected too

[decarelbitter]

The Dutch LFS FTP mirror was also hosted at the University of Twente, which means it's also down. The Dutch HTTP mirror should work properly, since it's outside utwente.nl space.
Last news is that HP (Who supplied most of the UT backbone equipment) is on its way with emergency equipment to have things up and running somewhere tomorrow.

Re:Halon dumps? -- not if the whole building is in

[earthy]

The fire did not start in the server rooms. What happened was that a fire started in one of the lecture rooms (and a smallish one at that, number A108) that just happened to be in the same wing of the TWRC building that also housed the server rooms (yes, multiple). It then proceeded to take out two entire wings and threaten other buildings nearby as well as the library.

Now, I would *love* to see a halon system capable of stopping that...

Owh, and the fire seems to be under control by now, as evidenced on http://webcam.traserv.com/
(which you can contrast to http://www-infstud.sci.kun.nl/~arthurvl/ispy.jpg (taken at about 09:40 CET this morning)).

security updates mirrored worldwide.

[novakreo]

Actually, Debian security updates are usually also added to the proposed-updates section, which means that they are available on nearly all Debian mirrors worldwide.

Something like
deb ftp://ftp.XX.debian.org/pub/debian/ proposed-updates main contrib non-free
deb ftp://ftp.XX.debian.org/pub/debian-non-US/ proposed-updates/non-US main contrib non-free
(replace XX with your ISO country code) in your /etc/apt/sources.list should work well.

You can find mirrors on Debian's website.

Re:now the engineers come out...

[AlphaInsight]

Actually FM-200 and Inergen are the current replacements for Halon. Non Ozone-depleting and won't kill you if you're trapped in a NOC. Just lowers the avaliable O2 in the air. You'll get out of breath easily, but as long as you stay calm you won't have to worry.

Debian is working on recovering

[StormCrow]

Quote from debian-devel-announce

At around 8 this morning (local time) a fire started in the computing facilities of Twente University. This affects Debian, since one of our servers (satie) is hosted there. At this moment it seems very likely that the machine can not be recovered from the fire.

The following services are currently down as a result of this:

security.debian.org
non-us.debian.org
nm.debian.org
qa.debian.org

We are working to restoring these services on another machine and hope to have things in mostly working order by tomorrow. Security advisories are still available at http://www.debian.org/security/

Wichert.

Breathe Quite Comfortably?

[Guido69]

The advantage of Halon is that you can breathe quite comfortably in an atmosphere that will not sustain fire. CO2 works just about as effectively but will not sustain life.

You've obviously never been in a Halon dump. Either that or you consider burning in your lungs to be "quite comfortable". Not to mention that if you're standing under one of the discharge nozzles at a dump you can get a nasty case of frostbite.

I've personally been through two 1211 dumps and had to enter a computer room and drag staff out after an FM200 dump. It takes about two days to completely stop coughing.