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Running an ISP in a Warzone

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the frag-the-line dept.

musatov writes "SGT Coughanour, David A (HHC 1-110th Infantry US Army) speech on NOTACON 3: "Right now I am currently serving in Iraq where I run IT operations for a small chunk of the Sunni triangle. One of the major projects that we have accomplished here is setting up an ISP that supports 350 subscribers. It has also survived multiple mortar attacks, and is built entirely on Linux." Download video (80 MB QuickTime) Requires latest QuickTime installed. A mirror is available for people to download it."

4 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. Gives new meaning to disaster recovery plans by qwijibo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've always found disaster recovery plans to be an annoying necessity in large businesses. I'd hate to see all the other paperwork that would be needed if my systems were subjected to mortar attacks. That certainly justifies the need for clustering over a WAN.

    1. Re:Gives new meaning to disaster recovery plans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I think mentioning terrorism might be the new Goodwin's law, but at that risk, do you recall the WTC attacks? I used to work for a company whose servers were located in the WTC, thankfully I worked in Chicago. I may have been one of the first in Chicago to know something was wrong when all of our connections went down. Of course I just thought it was a network problem at first.

    2. Re:Gives new meaning to disaster recovery plans by tinkerghost · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I was working tech support that day.
      You would not believe the number of people calling to complain that they couldn't see what was going on down the street because of the smoke and/or dust and they couldn't watch the news because their cable TV and internet services were not working.
      Geeee, there are whole blocks of your city missing, why do you THINK your Cable is down?
      IIRC - the basement of one of the towers housed a major peering point as well as a network satilite feeds.

  2. Re:IT + NRA by joib · · Score: 4, Interesting


    I wonder if anyone has tried that for real. Some sort of multiple server system up and running when someone puts a bullet through one without the system missing a beat. Now that's a video that would get some attention, both for the insanity and technical merit.


    Funny you should say that. HP just did it with their high end storage array. See here.