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Preparing Computer and Cellular Networks For a Hurricane
CWmike writes "As Hurricane Gustav approaches the US Gulf Coast, IT lessons learned from the devastating Hurricanes Katrina and Rita that smashed New Orleans and other areas in 2005 are on the minds of many worried IT managers. David Avgikos, president of Digimation Inc., a 3-D digital animation software company in St. Rose, Louisiana, said, 'We don't have to be told twice.' Meanwhile, the nation's major cellular network providers say that they too are prepared, having learned from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Still, they offer some helpful tips for dealing with what is expected to be a category-three hurricane when it hits: use text vs. calling on your cell phone, and if you use a cordless for your landline, ditch it for a corded model so that it will still work if there are power outages."
if (hurricane && phone =='busy'){ sendtext("GTFO GUSTAV IS COMING!"); }
Anything and Everything about the Net
... I use an above-sea-level datacenter, conspicuously located at a comfortable distance from major tornado, earthquake, forst fire, and locust infestation corridors. That whole "above sea level" part is particularly helpful.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
1. 3-M Blackwatch tape Fed Ex'd to some safe place north.
Other than that, unless your facility is 100ft underground, resistant to groundwater, and with lots of fuel for the generator, I don't think you can do much in the midst of a really big hurricane. Doesn't sound like this one is going to be the biggest of types though.
In an emergency, it's often good to have mobility. So rather than ditching the cordless phone, it's probably a good idea to make sure it can continue to work if the AC goes out.
But I agree that it's good to have a corded backup for when your batteries fail.
I was speaking to someone in Florida who said they just chuck everything from the garden into the pool when it gets a bit windy.
Seems like a reasonable solution for your tech stuff as well.
liqbase
A category-three + hurricane is likey to take the phone lines, data lines, towers with the power so get out of there.
Or is he just going to run around in circles like his hair is on fire again?
if you use a cordless for your landline, ditch it for a corded model so that it will still work if there are power outages.
Landlines have the benefit of battery and generator backups at telephone company central offices that can power your corded phone indefinitely even if your power is out.
How well do VOIP phones work over cable or DSL in storm conditions?
I'm curious about people's experiences. The in-home cable system VOIP boxes I've seen have a battery good for a few hours. Do cable head-ends have backups that stay up for more than that? How about DSL or telephone company remote terminals?
For Katrina, I was comfortably away in Houston... with a 504 area code cell phone, that was, for the most part, useless.
If all the 504 traffic HAS to go thru New Orleans, and most everything is down there, why can't they somehow re-route 504 calls to be handled by a different location?
If Atlanta was hit by a hurricane, and you were in Nebraska at the time, wouldn't you want your 404 area code cell phone to still work?
Trust me, unless they've made substantial changes in the way the network routes calls, it won't!
> One tip: Use text instead of voice
Wait a minute, did I just hear the cellular providers admit that text uses less resources than voice? When is that insight going to make it to the pricing on my calling plan?
Sometimes you have to flush a toilet twice to clear the bowl.
The most important thing you can do in preparation for a hurricane is pick the paint out of the screws holding your doors on.
Been there, cursed while the screwdriver spun uselessly, and never painted over a screw since.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
... where even the corded phones won't work after a few hours when the power goes out?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Who cares? Where I live, after a 24 hour power outage (not uncommon in PSE territory), the cellular network goes dead.
Have gnu, will travel.
With messages costing as much as they do? Maybe if there is a hurricane discount, but AFAIK that only applies for category 4 and higher.
Wait, surely they aren't saying that the cost to the network of providing SMS services is lower than voice? Because the way they price it, it's cheaper to get data from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Strange that texting is a more efficient way to use the capacity of a cellular system, yet they charge more for texting. hmmmm....
Do not put the generator in the damn basement.
In the 1970's the Council of Oxford, England built a nuclear bomb shelter beneath one of the buildings they owned.
During a briefing to the towns various community leaders they explained that they would have no problems with water supply because the shelter had a water tank, situated on the roof of the building which housed the shelter.
I know this because my uncle was one of those community leaders. He tried to question this somewhat bizarre design decision, but apparently the representative making the presentation failed to understand the problem.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
The thing about cordless vs. wired telephones really won't matter much if you really get hit by a hurricane. Simply put there is no one to call at all. Police, fire and rescue serves are all unavailable for quite some time both during and after a hurricane. Until crews get the roads cleared and that is after the roads are no longer rivers, then and only then can emergency responders get through to aid you. As far as cell phones go the cell towers go out of whack as soon as the storm starts. The same is true of cable systems.
The best way to ride out storms is elsewhere.Evacuate and go to Vegas and gamble or something. And as far as IT functions it would be great to have a second central hub that could take over for any site under the wrath of a hurricane.
When we migrated to VoIP, we lost the redundancy we had with landline POTS since POTS has its own power system. If power goes out, so is VoIP. Cellular service is required to recapture that redundancy, in my view, for anyone with VoIP service.
Ditch wireless? I used to make sure I could abandon the PBX if our building went dark.
I had spare 4-wires jacks and POTS telephones ready in the Computer Room and each of the senior managers offices. I also had a dozen loop and ground start CO lines down ready on our buildings POP. The phones were directly wired to the local CO dialtone.
We only used the system twice. The first time was when a 14.4KV transformer down the road exploded and killed our power. The second time was when we intentionally shut down power to install a redundant feed into our building.
You lose your building if you lose communication. It's better to stay in your office and work with a flashlight than have to run around looking for a working pay phone.
Still, they offer some helpful tips for dealing with what is expected to be a category-three hurricane
Tip 1: Time to bolt the racks down
There's no place like
It's great that Sprint-Nextel spent $27 million after Katrina for its emergency response team but wasn't that a little late? I was reading a few years ago about an article after the 4 hurricanes hit Florida within 5-6 weeks (before Katrina) that Nextel was the worst cellular operator with its emergency response team. I believe T-Mobile had the best emergency response team but they were not even mentioned in the article.
I'm guessing being prepared before the disaster isn't as amazing as saying that you spent a lot of money after the disaster...
You see, people incorrectly assume that prices are tied to costs, and that when costs go down, prices go down. That's a lie that businesses have been foisting on the populace for decades because they aren't telling you the whole truth. Economics shows us different.
Prices are tied to supply and demand. When demand goes up, prices go up. When demand goes down, prices go down. Supply is the opposite. Supply is up, prices down, supply down prices up.
The supply for text messages is basically near infinity, and is not changing. Therefore only changes in demand will change prices. Now, have you noticed that prices are going up lately, plans are getting higher, and they are looking at 15c a message rates now? Demand is going up, of course. The cell phone market is saturated, but text messaging is still a growth sub-industry as more teens get phones and more people try texting.
We are willing to pay these rates because the market will bear it. What's worse is that they still easily allow overages. I put a block on my son's cell phone for texting, because the monthly unlimited rate to text on verizon is outrageous and he can't control his texting. We got him a new phone to replace his old one, and we found out he had texting back and had started texting again. He ran up a $64 bill on texting alone! We called Verizon and they found out the block was "accidentally lifted" with the new phone and they refunded us the money. Of course they refunded the money, because they conveniently dropped it "by mistake" and they got caught being sleazy. How many people would just pay the bill? And how many people are willing to pay $20 a month just so they don't have to pay $64 a month? All the major telecoms take advantage of this on purpose, and it goes to their bottom line.
To fix this problem, you need to choke off demand. The market will have to saturate the with texting so that there are no more new customers. Instead of competing to get more new customers, they are competing to get customers away from other companies. That's typically when prices start coming down. Right now Verizon and Sprint offer $100 talk and text all you like plans, and there is a company that just came into the area called MetroPCS which offers the same plan for $40. The cell phone market is saturated, so now you are going to see some price competition. Because texting piggy backs on phone plans, you'll see that begin to drop.
The process would accelerate if we had more competition, and if they would stop allowing phones to be tied to a specific carrier and forced companies to allow us to chose the phone and the plan. The justice department and the SEC need to put some pressure on and stop allowing cell phone company mergers.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
ALLO SLASHDOT, Klause Meine here and I will rock you like a hurricane
It's early morning
The sun comes out
Last night was shaking
And pretty loud
My cat is purring
And scratches my skin
So what is wrong
With another sin
The bitch is hungry
She needs to tell
So give her inches
And feed her well
More days to come
New places to go
I've got to leave
It's time for a show
Here I am, rock you like a hurricane
Here I am, rock you like a hurricane
My body is burning
It starts to shout
Desire is coming
It breaks out loud
Lust is in cages
Till storm breaks loose
Just have to make it
With someone I choose
The night is calling
I have to go
The wolf is hungry
He runs the show
He's licking his lips
He's ready to win
On the hunt tonight
For love at first sting
Here I am, rock you like a hurricane
Here I am, rock you like a hurricane
Here I am, rock you like a hurricane
Here I am, rock you like a hurricane
Rock you like a hurricane
It's early morning
The sun comes out
Last night was shaking
And pretty loud
My cat is purring
And scratches my skin
So what is wrong
With another sin
The night is calling
I have to go
The wolf is hungry
He runs the show
He's licking his lips
He's ready to win
On the hunt tonight
For love at first sting
Here I am, rock you like a hurricane
Here I am, rock you like a hurricane
Here I am, rock you like a hurricane
Here I am, rock you like a hurricane
Here I am
That f*cking disgusting.
(Video is of some chick giving a guy in an ET mask a BJ.)
There's no place like
Technocrat reports:
Ham Radio works because each it's a heterogeneous mesh network of intelligent agents using agile frequency hopping to provide connectionless redundant relay of messages. Yes, we do that!
Leigh/WA5ZNU
use text vs. calling on your cell phone
my cell phone company makes me pay more for text, even though i hear my phone uses the same radio technology to send/receive text as voice, and that these days, voice is really just any old data when transmitted.
are we to surmise what we may already suspect (or know)? that text messaging is really easier for cell phone companies to deal with than voice?
shouldn't that make it less expensive?
not only is time travel possible, it's irrelevant.
what is expected to be a category-three hurricane when it hits
Category 3 ? Where the hell did they get that idea from.
Look at the storm path, it couldn't possibly get more time over warm open water than what the current path projects. Katrina was a cat 5 and started above the islands, Gustav is starting below the islands.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I believe all cell phones should be equipped with emergency failover frequencies to function in the event of an emergency or natural disaster The US government should be maintaining cell equipment to handle overflow calls should the main cell providers be overwhelmed in the event of a natural disaster. The government should have discretion on activating this failover network. Cell providers should be required to pay for the operation of this failover network if it needs to be used. They should not be able to pass costs over to customers. This would function as a deterrent for these providers so they don't oversell their network capacity by a certain amount.
as for computer networks, fiber doesn't go out when it's buried.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Step 4: Arizona!
on the desk behind me and another in the basement connected via buried POTS to the CO and a backup dialup account I can access with the laptop. It served us well when we were without power for a week after a direct hit on our neighborhood by a pair of F2 tornados two years ago. The cell phone was spotty at best because the nearest cell tower didn't survive. POTS just works.
We've got UPS for the backup server and router. No sense having it for the cable modem since cable was out for longer than the power. We've got a 5KW gas generator and enough stored gas for a full 24 hours continuous running or several days if we nurse it.
I've also made good use of the generator during two ice storms within the past two years. It's nice insurance and is enough to run the essentials in our house. Essentials meaning furnace blower, sump pump, freezer and refrigerator plus a few lights. I use Stabil in the gas and exchange it for fresh every few months. The generator gets run every two months.
I'm surprised that I've not seem mention of Ham Radio in this discussion. When all else fails, there's HF radio and several digital modes now, including WinLink that can handle emails.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I work for a service company on the gulf coast. This last year we moved into a newly constructed data center that was designed with hurricanes in mind. The building cinder block is steel reinforced and concrete filled. The actual server room is a gigantic rebar laced concrete cube. We have a large dual fuel generator that can power the entire building as well as a bus sized UPS to protect the servers during switchover. We have in ground optical data lines from 2 different providers as well as a satellite connection on standby. We don't believe we will have much problem with even a large storm.
The blogger Interdictor, Michael Barnett, has a detailed blog of what they had to do and deal with to keep their datacenter operational despite being located in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. His blog was a very good read during the hurricane and its aftermath as it happened in August/September 2005.
Blog: http://interdictor.livejournal.com/?skip=300 Start reading from this link and go forward through the posts.
Pictures: http://sigmund.biz/kat/
Katrina showed a basic problem with emergency generators in New Orleans. If the gen set and fuel tank were installed underground, they got flooded out. The emergency operations center had theirs mounted on the roof--where it was knocked out by flying debris. There's no truly safe place in a below-sea-level city when a hurricane hits.
TFA mentions their radios couldn't interoperate because of being on different frequencies. The version I heard (from a FEMA rep) is that New Orleans was one of the first to adopt the "fully interoperable" trunked radio systems, courtesy of post-9/11 grants to "fix" the inter-agency communications problems. When their EOC went down for lack of power, the system wouldn't work at all--nobody could talk to anybody on the trunked radios without the control centers working, and there isn't a quick, viable work-around as there was with the old analog radios (the sherriff's car could serve as a temporary command center, using a standard mobile radio set).
I hope they already have their disaster response on site and the evacuations under way. Katrina's biggest lesson is that when the storm hits and the water rises, it's too late to do any good. Like the Boy Scouts, the motto is "Be Prepared"--before disaster strikes!
You can try... put some more "support" under your balcony, clear the lower area...
But in the end, I'm going to transform you into a disheveled, completely wet... ehem... hill country...
-- Gustav
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
In Florida we use cordless phones regularly but when a hurricane is here we switch to an old line powered phone. When I say line powered I don't mean "non-cordless". I mean the telephone line provides all the power the phone needs to operate. These are commonly referred to as Princess Telephones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_telephone) and can be purchased from your local radio shack for a couple bucks.
Probably be cat 5 before it hits ground with N.O. in the NE quadrant at high tide midnight Tuesday. Probably 25-30 feet of storm surge.
Somebody's getting an emmy for footage of this. If you're in there, get out while you can.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Like grammar?
"Its only America"
"Like, who cares anyway?"
And America, since you gave such a bad description accounts for over 1 billion people. Maybe you meant the US, or maybe just those effected by the hurricane, but not everyone of those is in the US... IE: Cuba.
In my opinion education matters, and since you are obviously uneducated, you don't matter and your post should be deleted immediatly.
When Katrina and Rita arrived, the VC-funded startup I was working for relied entirely (never again!) on a then proprietary service provided by one of the afore-mentioned major purveyors of landline and cellular services. The assured us that they had multiple redundancy in their server scheme. They failed to mention that the redundancy was all on one shelf, on the ground floor, walking distance from a scenic canal in southern Louisiana.
You don't want to be there.
It's amazing how little the first defense against death in a flooded area is mentioned: Clean Drinking Water.
You can do without food for days, may be even a week - not so for drinking water.
Again, this shows without reservation that Nature has a liberal bias.
How else do you explain that Gustav will blow up the RNC and not the DNC ?
Costly, but it WORKS.
Hughes, iirc, has the most affordable portable unit.
Think $5000/1.2GB/y
For getting information out from ANYWHERE, near the equator ;)
(forget the Poles - for some reason internet only works for non Polish locations
Just limit it to status information and emergency communication
(flood! -> activate site failover)
etc, and you're good.
Plug into it like a router.
Later this year the Pacific region gets upgraded, so there won't be any weak spots outside the arctic/antarctic.