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Ask Slashdot: How To Evacuate a Network
First time accepted submitter gpowers writes "I am the IT Manager for Shambhala Mountain Center, near Red Feather Lakes, Colorado. We are in the pre-evacuation area for the High Park Fire. What is the best way to load 50+ workstations, 6 servers, IP phones, networking gear, printers and wireless equipment into a 17-foot U-Haul? We have limited packing supplies. We also need to spend as much time as possible working with the fire crew on fire risk mitigation."
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If you've got labeling stuff around, use it (not fancy label makers, just the basic "Hello My Name Is" and a Sharpie.)
Grab the servers, grab the workstation bodies, grab the phones and anything else that's easily portable, and any backup media you've got. Unfortunately, rack-mounted equipment is usually harder to grab, but that's probably your most expensive and critical stuff. And it'll be your critical path, so start unbolting it first. All of that will fit, put it in first, braced as well as you can.
Monitors and keyboards are nice, but they're just money, not data. Grab a few of them, but leave the rest for last. If you have packing material left, great, but if not you'll just have some breakage. If you've got any CRTs, leave them, they're heavy.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Offsite backup at the very least. Save your data and your people, and let the insurance company take care of the hardware. Loss of productivity is a problem, but you're going to have that anyway.
Mod parent AC up, please. Spending time on emptying buildings of hardware which should be insured anyhow is in the best case stupid, and could even be hazardous - if it holds up evacuating the area of humans as much as a minute, it's criminal sabotage of an evacuation.
You're not even supposed to grab your coat when a building is evacuated. Much less hardware.
This. The parent is already +5 Insightful, but really needs to be +500.
You don't evacuate a datacenter, you abandon it. Any other plan is a dozen different kinds of stupid.
At best you trigger a self-destruct (software or better yet hardware) to whip all data so scavengers don't get to it while you're fleeing.
Hardware can be replaced easily (insure it, duh). Lives and Data can not. So already have the data backed up offsite and let the lives flee as they can at the first sign of danger w/o being hindered by insanely stupid commandments like "save the copier!!!".
My
Two years ago we go a call telling us the levies might not hold and if they burst (1 block away) we'd have 8 ft of water. We didn't really have a battle plan and we had a lot less to deal with than it sounds like you did, but we learned some lessons.
1) praise the lord we had good network documentation. Now is not the time to be writing down how the firewall and public and private LANs are plugged in together. Shut stuff down, and start placing network hardware in big plastic tubs. Have tubs handy for this, they nest nicely when not in use. Toss cables in a different tub. just wind them up best you can into loops and toss them in. there's probably not time for neatness, you can deal with that later. TAKE THE DOCUMENTATION WITH YOU. You'll feel mighty silly if that's left pinned on the wall. or I assume you have an electronic copy you can print when you get offsite. Make sure any servers with complex cable attachments (like to phone banks or security systems) have labels on the connectors.
1b) got your phone system documented too? this is a whole 'nother can of worms that often is forgotten about. Does anyone have a diagram of where all those punched down wires go on each block? If you have phone switching hardware to pack, make sure the cables are labeled, they will all probably look the same with the giant connectors that attach to the blocks. "We'll just call Al, he does our phone stuff." Oh, you don't think Al is going to be BUSY helping everyone else that is returning? Nothing's as fun as a 2-3 day wait to get your phones back up and running huh?
2) Label ac adapters. You need to know which unit wants 12vdc and which has 24vac, you don't want to fry stuff when you are trying to reassemble. every pack should have the model of the unit it goes to written on it. Gear WILL get separated from its pack during the evac.
3) label staff's hardware. It's very annoying trying to figure out whose beige box is whose later. and they will probably fight over monitors and keyboards later. save yourself the headache. If you are already under the gun, run to the store and get a dozen rolls of masking tape and sharpies and have the staff label their equipment while you're packing things up, full initials or names, I bet you have duplicate first names you don't want to deal with later. Make sure you label the phones.
4) have a plan for things you can't easily move. the corp office was also forecast to get 8ft of water and they were on the WRONG side of the dike so it was more of a "when" than "if". they had a very expensive multifunction printer that the service people told them they could have a tech out to take it apart (so it fit out the door) in three days, which obviously was silly. They rushed in a bunch of cinder blocks and lifted it up and set it on them 8.5' up. (I have no idea how they lifted it) In retrospect, the building got 14" of water and totaled it, they SHOULD have killed power to the building and took a saws all to a wall. OR at least watertight wrapped it before lifting. I've seen this done with entire cars when faced with an incoming flood or hurricane. Even if it doesn't keep out the water 100%, at least it will keep out the mud, which you may be very grateful later. Got a plan for your big server room ups's? those can be quite large and heavy, and are often hardwired into the AC, are you able and qualified to unhook it? Maybe you should call in an electrician now and change that armored cable to a dryer type plug? Have a place you can move big stuff that can't be evac'd to where it will be at least more likely to survive. Think of flood, fire, and tornado/hurricane, there's probably not one single place that will work best in all three cases. Smoke damage can be very destructive, simply having something wrapped in mover's visqueen may prevent unnecessary loss that the fire missed but the smoke got. Do you have a plan for that rack that's bolted down or won't even fit through the door?
5) Document what's been left behind. A simple way to
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
You're not even supposed to grab your coat when a building is evacuated. Much less hardware.
That's when it's an emergency.
This is more like: "There'll be an emergency a couple of hours from now..."
No sig today...
Your insurance company will pay to replace anything that's damaged by the fire.
Insurance does not cover any damage that should have been prevented or was caused as a result of culpable negligence, when the org intentionally passed up a reasonable opportunity to mitigate or prevent the damage.
If you had an opportunity to mitigate or prevent the fire damage because there was sufficient warning, and you intentionally avoided mitigating the damage, that a reasonable person would have taken actions to prevent, then your reckless inaction likely means that the insurance company is not obligated to pay for the fire damage that resulted from your inaction.