Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 19:02:50 -0500 From: Zachary DeAquila <zachary@zachs.place.org> Sender: owner-nanog@merit.edu Sure, Mike, but how do you protect against an airplane falling out of the sky? or having the building that houses your generators flattened by a runaway semi? Or the ever present possibility that the building next door will have a gas leak and explode? And what about that house-sized meteor that could come hurtling down? Give me a break. Hindsight is 20/20, it's easy to see how things could have been avoided, but excessive paranoia can and does get in the way of getting real work done. Any engineer worth his salt will tell you that 100% reliability is unattainable - IMHO, these days with the technology we work with daily as young as it is, I'm impressed with 90% uptime... For all the effort you put into saying how you could have done better, I sure hope you check the fuel quality on your generator and hide it (and the rest of your ISP) in a flood-proof well ventilated bomb shelter. I hear the goverment has an installation that might meet your standards somewhere under Cheyenne Mountain.... -Z There's another thing that hasn't been mentioned during this thread. Suppose BBN did ALL of the necessary upgrades to prevent this sort of outage. Not only at this site, but at all of their sites. Now they come to you, their customer and say "Well, we've made all of these improvements, but we now have to raise your rates by 50% to cover the costs." How many of you would simply change providers? An editorial in Unix Review (October issue I believe) talked about some outages that their site had suffered and mentioned other outages. Then the writer asked the question "Who's at fault?". His answer was that the consumer was at fault, because the consumer is unwilling to pay the rates necessary to pay for the level of service that they demand. We all scream for fixes when these outages occur. How much are we (and our customers) willing to pay for them? -- David.Schmidt@on-ramp.ior.com Internet On-Ramp, Inc. (509)624-RAMP (7267) Spokane, Washington http://www.ior.com/ (509)323-0116 (fax)