[ntp:questions] Re: Mother Of All Clocks

Todd Knarr tknarr at silverglass.org
Tue Mar 29 05:00:33 UTC 2005


In comp.protocols.time.ntp <88e50c98.0503282017.1082ad81 at posting.google.com> Heiko Gerstung <hg at heiko-gerstung.de> wrote:
> We have customers with extremely high security constraints (I'd call
> it "paranoia"), think of air traffic control authorities or the guys
> wearing a uniform  (hey, maybe being paranoid is OK in _this_ case).
> You will not get even close to their server racks without a nice guard
> on your side and these guys can get really unfriendly if you are
> trying to touch a cable...

But what about the guy who's _supposed_ to be touching the cables, since
that was what he was called in to do?

I've rarely run into an outage caused by unauthorized people or just
plain accidents. If they're not acts of God (or backhoe operators),
they're almost always caused by people who were completely authorized to
be in that equipment working on it, were in it on a job they were
supposed to be doing, and were absolutely sure they were doing exactly
the right thing right up to the point where something critical went
dark. Physical dispersement at least gives you the time it takes for him
to walk from one rack to another to catch the alarms and stop the
failure before more than a couple or three networks are hosed. I factor
in not only the chance of a failure but how catastrophic the failure
will be if (or more likely, when) it happens.

As far as being paranoid, sysadmin's rule: "It's not whether you're
paranoid. It's whether you're paranoid enough."

-- 
death.net: because for some problems there's only one solution.



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