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LinuxDig.Com : Linux Hurricane News : NOT AGAIN! Hurricane Ivan is coming.
Author: HumanX | Thursday September 09, 2004
After the beating we took earlier this week, it is looking like Ivan is coming for round 2. But this time, we spread the servers out, just a little further.
** Read Picking an Internet Provider and some tips on keeping your servers safe
During Hurricane Frances, LinuxDig.Com experienced about 20 hours of downtime and we have our servers in two locations 3 miles apart. Our backup location went down early saturday and the primary went down later Saturday. We broke the rules, 50 miles apart is the minimum.
Now Hurricane Ivan is breathing down our neck which is expecting land fall Monday Morning. Ivan is making Frances look like a mouse. It has 160 MPH sustained winds and is a category 5 hurricane. For those of you who do not know, category 5 hurricanes are rare and they are deadly. Ivan flattened Grenada yesterday with 94% of the homes damaged.
I can tell you that if Ivan hit South Florida directly, it would be total devastation. South Florida really only had 60-70 MPH winds and we had big problems. When you cross the 100 MPH mark, buildings start coming apart. So what do you do?
Storm Tips, Picking an Internet Provider
1. Keep Primary and Backup Servers at least 50 miles apart
2. Keep services especially DNS in 2 distant locations. *More on DNS
3. Practice emergency fail over before the storm, make sure it is working.
4. Do not expect internet providers to get you back up and running to fast. Many people are still without power and phone 4 days after hurricane Frances. Remember the ISP is dependent on the phone companies. And you may not be able to get Internet Connectivity to address issues with your servers, things need to be automated.
5. Found out what kind of building the ISP is in.
Get a category 5 facility and park your servers there, and by the way, get out of the way of the storm! When picking an internet provider you should always ask what emergency plans they have in place. For our new provider, they have 4 oc3 rings (from diff providers and reinforced piping which carries the actual cabling away from the building), a category 5 strength building (Cat 5 building can handle 160 MPH winds) and 25,000 gallons of diesel to power the backup power generators.
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