Internet2 Taken Out by Stray Cigarette

AlHunt writes "A fire started by a homeless man knocked out service between Boston and New York on the experimental Internet2 network Tuesday night. Authorities say the fire, which also disrupted service on the Red Line subway, started around 8:20 p.m. when a homeless man tossed a lit cigarette. The cigarette landed on a mattress, which ignited and led to a two-alarm fire."

Re:obligatory

[sporkme]

In other news, a molehill has become a mountain. Here's tom with the weather:

I am reminded of This 2001 train accident [com.com] in Baltimore, where a tunnel fire severed a major internet backbone among other things and disrupted local communications as far away as Africa. [thestandard.com] It seems that while decentralized and robust on the massive scale, the internet is vulnerable as a child to small accidents or attacks, whose ramifications can be felt worldwide. It is too big to be defended or destroyed.

Re:so the fire starter didn't have a home?

[alzoron]

Something about this story is fishy. If they knew so many details about how the fire started, down to knowing it was a homeless smoker at precisely 8:20, why didn't anybody do anything to stop the fire. You don't just throw a cigarette and "boom" interweb 2.0 goes up in flames instantly. Sounds to me they don't really have a clue how the fire started past a mattress catching fire and just wanted to pin the blame on today's favorite evil... tobacco. Watch out folks, cigarettes kill the interweb! Secondhand smoke is somehow worse than firsthand smoke, and you'll get cancer and die tommorow if you get withing 30 feet of a smoker!

Look Sharp

[kram175]

One if by land, Two if by sea, Three if by burning mattress under a bridge! Good thing the minute men (well, 6 hour men) were on the job. But seriously, what does this say about the vulnerability of our infrastructure? I mean, a homeless guy with a cigarette?

An LSU student's take

[coderedave]

We had the same thing happen here at LSU last Spring semester. Someone had thrown a cigarette into a drain and caught some dry leaves on fire causing some serious fiber optics damage for most of the campus. But of course not on the scale as what happened in Boston. Luckily enough it was a small fire and happened on a Friday, so they got it fixed before Monday; so only us people in the dorms felt the effects of it :(. So I wonder if there is any kind of protection that could be used to help prevent things like this in the future.

Re:so the fire starter didn't have a home?

[kripkenstein]

Sorry, but isn't a little absurd, and likely judgmental, to mention TWICE in the abstract that the fire was started by a homeless person?

I agree that twice looks a little suspicious (and how do they even know how the fire started?), but my guess is that they are trying to make it perfectly clear that it wasn't one of their own that caused the failure. That is, it wasn't a fire started by someone using Internet2, so they aren't directly to blame (but might be to blame for inadequate preparations for such events, I really don't know).

Re:reliability?

[ubrgeek]

Good call on referencing the book. When I spoke to the authors a number of years ago they were appreciative that I read it and asked me to pass the word as the sales (at least at the time) were low. It's definately an interesting read about the intents, PDPs, etc. But, if I recall (and like I said, it's been years) the actual initial thought had to do with some general not wanting to remember different passwords for two divergent systems/networks and so thought that one, large network would make things easier and allow computers involved with different projects in different locations to communicate.

From Wikipedia, "the ARPAnet came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators who should have access to them were geographically separated from them."

(I do seem to recall the bit about the lazy officer, but can't find my copy of the book.)

Re:obligatory

[plover]

The same thing happened here in Minneapolis in the mid 1990s. As I recall, some homeless people had built a fire under a bridge, and it destroyed a couple of conduits mounted beneath the bridge deck. The conduits held the main fibers of US West connecting Minneapolis to the backbone, blacking out the city. Apparently US West was unaware that their backup fiber providers leased space beneath the same physical bridge as their own fibers.

Since then, more carriers have installed more fibers. I don't know if carriers ever sit down and compare "bottlenecks" but I doubt that a single point of failure remains here.

As far as the Africa thing you pointed out, it's a case of a single application being down because the required servers were offline. It's certainly not a reflection of weakness with "the internet" but with that corporation's architectural design -- if they were dealing with a mission critical application, why didn't they have geographically diverse redundant data centers? The answer could have been "money" or it could have been "inexperience". Either way, the internet didn't fail the people in Africa, WorldCom failed their subscribers (there's a news flash.) It's a huge difference.

Re:G0d@|\/|N smokers!

[StarvingSE]

The problem with your comment is that "smoker" is not a minority group. How can I choose to go where people don't smoke when businesses don't ban it. I'm happy that smoking is banned at the workplace around here, but if I want to go get a beer, get some food, watch the game at a bar, or go bowling, it means subjecting myself to cigarette smoke.