Xref: utzoo news.admin:7341 news.config:1449
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!bfmny0!tneff
From: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.config
Subject: Re: Disaster Planning
Keywords: doom naysayers death destruction
Message-ID: <14806@bfmny0.UU.NET>
Date: 26 Oct 89 17:31:05 GMT
References: <103@farcomp.UUCP> <35944@apple.Apple.COM>
Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff)
Followup-To: news.admin
Distribution: news
Organization: ^
Lines: 34
Summary:
Expires:
Sender:
Followup-To:

Kenton's quite right, this is a serious issue.

I agree with Chuq that the net shouldn't turn off completely because of
disasters.  But it's still a good point that telephone and other
bandwidth resources become precious in emergencies and we shouldn't
waste them.

To that end it makes sense to have "emergency versions" of such key
files as B news "sys" and HDB UUCP "Systems", specifying important
hierarchies or newsgroups to pass on, and modified calling schedules
for emergency affected areas.

These would be easy to "swap in" on sites actually in the areas.
It would be a more complex operation for well connected sites to
selectively modify their Bay Area feeds, for instance, to handle
an earthquake without touching other areas.  (I assume it would be
undesirable to throw the entire world net onto emergency status
every time ANY regional emergency occurs.)

One approach to solving this would be to chop up the country and world
into emergency management zones (emz's) and assign zone ID's to existing
and new nodes.  Then you could support selective zone control directly
within the net software.  If a hurricane hit Hawaii for instance, a
master control message placing that zone on Emergency status could be
issued.  Perhaps this could be done with existing state and country
subnets once those are in place, or maybe they'll never be sufficient.

The other thing to add would be an "emergency broadcast system" (ebs)
hierarchy, to be used only in emergencies.  This hierarchy would
obviously lead the list in any abbreviated "sys" file.

-- 
I'm a Leo.  Leos don't believe    *  *  *     Tom Neff
    in this astrology stuff.        *  *  *   tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET