nanog mailing list archives
Re: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion
From: Michael Sinatra <michael () rancid berkeley edu>
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 11:38:37 -0800
On 12/25/09 7:57 AM, Anton Kapela wrote:
What I'm getting at is that after following this thread for a while, I'm not convinced any amount of process-borrowing is going to solve problems better, faster, or even avoid them in the first place. At best, our craft is 1/3rd as "old" (if that's somehow I measure of maturity) as flight and nobody is being sued to settle 200+ accidental deaths because of our mistakes.
So, we're supposed to make the mistakes of aviation, nuclear power, the chemical industry (i.e. Bhopal), oil production & refining, etc., all over again?
Checklists and MOPs are but one of the things we ignore from other industries. Some others:
o Increasing complexity and tight coupling lead to systemic failures. Simply grafting redundancy onto complex systems can make them less, not more, reliable. Yet this is the trend in networking. "Want bells and whistles, firewalls, load-balancers, rate-limiters in your network? You can have 'em without sacrificing reliability if you just buy two of 'em!"
o The gradual acceptance of components or procedures that have adequate reliability for a certain task (say, research) that are not reliable enough for another task (e.g. being a critical part of a 1,000 megawatt nuclear power plant) without understanding the implications. Do we know how our technology is being used and will be used? Will the people adopting IP for everything (the "smart grid," VoIP, life-supporting functions) fail to see these implications just as the people who shoved a fissile core into a pressure vessel did?
This last point directly contradicts the theme of your message. The notion that what we do is not (yet) a matter of life-or-death has bitten other industries in the past and it provides a nice illustration of why we should *not* be ignoring their lessons.
michael
Current thread:
- Re: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion, (continued)
- Re: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion Dobbins, Roland (Dec 24)
- RE: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion George Bonser (Dec 24)
- Re: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion Dobbins, Roland (Dec 24)
- Re: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion Scott Howard (Dec 24)
- RE: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion George Bonser (Dec 25)
- RE: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion Vadim Antonov (Dec 25)
- RE: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion Mikael Abrahamsson (Dec 25)
- Re: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion Anton Kapela (Dec 25)
- RE: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion George Bonser (Dec 25)
- RE: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion Vadim Antonov (Dec 25)
- Re: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion Michael Sinatra (Dec 28)
- Re: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion Owen DeLong (Dec 28)
- Re: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion Robert Boyle (Dec 28)
- BCPs, Exercising emergency process et al Jared Mauch (Dec 25)
- Re: BCPs, Exercising emergency process et al Sean Donelan (Dec 26)
- Re: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion bross (Dec 25)
- Message not available
- Re: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion Robert Boyle (Dec 26)
- Re: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion David Hiers (Dec 28)
- Re: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion Bill Woodcock (Dec 28)
- Re: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion Owen DeLong (Dec 28)
- RE: Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion Frank Bulk (Dec 25)