[aklug] Re: linux, electricity, and the internet

On Thu, 2 Apr 2009, Patrick P wrote:

> I ran across this article today and the thought happen to occur to me that without electricity we have no internet.
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127001.300-space-storm-alert-90-seconds-from-catastrophe.html
> If
> this were to happen tomorrow would we be able to keep internet
> communications up? Assuming of course that we had water and food. Email
> and IM are mostly centralized.
> _________________________________________________________________
> Windows Live?: Keep your life in sync.
> http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_allup_1a_explore_042009
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>

I'm certainly no expert on this, but I think there predictions that
America becoming a "third-world country" are a bit over-dramatic.

So all our high-voltage lines are fried. That means inter-regional grids
are going to down probably for quite a while, but obviously top priority
on everyone's mind is going to be getting power up again, especially in
their local area.

And once local areas started to get power back (a few days, maybe?) we
could start forming pocket regional networks. TCP/IP is pretty flexible,
and heck, probably half of us who are using Linux/Unix are either already
running our own mail/web/IM servers, or could set one up fairly easily. So
I think, even before trans-regional communications were restored, we could
all be communicating with 90% of the people who really matter to us.

However, this does bring up one important subject: Are any of you guys
maintaining local, mirrored repositories of your distribution's software?
How hard is it to maintain a local repository of distribution software if
you limit it to software which you think is essential?

Obviously, in such a crisis we would lose access to the commonly used
repos. So it would pay to have some local repos set up, so we could still
install essential software fairly easily. I've been wondering about that
for a little while, being curious if it would be possible/practical to set
up a mini-repo inside my own network.

-- 
Christopher Howard
http://indicium.us
http://theologia.indicium.us
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