Wapsi Square Forum

Just FYI for anyone logging into the boards right now: The weather in the greater Houston, Texas area is looking like it's going to be bad again - flooding and whatnot.

Hopefully, Bookworm will keep the servers up, but keep in mind that this might be the reason why you get a "DNS error" if you log in here or on the main site.

Been there, done that, t-shirt floated away!

There are a few prime flood areas, mine included, but not everywhere floods. Power outage due to said event, yes most likely reason for lack of service.

Just stack the servers on the kitchen table and it's all good!

Hansontoons wrote:Been there, done that, t-shirt floated away!

There are a few prime flood areas, mine included, but not everywhere floods. Power outage due to said event, yes most likely reason for lack of service.

Just stack the servers on the kitchen table and it's all good!

But what happens when the flood waters reach kitchen table levels? He needs to plan better than that, if he hopes to keep the servers running for us...

Get a barge and a long, flexible, waterproof power/data cable. Just plonk the barge on the ground in the backyard, put the servers in the barge, put a good roof over them, and run the cable to the house.

Oh, wait... Power outages and ISP outages... Uh...

Ok. Backup generators and...

Hmmm. Dependence on ISP is most vexing...

GlytchMeister wrote:Hmmm. Dependence on ISP is most vexing...

If you have a barge, and generators, and can rig up some kind of self-leveling gyro platform, you could mount a two-way satellite dish for one of the satellite internet providers.

The bandwidth isn't wonderful, the latency is atrocious, and reliability falls off when there is very heavy cloud cover or rain, but it's better than nothing. Arrange for a proxy server with a big fat cache, elsewhere on the Net, to act as your front end (I believe that Cloudfront provides such a service?) and it might actually be viable in an emergency.

Dave wrote:

GlytchMeister wrote:Hmmm. Dependence on ISP is most vexing...

If you have a barge, and generators, and can rig up some kind of self-leveling gyro platform, you could mount a two-way satellite dish for one of the satellite internet providers.

The bandwidth isn't wonderful, the latency is atrocious, and reliability falls off when there is very heavy cloud cover or rain, but it's better than nothing. Arrange for a proxy server with a big fat cache, elsewhere on the Net, to act as your front end (I believe that Cloudfront provides such a service?) and it might actually be viable in an emergency.

With the self-leveling gyro platform: I believe ye olde instruments on ships (nautical clocks, I think) had a system that kept them level despite wave action. Could probably do something like that with the satellite.

This is why I love technology. It's unstoppable. You can hold it back, and you can stump it, and you can stymie it, but it will find a way to get the job done, given enough money, time, and knowledge of how the universe works.

The relentless march of progress.

I remember seeing one house built on a flood plain (I think it was near the Mississippi River) that was basically a house built as a barge. It was rectangular in floor plan, with a post stuck into the ground at each of the four corners and rings around the posts that were fastened to the base of the house. The idea was apparently that if the place got flooded, then the house would rise up, with the rings sliding up the posts to keep the house anchored in place. I never saw anything to indicate how well that idea worked, though, or if the house had ever made use of the feature.

GlytchMeister wrote:With the self-leveling gyro platform: I believe ye olde instruments on ships (nautical clocks, I think) had a system that kept them level despite wave action.

They still use them on ships for all sorts of things, from navigational instruments to cooking equipment to cup holders. Aircraft also use them, for their attitude indicators or inertial navigation systems.

When I lived in Red Bluff California, I saw a sub-division going into the flood-plain of coyote creek- they were building it. I walked onto one jobsite and noticed that 20 year old water erosion marks on the near bank were at my eye level. I called this to the foreman's attention and he basically escorted me off the site.
The house was finished that fall- next spring, the back porch became a boat dock.

Not much different from the tendency of the idle rich to ignore (or lobby their way around) building restrictions in places like Topanga Canyon, because it's so beautiful there. Every twenty or thirty years there's an unusually wet winter in Los Angeles when an "atmospheric river" arrives, a torrential downpour occurs, the canyons flood, unstable slopes break out into landslides, and a whole bunch of expensive homes get turned into kindling. Some people usually die. Various property owners apply for "act of God" disaster relief.

"Don't build there" regulations are enacted.

Wait 20 years for memories to fade, and property values to rise again. Add a new generation of developers who see an opportunity to make a buck.

Lather, rinse, repeat.