Gnawing squirrels interrupt network
Lightning can strike the same place twice. It did last week in Boise.
Network connectivity was interrupted temporarily Tuesday morning – the first, and typically the busiest business day of the year for processing vehicle registrations and titles, and driver’s licenses. It came exactly one year after a problem with a cooling system at Headquarters caused the department’s main network servers to shut down.
A year ago it was failure of a cooling system. Temperatures outside the building dropped to 16 degrees. Inside the computer room, the temperature spiked at a sweaty 110-plus degrees. A failed valve kept water from circulating in the computer room, triggering automatic shutdowns and leaving employees without network connections sporadically throughout the day.
ITD’s technology team and building maintenance workers brought the systems back to life and introduced solutions to reduce the risks of a repeat in the future.
They hadn’t accounted for squirrels, though.
ITD’s link to partners across the state was impaired again when squirrels apparently chewed through fiber optic network cables that feed into the ITD campus.
Network provider Time Warner Telecom isolated the cause and began repairs. In the meantime, ITD’s Phill VanSickle, a member of the infrastructure team, along with Syringa Networks, found a work-around by rerouting the network onto a network connection recently installed at the State Communications Center in Meridian.
VanSickle contacted Syringa and made the necessary arrangements for the temporary fix and worked through Branden Carter of the infrastructure team to complete workaround.
Total down time for users was 90 minutes, except for Ada County DMV, Ada County Motor Vehicles and the Division of Aeronautics, which were without services for less than four hours.
Because of system redundancy and quick response by the department’s ETS staff, the interruption was held to a minimum and most connectivity with outside partners was quickly restored.
Published 1-13-2012