This guy is the crisis manager for DirectNIC, based out of New Orleans. He’s ex-military to boot, so he’s pretty qualified to be handling things, from the sound of it.
The blog is updated several times a day with information about how he and his are doing vis a vis the situation. There are also pictures, as well, although I haven’t taken a look at them yet.
Very scary indeed. Sorta takes the sting out of the boss asking me to stay late a half hour tonite.
Wow. He states at one point that the NOPD were commandeering new SUV’s, chasing looters away from stores, and then starting to help themselves and loading up the SUV’s. At this point, the looters started shooting the police.
Interesting. I wish the pictures were still up, and the cam.
Where they even looting for themselves or trying to get necessary supplies to more critical need people somewhere?
I don’t want to be the jerk… but do we know this is legit?
This guy is answering IMs and updating his LJ?
Just seems strange to me.
Well, if it’s a hoax, he went to an elaborate effort to take many, many pages of pics and install a webcam. They appear to back him up.
It would seem strange to be hanging out there, taking pics and maintaining a web cam, just to play a practical joke.
They’re maintaining a web hosting service, so they’ve got internet access, and what the heck else have they got to do all day long? There’s enough detail, plus the webcam, it seems for real to me.
I read it and found it fascinating. But is there anything critical running on the ISP? Couldn’t we just live without the websites they host for a few weeks?
They are doing a lot more that just web hosting. They are providing a vital communication link. That means email, messaging, Voice-over-IP and such. Right now NO needs as much communication infrastructure running as possible. (Which also explains how they were able to get diesel for their generators.)
The Internet is a lot more than just web sites.
We used DirectNIC for a registrar for 5 of our sites. I didn’t even realize they were an ISP.
Oddly enough, in an effort to consolidate our registrar accounts, I just transferred away from them a few weeks ago. Odd.
That’s true. But to be honest, when this is all over, it’s going to make a great selling point for them. “We kept our customers’ websites up and running during the worst natural disaster in US history.” Wouldn’t you want to go with a vendor which proved it was that dedicated?
(I used to work for a dotcom, and we discussed having two widely separated data centers, just in case of this sort of thing. I think most of the big sites, like Yahoo and Google, use multiple data centers. In their case, however, it’s partly a matter of improving website performance as much as it’s about disaster planning.)
Yeah but seriously, they’re doing a great job. I don’t care if their business will profit afterwards, they’ve already earned it plenty.
No, I agree. Their business should rightly benefit from this work. And from the blog, it sounds like the crisis manager’s girlfriend is helping them keep things going this week. They should give her a chunk of money or even a small share of the business in gratitude. That’s way more than she needs to do.
I think it’s probably legit now BUT *linking * to pics and a webcam doesn’t necessarily make it legit.
If I like to pics of the Hindenbergh…Does that mean I was there.
I just wasn’t sure if someone was concocting a story and making posts and using the pics from other sites as back up.
That blog is a great read.
I think I am gonna follow it for some time.