On Sat, 11 Apr 2009, Lamar Owen wrote:
The locking covers I have seen here put the lock(s) on the inside cover cam jackscrew (holes through the jackscrew close to the inside cover seal rod nut), rather than on the outside cover, thus keeping the padlocks out of the weather.
I'm starting to wonder what makes more sense -- locking down thousands of miles of underground tunnel with mil-spec expensive locks that ideally keep unauthorized people out, OR simple motion and or video cameras in the tunnels themselves which relay their access back to a central facility, along with a video feed of sorts, to help identify who is there, whether approved or not. With locks, you know they gained access after the fact and that your locking wasn't sufficient enough. With active monitoring of the area where the cables live, you at least know the moment someone goes in, and have some lead time (and maybe a video) to do something to prevent it, or catch them in the act. Unfortunately, that kind of monitoring is also expensive and complex. I wonder what the cost of the outage was, and how much it might cost to monitor it? Would it be worth $2,000 per site per year? A great webcam, with day/night capability, and a cell phone, in a locked box, with a solar panel, on top of a pole, near the site. Sure, if you know it's there, taking it out is easy, but someone will still know something is wrong when it goes dark or the picture changes significantly. Are there some low-cost, highly-effective ways that the tunnels which carry our precious data and communications can at least be monitored remotely? Waiting for someone to cut a cable and then deploying a crew seems reactive, whereas knowing the moment someone goes INTO the tunnel is proactive, whether the person(s) are there to do some normal maintenance or something malicious. Beckman I suppose rats and other rodents could cause such a system to be too annoying to pay attention to. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Beckman Internet Guy beck...@angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
