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Inside the Fortified, Nuke-Proof Bunker that's Now Hosting Wikileaks

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Re: Inside the Fortified, Nuke-Proof Bunker that's Now Hosting Wikileaks

#21

Post by cosmicray »

pak wrote: post #14
cosmicray wrote: post #13

Back in the late 1960s, and early 1970s, AT&T built a series of nuke resistant bunkers. The typical specs were concrete walls 36" thick, self contained turbine generators, water and air purification, plus rations to last up to 6 months. Some of those facilities are still around and operating (including one not far from me). I would expect that the switching gear of todays vintage takes up much less space and power th…

I don't think you were referring to these, but there are actually a few windowless, fortified concrete skyscrapers in New York that were built as telephone switching centers. Here's one in Lower Manhattan that is 29 stories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street They were likewise designed to withstand nuclear fallout. Because telephone switching equipment has shrunken over the years they now rent out some of…

> I don't think you were referring to these, but there are actually a few windowless, fortified concrete skyscrapers in New York that were built as telephone switching centers.

Actually no. The ones I'm referring to were (usually) built way out in rural areas, where they were away from the expected blast area of a hit on a major city. The one I'm aware of is built mostly underground, then backfilled so that it looks like a natural hill (a hill with a concrete top, and a big microwave tower).

Some of these facilities were rumored to have ground entry points for a system called Combat Ciders ... http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/c3i/combat_ciders.htm

Re: Inside the Fortified, Nuke-Proof Bunker that's Now Hosting Wikileaks

#23

Post by Pfiffer »

pak wrote: post #14
cosmicray wrote: post #13

Back in the late 1960s, and early 1970s, AT&T built a series of nuke resistant bunkers. The typical specs were concrete walls 36" thick, self contained turbine generators, water and air purification, plus rations to last up to 6 months. Some of those facilities are still around and operating (including one not far from me). I would expect that the switching gear of todays vintage takes up much less space and power th…

I don't think you were referring to these, but there are actually a few windowless, fortified concrete skyscrapers in New York that were built as telephone switching centers. Here's one in Lower Manhattan that is 29 stories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street They were likewise designed to withstand nuclear fallout. Because telephone switching equipment has shrunken over the years they now rent out some of…

> The floors are also unusually strong, designed to carry 200 to 300 pound per square foot (10 - 15 kPa) live loads.

This is pretty much the coolest thing I've seen all day. I'm not sure what kind of standards buildings are held up to in terms of load-per-foot-squared, but that seems like an awful lot to me. That building is incredible.

Re: Inside the Fortified, Nuke-Proof Bunker that's Now Hosting Wikileaks

#24

Post by mkramlich »

cosmicray wrote: post #13

Back in the late 1960s, and early 1970s, AT&T built a series of nuke resistant bunkers. The typical specs were concrete walls 36" thick, self contained turbine generators, water and air purification, plus rations to last up to 6 months. Some of those facilities are still around and operating (including one not far from me). I would expect that the switching gear of todays vintage takes up much less space and power th…

> I wonder what AT&T uses all that extra floor space for now.

... to comply with the Patriot Act.

Re: Inside the Fortified, Nuke-Proof Bunker that's Now Hosting Wikileaks

#25

Post by rdl »

Pfiffer wrote: post #23
pak wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you were referring to these, but there are actually a few windowless, fortified concrete skyscrapers in New York that were built as telephone switching centers. Here's one in Lower Manhattan that is 29 stories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street They were likewise designed to withstand nuclear fallout. Because telephone switching equipment has shrunken over the years they now rent out some of…

> The floors are also unusually strong, designed to carry 200 to 300 pound per square foot (10 - 15 kPa) live loads. This is pretty much the coolest thing I've seen all day. I'm not sure what kind of standards buildings are held up to in terms of load-per-foot-squared, but that seems like an awful lot to me. That building is incredible.

Most purpose built datacenters are >100 lb/sf. You only really need in excess of that for rooms full of batteries. Even generators, while individually heavy, usually have enough spare space around them that the overall loading in the room isn't approaching banks of batteries.

Most datacenters which are in excess of that were either originally built for telcos (crazy battery banks for the DC plant), or were industrial (e.g. the TANK FACTORY in SF which became 360 Spear/365 Main).

Re: Inside the Fortified, Nuke-Proof Bunker that's Now Hosting Wikileaks

#26

Post by rdl »

daten wrote: post #19
cosmicray wrote: post #13

Back in the late 1960s, and early 1970s, AT&T built a series of nuke resistant bunkers. The typical specs were concrete walls 36" thick, self contained turbine generators, water and air purification, plus rations to last up to 6 months. Some of those facilities are still around and operating (including one not far from me). I would expect that the switching gear of todays vintage takes up much less space and power th…

It looks like 2000 of those bunkers were sold back in 2002 for $25,000 each. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/11/230203 Here's a map with links to pictures of 5 of the nuclear hardened sites. http://coldwar-c4i.net/ATT_Project/index.html

You can also just buy old (ICBM) missile silos; unfortunately, they are often in pretty bad repair, flooded, and may contain PCBs or asbestos.

http://www.silohome.com/atlas_f_missile_silo_for_sale_ultima... is a particularly nice example of a residential conversion, though.

Moses Lake, WA has a site which got used for ToorCamp, a hacker conference, a couple years ago. http://joachimp.fotki.com/events/toorcamp/page4.html

Re: Inside the Fortified, Nuke-Proof Bunker that's Now Hosting Wikileaks

#27

Post by Dove »

potatolicious wrote: post #20
pigbucket wrote: post #7

"...one wonders why Swedish Bahnhof would take on the challenge of hosting a site that will probably be under permanent attack for the foreseeable future. Unless it's for the PR value" That's a good example of allowing one's imagination of possibilities to wander over very short distances. Is it that inconceivable that a company might be motivated by something other than the bottom line? Arvinjoar commented earlier o…

Indeed. It's a little depressing that we live in a world where someone driven by principles instead of profits is regarded as extraordinary.

Such a sentiment says more about the speaker than the world.

Re: Inside the Fortified, Nuke-Proof Bunker that's Now Hosting Wikileaks

#28

Post by rdl »

Bahnhof is pretty amazing. They have great interior design too, almost like a movie set (although I haven't visited in person yet).

While for reasons of principle, hosting controversial content is great, and if it's legal in your jurisdiction, it is up to you if you want to do it, as a practical matter, a site getting >10Gbps DDoS while paying presumably close to nothing is going to potentially impair the usability of other sites in the datacenter. Even if you don't put profits above principle, you have a responsibility to your other customers to not fuck them over.

A pure colocation (vs. managed or hosting) facility in a legal to host jurisdiction, near or at a carrier hotel where you can cheaply buy bandwidth from a bunch of different providers (on their core networks), and with great filtering agreements in place with the upstreams, is probably the only way to go. The colocation facility is just renting you space and power, and it's a much more arms length relationship; you can rapidly turn up network connections from other providers within the facility, vs. your own building somewhere (where running fiber often requires digging up the streets).

Back in 2000 I did this with ~2Gbps of aggregate transit/peering to people inside London Telehouse, and 4xE1 + WiFi to the hosting location, with VPN over VSAT as a backup.

You want to be able to put "problem" customers on their own subnets, potentially on their own routers and even transit connections, to isolate them from the rest of your customers. Combined with the regulatory constraints, Stockholm and Amsterdam are probably the best places to do this right now (or SFBA if it's a customer who will not be a legal problem in the US).

Re: Inside the Fortified, Nuke-Proof Bunker that's Now Hosting Wikileaks

#29

Post by rdl »

patrickgzill wrote: post #3

Is this a black eye for Amazon, or do they get a pass due to the pressure that we assume was applied to them as a company domiciled in the USA?

I'm curious if wikileaks picked Amazon knowing they'd be kicked off (either for political or technical reasons), just to increase their own media profile.

Re: Inside the Fortified, Nuke-Proof Bunker that's Now Hosting Wikileaks

#30

Post by ars »

sliverstorm wrote: post #10
glhaynes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why they're not doing that.

It's far less visible to normal, ordinary people, who they need to reach. The success of WikiLeaks depends in part on being highly visible and accessible by anyone and everyone- ironically, much the same as terrorism. (Not that I believe they are a terrorist organization, but they definitely function kind of like one, at least superficially) I imagine the day somebody figures out how to make a HTTP-compatible P2P net…

> It's far less visible to normal, ordinary people, who they need to reach.

There's no reason they can't do both.

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