The Eaton wildfire in Southern California broke out about 36 hours ago and it’s racing across the region, threatening Pasadena, Altadena, and many surrounding communities.
As of early this morning, over 2,000 acres were affected, with the flames being driven by powerful winds.
For those unfamiliar with the geography, Los Angeles backs up to a series of mountain ranges to the East. The fire broke out where the Northeastern edge of LA touches the mountains.
Given the tech-heavy nature of the region, there is the potential for impacts to IT services. Cogent has already posted that they’ve had to do an emergency shutdown of their Pasadena datacenter.
Please stay safe everyone!
Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.
Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.
His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.
You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.
The wildfire’s impact on IT services is such an important point. With events like this becoming more frequent, do you think companies in tech-heavy regions should start building more resilient systems or decentralize their datacenters?
So far this year I had service issues due to two different hurricanes and now a fire. Not much a datacenter itself can do as they have to locate near the main internet connections. It’s up to us to build services resilient to this. Most that do what I do run it off one server. I run nine so if one has an issue within a minute I can edit a file and go around it.