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Comment by erentz | Hacker News Reader

> But, in the early hours, the company’s technicians had not yet pinpointed the cause of the catastrophe. Rogers apparently considered the possibility that its networks had been attacked by cybercriminals.

I mean, if you just pushed a config change and the whole network goes kaput, take a look at the config change before you start suspecting hackers.

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I heard that the teams were having trouble communicating with each other and so the ones who pushed the config might not have been the ones looking for hackers.

This is why some hospitals still use the old pager systems to contact people in the city. One hospital-owned antenna on a battery can coordinate a lot of people. I don’t know what the equivalent to that would be in this case though.

Ham radio.

It still works, you know?

Also, pagerduty works over wifi...

>works over wifi

even when the internet is down?

Radiocommunications Regulations in Canada indicate that “radiocommunications in support of industrial, business or professional activities” cannot be done over ham radio (Section 47, Subsection C, Para iii).

I would imagine using it for running a nurse-doc comms would constitute professional use.

I have my Ham license in America and so it may be different for our maple syrup friends up north. But one thing that is stressed repeatedly throughout preparing for the exam is that when an emergency happens most of the restrictions fly out the door as the emphasis is on helping address the emergency. So I am assuming the FCC equivalent wouldn't be too peeved.

Of course I'm sure this does run the line of if this is emergency or not.

In this case, the option would be to have a whole bunch of care providers in the hospital trained and licensed for ham radio.

May whatever deity you worship help the instructor teaching atmospheric propagation to some of the staff I’ve worked with in the past.

Let's not make ham radio operation out to be some complex Voodoo that requires months of training. You tune your radio to a given frequency and press the ptt button.

Yes sure, there's repeaters, and other details to know about, but tx/rx on a single frequency isn't exactly the rocket science that sad hams make it out to be.

An telecommunications outage, by itself, is not an immediate threat to life or limb to you, and you'd need to exhaust other reasonable options to communicate before that emergency provision comes into play.

(Many hospitals do also have ham radio operators as part of the disaster plans and operate during their drills.)

INAL, contact ARRL for farther questions.

I’m skeptical the FCC would be upset if the alternative is 911 service being unavailable for most of the country.

The alternative would have been to pull the SIM card to access 911 through any available cell network, but not many knew about this.

A remote devops guy is enjoying some quiet time at home when...

https://youtu.be/-sQqc6xy_og?t=42

I don't think it immediately went 'kaput' -- and then internal communications would have also been affected so that would delay communicating the failure as well. So, it might have been hard to initially tie it to the config change.

> I mean, if you just pushed a config change and the whole network goes kaput, take a look at the config change before you start suspecting hackers.

They probably did it from home/overseas. Can't check what you did after you dropped the country itself offline.

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