William H. Magill on Thu, 21 Nov 2002 00:40:05 -0500


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Re: [PLUG] security.debian.org up in flames (and others) (fwd)

On Wednesday, November 20, 2002, at 06:09 PM, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 02:45:05PM -0500, Kevin Brosius wrote:
Wow, doesn't that NOC have any fire protection??? 

Nobody installs halon any more. It's deemed too much of a health
risk.

So, without that, what do you want, sprinklers in the NOC? I think
now...

So, no. And neither does my workplace have any kind of fire
suppression. Not for the six Sun E450s, not for the various
PowerEdge or Compaq servers, not fot the old Penguin boxes, not
for either of the IBM 390 (well, one's a "zSeries, but whatever)
mainframes. I'm led to believe this isn't as shockingly bad as you
may think, that you could probably do as much damage as a fire with
halon to your equipment, and you certainly could with water. (And
the fact that halon will kill the operator if he doesn't bolt fast
enough isn't much in its favor.)

This is an interesting statement. Your facility must not be located in the City of Philadelphia. If it is, the City Fire code requires that the room be sprinklered. Not to mention your insurance company. Only if your facility has not been refurbished since Halon was eliminated as an alternative, are sprinklers "not required." However, if the room is "modified," it has to be brought up to the current code. While it's true that new Halon installations have not been possible for the past 4 or 5 years (I forget when Dupont stopped manufacturing it), there are other chemical suppression systems which replaced it (like FM200). Under current code sprinklers are mandatory and a gas-bases suppression system may also be employed.

As for sprinklers in the computer room. It turns out that it is not only a good idea, but a perfectly reasonable one. The sprinklers are to put out FIRES, not SMOKE, as a Halon system did. There is a big difference in how they are triggered when installed correctly. A computer room sprinkler system will be designed so that only the "heated" heads go off, not one head triggers all as in "common space." By the time that the sprinker heads trip (ie the temperature gets to 450 degrees or whatever it is that melts the strip), there isn't any computer left to worry about saving. The sprinklers are there to protect the building and the personnel, not the computers. And in the general case, the water doesn't bother the computer equipment anyway. It drys out and unless the piping is seriously contaminated, there is virtually no corrosion associated with the event. Granted, you have to have the gear cleaned, but then you have to do that following a fire anyway. Most computer room fires are NOT fires in the computer.
Normally, they are overheated components which stop "burning" as soon as power is removed -- which is why the sprinklers never trip... smoke detectors are a different story. But in a properly designed system, no smoke detector ever trips a sprinkler system -- Halon or other supression gas, yes, but not the sprinklers.

Also, for what it's worth... Halon 1301 is not a toxic gas as such. (It is frequently confused with CO2 based gas-dump systems which were.) However, Halon is a CFC gas --
Chlorofluorocarbon -- governed under the 1987 Montreal Treaty and currently about to be banned in the EU (it is not banned in the US, however it is no longer manufactured.) As of 12/31/2002, no Halon system can be refilled and as of 12/31/2003, all Halon systems must be decommissioned.

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com

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