At the Pentagon, the majority of our networks are back online. This Herculean effort has gone on since 9/11 even as the building was still burning out of control. Civilians, Military, Contractors and Volunteers have stood together in a relentless effort with dogged determination that this monolithic structure and symbol of America's mightiest tool of defense would not fall victim to barbaric acts of cowardice and terrorism. Hundreds of servers, network devices, and PC's were brought out of extremely hazardous areas at great personal risk. Unlike the situation with the WTC, we don't get to rebuild from the ground up. Somehow we have to find new physical pathways around structural impediments while maintaining a logical structure that points the end user's terminal back to its original home servers and network groups. Our network engineers have performed miracles.
Mind that this infrastructure is not new and shiny; it's a hodgepodge of every imaginable type of networking you can think of all meshed together for the last fifty some odd years. A FDDI ring becomes a FastE VLAN. 100MBit pipes magically transform into GigE pipes. One cannot even conceive of the complexity of these problems and issues. Our cable technicians have been yanked around the building, stringing CAT V cable, fiber etc. Called first to go one way and as we discover a better routing point hauled off in a different direction. I personally owe these men and women a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid. They have had to endure the seemingly fickle nature of our engineers as they have tried their best to put wire to the wallplate.
I wanted to get it on record someplace before we slip away into history as a footnote that not all the heroic efforts are shown on the news. Many of the heroes are behind the scenes.
This letter was dated 9.18.2001