For those of you not in the know, Jon "Hannibal" Stokes is from Louisiana (the part hit by Rita, not Katrina). A few days after Katrina devastated southeast Louisiana, he headed back home to help out with disaster relief in Lake Charles, LA. He quickly found himself immersed in the problem of getting lots of donated hardware up, running, and usable for the refugees at the shelter.
In a disaster IT setting, first responders don't need prepackaged "solutions." A "solution" implies a known problem, and the primary challenge of disaster response is in identifying and meeting the myriad brand new and totally unexpected problems that crop up from moment to moment. What disaster IT workers need, then, are tools that let them make use of whatever the shelter environment throws at them.
Hannibal looks at a number of different options for disaster IT LiveCD builds and discusses the challenges he faced in finding the perfect solution.http://feeds.feedburner.com/arstechnica/BAaf?m=1028