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At the risk of being on-topic...
by Deepak Jain 10 Aug '99

10 Aug '99

...and the risk of on-topic having changed since the last time I checked. I heard that Ames has quietly implemented a gigabit ethernet switch that is interconnected to the Mae-West fabric. Has anyone starting using it/any details to share? Rumor also has it that Ames requested a 5th OC-3 to connected to the Worldcomm side of Mae-West which was turned down by Worldcomm management. Deepak Jain AiNET

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MCI/Worldcom customer advisory
by Sean Donelan 10 Aug '99

10 Aug '99

Although I said I wouldn't post any more updates about the MCI/Worldcom frame-relay problems, since I said MCI/Worldcom wasn't keeping its customers updated, I should inform you that we received our first 'customer advisory' from MCI/Worldcom at 1:57am CDT this morning. MCI/Worldcom informed us they are 'upgrading' their network, and some customers may see a few service interruptions or congestion. Because MCI/Worldcom's PR department seems determined to declare me a crank posting rumors on the Internet, perhaps other MCI/Worldcom customers carry more weight. http://www.cbot.com/news_views/trading.html I called it a "collapse," MCI/Worldcom's President of operations called it a "meltdown." I think either word communicates the seriousness of the situation better than MCI/Worldcom's PR department calling it an "upgrade." Those that have read my postings over the years know I'm less upset about the actual outage, than I'm angry about the management response to the problem. The entire weekend we couldn't reach anyone with more authority at MCI/Worldcom than the call-taker or first-level tech. The upper management simply vanished. BTW, I think Alan is just worried because Frontier bid on replacing MCI/Worldcom as our frame-relay provider, and he might get me as a customer again. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation

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Re: OUTAGE: MCI/Worldcom frame-relay network
by Alan Hannan 10 Aug '99

10 Aug '99

> I'm confused by your message. Which is more questionable: The MarketWatch > story which was clearly inaccurate -- it didn't even mention impact to the > industry they report on (i.e., CBOT) -- or the messages Sean posted? From > all appearances Sean's messages were timely, highly accurate, and very > informative. This is more than can be said of the news media coverage. > This is the second time I have witnessed you complaining about outage > information being posted and discussed in this forum. Why is information > sharing bad? I don't believe that information sharing is bad. I think it is good. I do not believe NANOG is appropriate for real time operational issues. That's all. -alan PS - sean's messages were not 'highly accurate' as they maintained that WCOM was not reporting on the problems, while they were.

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Register.com (sucks)
by Ehud Gavron 10 Aug '99

10 Aug '99

Operational: New registry fails to be a registry. More of a 'user site registry'. It's been five days and I can't seem to get a human at register.com with a clue. I made a mistake and registered a domain with them instead of netsol. Here's how the nightmare unfolds. 1. They created records (MX and SOA) which cannot be removed via their graphical interface. 2. Despite providing a primary and secondary server, when I changed the primary server it did NOT ever zone xfr the new zone. Customer service says: "Can't mix offsite primaries and secondaries." Right. 3. Customer service won't respond to email. Have to use web form!!! 4. Domain validations require an email to be sent (so far so good) with a URL which is 86+ characters long which must be cut and pasted and used to verify authentication. (You get the feeling I'm on on 80- character terminal window here? Two cut and pastes...) 5. They take 24+ hours to respond to any query. So far... I've done more "changes" and "updates" and "emails" than I've ever had to do... all for one domain name. Anyone have a human contact over there with a clue? Ehud

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Acceptable Use, WAS: Re: OUTAGE: MCI/Worldcom frame-relay network (fwd)
by David Lesher 10 Aug '99

10 Aug '99

Unnamed Administration sources reported that Forrest W. Christian said: > > > Is there ANY topic which is ok to discuss on the nanog list? sex, religion & politics have not been mentioned yet..... -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz(a)nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

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Re: OUTAGE: MCI/Worldcom frame-relay network
by Sean Donelan 10 Aug '99

10 Aug '99

SEAN(a)dra.COM (Sean Donelan) writes: >I'm trying to post no more than once in 12 hours. Its been another twelve hours. Although I don't like all the red on our network map, it is showing how resiliant IP protocols are. My core network uses several different facility providers and technologies, and for those customers who have more than one connection: IP works. How else could I send this e-mail? However, for customers with only one connection, they don't really care how many other connections are working. They only care about their one connection. MCI/Worldcom claims 75% up their frame-relay network is 'up.' This is down from their previous claim on Friday that 90% of the frame-relay network was 'up.' We still see a number of PVCs throughout the US and Canada either completely down, or dropping so many frames as to be unusable. I received similar reports from other MCI/Worldcom frame-relay users throughout the US and even as far away as Germany. To try to figure out what is going on MCI/Worldcom imposed a 'quiet time' on their network, telling their engineers to stop touching things. This helped somewhat. Portions of the network stabilized on its own, but there is still massive congestion. The quiet time is over. Now MCI/Worldcom is trying to reduce the congestion by disconnecting parts of the frame-relay network. Remember this is Sunday, normally a low-traffic day. Monday is underway in Europe, and will be hitting the East Coast of the USA soon. Traffic levels are going to increase on the network, assuming any traffic can get through at all. MCI/Worldcom's web site continues its long silence about this outage. I've got to hand it to MCI/Worldcom; its engineers may have trouble keeping a frame-relay network going, but its PR department has done a great job keeping a lid on the story. Even MCI/Worldcom customers can't find out what is happening. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation

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Re: OUTAGE: MCI/Worldcom frame-relay network
by Sean Donelan 10 Aug '99

10 Aug '99

wb8foz(a)nrk.COM (David Lesher) writes: >Where exactly is this mention on the UUnet page? > >I have yet to find it.... It is normally on http://www.noc.uu.net/ However there seems to be some time-related procedure (cron ?) which clears off 'old' information after a few hours. Since it happened at exactly 12:00, 18:00, I'm assuming some automated procedure. UUNET usually adds the comment back to the page later. Depending on exactly when you look, it may not have been there. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation

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Re: OUTAGE: MCI/Worldcom frame-relay network
by David Lesher 10 Aug '99

10 Aug '99

Where exactly is this mention on the UUnet page? I have yet to find it.... -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz(a)nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

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Frame relay outage
by Tatsuya Kawasaki 09 Aug '99

09 Aug '99

I understand since last Thursday, there is frame rely major? outage in WorldCom. Does anyhone have input on this ??? Tatsuya /_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ Tatsuya Kawasaki KIVEX.com Unlock the Power of the Internet URL:www.KIVEX.com Phone 301.215.6777 Fax 301.215.5991 /_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

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Re: What frame relay switch is causing MCI/Worldcom such grief?
by smd＠clock.org 09 Aug '99

09 Aug '99

Vijay - | Traffic flows change faster than the topology in most cases. So, in other words TE is a hack to make up for people's weaknesses in forecasting that leads one into a connectivity graph where the normally-selected logical path between two points is insufficient for the amount of traffic one wants to shuffle between ingress and egress? "Our forecast horizon is shorter than our planning cycle, so therefore we need TE" is probably the most real argument I've run into so far for doing TE, but it's so terribly sad that this is the case. Again, again, again, just like so many other times in the past. The other "compelling reason" I've run into for TE/MPLS is that it allows some people to close the book on the ATM-switch-in-the-middle-of-a- cluster-of-7[05]xx-es hack that was done in response to another famous underprediction of growth about which the people who seem most in favour of MPLS seem the most unforgiving. Ironic, isn't it? | Traffic measurements from end to end (per city flows) are also | easier to measure with the city to city pipe as it were. Uhm, think about that carefully before you declare it a compelling reason - step 1: sort traffic into categories that group together combinations of the 5-tuple, step 2: count this traffic. Possible implementation: add column to FIB table which is of the type struct counter { long long bytes; long long packets } * When a packet matches the FIB row, forward according to directives in the other columns, and then do: FIBLINE.counter->packets++; FIBLINE.counter->bytes += packet_length; Add glue to allow the FIB-creation-system to assign a particular counter per FIB entry, and some stuff to allow for the nice extraction of this information. One might even put it like this "show interface POS 0/1 quasi-vc <identifier>", which should show you a pretty printed summary of what the relevant counter structure contains. In other words, if extracting information about aggregate traffic flows is the means by which someone justifies deploying a pseudo- circuit-switched network like MPLS, I believe the problem lies in poor communications skills when communicating one's needs to one's vendor(s). Sean.

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