On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 02:05:58PM -0700, Steve Gibbard wrote:
Speaking in my personal, non-list-administrator, not having discussed this with anybody else, capacity, I think that notifications of large-scale outages affecting large numbers of networks are a really useful thing to have on the NANOG list.
Assuming this list has large numbers of people who operate networks and have to troubleshoot problems when they see them, telling people that the problem is already being worked on can save a lot of people some work (and can hopefully also reduce the number of phone calls that NOC people have to juggle).
To that end, the first couple of messages in this thread are the sort of thing I wish the NANOG list would have more of.
If we started posting about every fiber cut of every carrier anywhere in North America every time it happened there wouldn't be any room left on this list for talking about spam, senderid, DNS RFCs, E911 for VoIP carriers, err... wait which side am I arguing again? :) My concern would be that by openly encouraging people to send in more reports of or inquiries about outages, we are going to see a lot more noise from unqualified folks wanting to "be cool". I personally don't want to hear about it every time someone wants to vendor bash ("@#$%^&ing GX is down again and their customer support sucks"), every time a T1 in Bumblescum Nowhere goes down, or otherwise completely useless posts ("did anyone see anything funky on level 3 on the east coast yesterday?"). Now don't get me wrong, the technique of publicly embarassing the stupid and inept is time honored and effective, but we need to remember to keep it in reasonable doses. For every one such useful post, we see 10 useless "will someone from X company contact me" e-mails from people who have either not taken the time to look into the issue at all, who have made no effort to try contacting them directly, or who don't understand that the best place to complain about your unsatisfactory customer experience is to your sales rep. This same exact route was cut for over 12 hours by a directional boring machine last month, but we don't piss and moan about it on NANOG because we know a) stuff happens, and b) if you are buying unprotected circuits you should damn well know how to have proper path diversity. Trust me, if anyone from a reasonable sized network wanted to complain on nanog every time one of their vendors managed to suck in some way that "shouldn't" be acceptable, there really would be no room for anything else on this list. If you really feel you need to share it with the world just for the sake of sharing, go get a "vendornameheresucks" livejournal account or something. :) Please, if any of you are reading this and planning on using nanog as your own personal toilet for dumping complaints about your vendors or other networks, at least do us the favor of making certain you research the issue and exhaust the normal methods of communication. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)