Many of us in the operational community are required to conduct testing in lab environments, followed by well-announced maintenance windows.
Thanks for this funny post. I needed a good laugh. It has been years since people have needed a reminder that as the biggest and most complex telecommunications network in the world, the Internet cannot be tested in a lab because it is not possible to construct a lab environment that matches the scale and complexity of the Internet.
Why is this operational test supposed to be given freer reign on the 'net than our own operations?
It's not. Your operations are also an EXPERIMENT as are the operations of every other ISP. People can pretend that this is not so and make claims to the contrary in their marketing literature, but the Internet by its very nature is and will always remain, AN EXPERIMENT. Your network probably poses more threat to the net than the long AS experiment. That is because you haven't tested all the possible configurations of fat-finger mistakes in your announcements and therefore your peers do not know if their routers can handle it when your network goes nuts. And no matter how much you test it and how tightly you manage it, you can never get that probability down to zero. At least the long-AS folks are warning in advance that their area of the net could be acting strange soon. How many other ISPs provide their peers with warnings about misconfigurations? If, after this advance warning, your network falls over because of the long AS tests then I suggest that your own lab testing has been inadequate. --Michael Dillon