Aaron Glenn wrote:
I think it should be clear to those posting here as a last ditch effort that they should certainly outline the steps they've already taken -- basically justifying their post to NANOG: "I tried X, waited Y, got Z, and now I'm here"
To give an example: http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2008-June/001452.html I started with the customer care support line (in a concall with our client who was also their client). Then I moved onto various email contacts. Since my problem was partially DNS related, I tried the SOA mailto address. Since the other part of my problem was email related I tried postmaster@. I also tried to mail the ARIN whois contacts (but a bug in my client software prevented me from getting the record, and since the error appeared to be on the RPs side it looked to be a dead end) Then I went onto Jared's NOC list, as well as the INOC-DBA directory. By the time I resorted to posting here, I had exhausted every feasible contact method I could think of. And yes, that meant waiting days for resolution BEFORE posting here, and some additional days AFTER posting here before actually getting the help I needed. INOC-DBA is still a great idea, BTW, and would be even more useful if it were more widely used: http://www.pch.net/inoc-dba/ Also, to second another poster's point, most "routing loops" aren't really routing problems per-se, as much as localized link failures and the absence of naildown routes (we use the naildowns on all point-to-point circuits for this reason, since we don't run routing protocol on CPE).