Hello Alan - Here's a PARTIAL list of presentations we've planned so far:
I hesitate to suggest a presentation, because I don't have any solutions only problems. A couple of months ago this list had a thread on communicating network outage information, network usability, and generally keeping network operators and users informed about the current state of the net. - Overall network reliability tracking, better or worse? While individual network providers track their own network reliability, is there a need to report and track some data on an Internet-wide basis similar to the reliability reporting done in other industries (telephone, airline, etc)? While anyone could track network outages on their own through massive invasive testing, it usually doesn't reveal the cause of the outage. What is the biggest threat to network reliability? A farmer with a backhoe, or a network engineer at a console? Is there a neutral third-party which could blind and summarize the data? I'm not an academic type, so I don't know what would be involved in getting funding at one of the national labs for such a project. Or do we wait the the FCC to mandate something? - No one is perfect Everyone should plan for the disaster which will hit their network at some point. Whenever a network melts down, the next thing to go is the NOC communication lines. I haven't seen a network provider with sufficient staff to answer all the calls, and repair their network at the same time when it goes down. Either calls go unanswered, or the network doesn't get repaired, or sometimes both. The 1-800 problem reporting method isn't scaling well. Alternatives? - Everything hasn't failed at once [for a long time] I don't think there has been an Internet-wide ('net-wide) failure since BBN made Butterfly gateways and one lost its mind. This means, even though one network provider is wiped out, other networks could pass along reports about the current state of the network. How can this reporting function be decentralized? - Finally, keep network users informed Since we have a hard time tracking who is using what (if we even wanted to track users), out-of-band notification isn't great for notifying users. Ideally the network itself could be used to inform just those users affected why things aren't working. Any chance of wedging a "user information" field into the IPng ICMP destination unreachable message? It would be nice to tell the user in the ICMP message: "Beep BOOP BEEP, We're sorry your packet could not be delivered as addressed due to a ...." Instead of waiting for the users to call the NOC which probably is already snowed under with calls. Since the 'net as a whole doesn't fail that often, but pieces of the 'net fail frequently, in-band notification isn't as crazy an idea as it seems. Any thoughts how to turn this into a presentation topic? -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation