On 4/6/16 3:56 PM, Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:
All,
We recently, at $dayjob, had one of our peers (at Symantec) send out a network maint notification, putting 70 addresses in the "To:" field, rather than using BCC or the exchange's mailing list.
Naturally, when you mail 30 addresses, of the forms peering@ and noc@ various organizations, you're likely to hit at least a few autoresponders and ticket systems...
And at least one or two of those autoresponders are of course brainded and configured to reply-all. (In this case, Verizon's ServiceNow setup was such a stupid responder). And that made things fun in our own ticket system, as our RT setup happily created a bunch of tickets.
My question for the group -- does anyone know if there's a "best practices" for sending maint notifications like this? An RFC sort of thing?
In general I'd push for a little automation for the sending of notifications as reducing the likelihood of mishap. Targeting bcc is nice, but so does simply generating a message for each peer precludes this. we store contact information which bgp neighbor parameters in our config generation.
While it would define a social protocol, rather than a truly technical one, if there's not such a document, it seems like it could useful. And once such a thing exists, exchanges could of course helpfully point their members AT it (for both their humans, and ticket systems, to follow).
-Dan