Billy Biggs put this into my mailbox:
On Fri, 11 Apr 1997, Sean Donelan wrote:
I've noticed the sprint outage list has become very quiet, as has the MCI outage list. They seem to be quiet even during and after widely known problems. The same is true of most providers I bother to track. Even those providers I have signed agreements which include notification requirements. [...] Is there anything that will encourage pro-active notification?
I'm thinking that it might be useful about now to set up a decent notification organization that can seek out network status and outage information both through standard channels and agreements, as well as using objective monitoring tools positioned at different ends (what ends?!) of the net.map.
I've tried to do this to an extent with outage@dal.net. (e-mail majordomo@dal.net with a body of 'subcribe outage' to subscribe). Currently, Sprint and MCI's outage lists forward here, and as people see outages from other sites, they forward them here. (We also send notices of IRC server outages here, so the general nanogite may not necessarily want to subscribe.) It's not perfect, and it's far from complete, but it's helpful. As a statistic, Sprint has always been very verbose and wonderful about posting outages and downtimes to their list. MCI, while they occasionally post outages, seem to make use of their list pretty rarely. A good general list like this that ISPs/whoever could subscribe to and know exactly what's down where would be a good first step in avoiding the mountains of phonecalls/etc. demanding to know what broke. (Who knows, maybe we could even move the messages about "wtf is wrong with XXXX and YYYY" off of nanog..) If anyone wants to subscribe 'outage@dal.net' to their general outage list, feel free... -dalvenjah -- Dalvenjah FoxFire (aka Sven Nielsen) College is a fountain of knowledge... Founder, the DALnet IRC Network and the students are there to drink. e-mail: dalvenjah@dal.net WWW: http://www.dal.net/~dalvenjah/ whois: SN90 Try DALnet! http://www.dal.net/