On Sat, 29 Dec 2001 04:32:08 EST, Sean Donelan said:
How can you perform due dilegence on a carrier? With a car, you can open the trunk and check the spare tire. What is the best way to check a spare circuit?
How do you know it's a <insert vendor> field engineer trying to fix a flat tire? He keeps swapping tires till he finds the flat one... Make sure your testing procedure *really* tests the actual spare circuit, not something else's representation of one. I know one poor soul who wrote software to monitor-via-ping the other end of a point-to-point, then watched in horror as a co-worker accidentally removed the entire DSU from the rack, unwilling to say "Wait, that's the wrong one" because the monitor hadn't burped an error. Guess who's network was basically a triangle? ;) -- Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech