rjoffe@mailorder.COM (Rodney Joffe) writes:

Sheesh, am I the only one who thinks valid contacts are important? I'm sure that Sprint and MCI and GTE have good numbers for each other... but wouldn't it be nice to be able to get to someone clueful at Exodus today

I wouldn't be too sure about that. I've gotten some pretty weird phone calls, and spoken with too many NOC operators in the hallways at meetings over the years who couldn't find good numbers for another provider. When I speak with other network engineers well separted from the day-to-day operation of their NOC, either vertically or horizontally, the better they think everything is working. To some extent its an illusion created by a lot of hard work by your NOC operators. In one sense its a tribute to this community when the formal, approved channels don't work; the necessary people somehow manage to contact each other and eventually get the problem resolved. I suspect each of us have our own special list of cell phone numbers, pager numbers, e-mail addresses, etc direct to other senior engineers around the net. However, that door is slowly being shut by various management efforts. I've been asked several times for a copy of my list of NOC contacts, but non-disclosure agreements prohibit sharing the contact information. Sometimes I don't know if managers are even aware that they are doing this, or the lawyer just spits out the boilerplate. IOPS has set up a 'fire drill' to contact each other. I don't know how well it is working. The press release said everything was hunky dory. However, it is limited to only other IOPS members, and doesn't help when a non-member disrupts your network such as the QWEST problem last month. C&W needed to contact a variety of other providers to resolve the problem. I don't know how successfull C&W was at contacting other providers. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation