On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 02:05:36PM -0700, Randy Bush wrote:

and telcos usually do. but they almost always tell you it's protected. force them to test, or pull one side yourself. and repeat the test every quarter.

Actually Randy, I would say 85% of the APS problems I've had were not due to a missing protect, but the inverse. There are a couple of carriers out there that insist on putting protects on everything....including circuits explicitly ordered without them. The best part is when they proceed to put hard loops on the protect you didn't order, and someone reloads a router. The circuit fails over to the looped protect, taking it down until you find someone that can locate which portion of the loop went to protect and take it out. Rinse and repeat for a different portion of the loop that wasn't supposed to have a protect every time anything at all takes the circuit down. Of course, since the circuit was ordered 'without' a protect, the telco themselves doesn't know it has a protect path. This is always fun to get them to troubleshoot. :) It's worth noting that just because you have a working protect doesn't mean it isn't wdmed or muxed onto the same fiber. If it is supposed to be a widely divergant path, latency can provide a clue, but in the majority of cases as the customer you can't really tell if they've given you the protect you asked for or not. --msa