On Wed, 26 January 2000, John Hawkinson wrote:

I think outage notification and operational issue discussion are different things and should go to different places.

That worked well for the NSFnet with nsr@merit.edu split from regional-techs@merit.edu, and the Internet has only grown since then, and the scaling benefits would be much more sizable.

Opinions?

IMHO, the concept is great, but the implementation has been a problem. As you point out there have been numerous outage lists such as nsr, netstat, outage@dal, puck; as well as provider specific lists such as outage@mci.net, outage@sprintlink.net, @internic.net, etc. The problem is its easier to set up the address than it is to get anyone to use it. I am (or have been) subscribed to most outage lists I know about on the net. Maybe I've just fallen off most of them, but even when there are major problems affecting the domain of each list, there are rarely any reports posted on lists other than NANOG, and general news sources such as CNN, Reuters, etc. Like CNN filling the day with Showbiz Today, there seems to be a need too have a steady stream of traffic to remind people a list exists when "Breaking News" happens. Outages alone don't create the traffic necessary to sustain the viability of such a list. Even on provider lists its a problem, one of the last posts I saw on the outage@cw.net mailing list was a C&W NOC employee asking what the C&W outage list was for. So on "slow outage days" you might see a posting about Area 51. No I don't think a single site outage is that important. But if there is nothing else happening, it may be the top story. On the other hand, on heavy news days it might get drowned out. For example, NextLink had the misfortune to announce it bought Concentric for $2.9Billion on the same day as the AOL-Time Warner announcement.