Outage (planned and unplanned) notification
Got off the phone w/Hector @MCI indicating that they are currently have problems with their OC12 ckt in Illinois. Routing through their network is getting beat up...
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. Since I still notice end-to-end interruptions of service, I don't think the network has really become as reliable as the lack of outage notifications might indicate. Are folks just not bothering to keep everyone informed? Should I go back to nagging your NOC folks with phone calls? Perhaps its just different expectations. For example, I don't bother to notify people about MAE-West outages that effect everyone because I assume the operator of MAE-West should handle that, and a NxN set of providers notifying each other isn't helpful. And a lot of the time extraneous notifications just muck up the trouble ticket system. Is there anything that will encourage pro-active notification? -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation
On Fri, 11 Apr 1997, Sean Donelan wrote:
Got off the phone w/Hector @MCI indicating that they are currently have problems with their OC12 ckt in Illinois. Routing through their network is getting beat up...
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.
Since I still notice end-to-end interruptions of service, I don't think the network has really become as reliable as the lack of outage notifications might indicate. Are folks just not bothering to keep everyone informed? Should I go back to nagging your NOC folks with phone calls?
I hesitated the mentioning, thinking it may break some curtesy protocol (and apologize if it has), but I am a NOC folk and was responding to the initial impact this flap had for general routing.
Is there anything that will encourage pro-active notification?
We are striving towards more proactivity with respect to outage postings on our network, though I wasn't sure what to do with this. In retrospect realize that it was probably not my position to do so. Again, my intent was to share the information (we have our own problems to be concerned with). -ron
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 think an independant might be able to cut back on the NOC calls, the ISP requests, and the ping flood. Would something like this be redundant? Are there already such orgs in place? If the outage lists don't seem to be helping much... -- Billy Biggs ae687@freenet.carleton.ca
--- On Fri, 11 Apr 1997 22:23:54 -0400 (EDT) Billy Biggs <ae687@freenet.carleton.ca> wrote: http://www.nlanr.net/COLL/ipnmoo.html
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 think an independant might be able to cut back on the NOC calls, the ISP requests, and the ping flood.
Would something like this be redundant? Are there already such orgs in place? If the outage lists don't seem to be helping much...
-- Billy Biggs ae687@freenet.carleton.ca
-- From: Joseph T. Klein, Titania Corporation http://www.titania.net E-mail: jtk@titania.net Sent: 22:28:45 CST/CDT 04/11/97 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke
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/
participants (5)
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Billy Biggs -
Dalvenjah FoxFire -
Joseph T. Klein -
Ron da Silva -
Sean Donelan