RE: Fire, Power loss at Fisher Plaza in Seattle
From: Seth Mattinen [mailto:sethm@rollernet.us]
Apparently it took authorize.net with it, too: http://twitter.com/authorizenet
~Seth
No technical explanation of course but it also took down their 'backup facility' according to them on twitter; I assume some bad routing/DNS if they do actually have a backup facility. Lots of online stores are offline right now because of this, and the holiday is unfortunately keeping those store owners from knowing they are not making sales right now. Life in ecommerce... David
This begs the question of what basic parameters should be for a "carrier hotel" or co-lo. Given that we're getting designated "Critical Infrastructure", we'd getter start coming up with some, or we'll have them defined for us. The old NEBS standards were too much of a straightjacket, but the current situation, where any buffoon who wants to can claim to be something they aren't (redundant and reliable) undermines the business of those who actually spend the money, and make the effort, to provide a true "carrier grade" co-lo. This is life in the current Internet: Overpromise, and Underdeliver.
-----Original Message----- From: David Hubbard [mailto:dhubbard@dino.hostasaurus.com] Sent: Friday, July 03, 2009 10:05 AM To: NANOG list Subject: RE: Fire, Power loss at Fisher Plaza in Seattle
From: Seth Mattinen [mailto:sethm@rollernet.us]
Apparently it took authorize.net with it, too: http://twitter.com/authorizenet
~Seth
No technical explanation of course but it also took down their 'backup facility' according to them on twitter; I assume some bad routing/DNS if they do actually have a backup facility. Lots of online stores are offline right now because of this, and the holiday is unfortunately keeping those store owners from knowing they are not making sales right now. Life in ecommerce...
David
Tomas L. Byrnes wrote:
This begs the question of what basic parameters should be for a "carrier hotel" or co-lo.
Given that we're getting designated "Critical Infrastructure", we'd getter start coming up with some, or we'll have them defined for us.
The old NEBS standards were too much of a straightjacket, but the current situation, where any buffoon who wants to can claim to be something they aren't (redundant and reliable) undermines the business of those who actually spend the money, and make the effort, to provide a true "carrier grade" co-lo.
Absolutely. Then your pricing is so far out of whack with the apparent competition that it's hard to get customers when it appears one can get the same/better for far less. Me, personally, I just don't say things like "100% uptime" or claim to be a carrier-grade facility. But I think that scares people off when my competitors (and I've seen the insides of some of the horrid trash heaps they call a NOC) claim they do.
This is life in the current Internet: Overpromise, and Underdeliver.
"Our flywheel systems are so failure-proof and thinking outside the box that we don't need a silly battery UPS that can cold-start!" I know outages and related discussion end up attracting the off-topic hammer here on NANOG, but I do find them interesting and worthwhile. ~Seth
-----Original Message----- From: Tomas L. Byrnes [mailto:tomb@byrneit.net] Sent: Fri 7/3/2009 10:20 AM To: David Hubbard; NANOG list Subject: RE: Fire, Power loss at Fisher Plaza in Seattle This begs the question of what basic parameters should be for a "carrier hotel" or co-lo. Given that we're getting designated "Critical Infrastructure", we'd getter start coming up with some, or we'll have them defined for us. ---- I think the more important question is, "what do you consider redundancy?" We have facilities in Plaza East (no down) and Plaza West (unaffected). If you are critical infrastructure there is no amount of redundancy that you should offload onto a colo provider. Instead, you build your redundancy across different data centers, different providers, different everything. If you rely on a single provider for any of the aforementioned then you have built in at least one single point of failure, regardless of the resiliency of the underlying provider. My .02, worth almost every penny. Mike
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Tomas L. Byrnes<tomb@byrneit.net> wrote:
This begs the question of what basic parameters should be for a "carrier hotel" or co-lo. [...] The old NEBS standards were too much of a straightjacket.
Tomas, There is a useful standard: ANSI/TIA-942. It offers specifications for four tiers of data centers ranging from tier 1 (a basic data center with no redundancy) to tier 4 (fully fault tolerant). http://www.tiaonline.org/standards/catalog/search.cfm?standards_criteria=TIA... (the 2005 one) Judging from http://www.techlinks.net/community/articles/article/1-article-submission-for... there's even research that projects what sort of annual downtime you can expect for each of the tiers described by the standard. When I walk into a data center, I make a habit of asking which tier they achieve, at least for the HVAC and electrical systems. And then I ask to see the components which the tier claim says they should have. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
On Fri, 3 Jul 2009, William Herrin wrote:
There is a useful standard: ANSI/TIA-942. It offers specifications for four tiers of data centers ranging from tier 1 (a basic data center with no redundancy) to tier 4 (fully fault tolerant).
Are you better off with a single "tier 4" data center, multiple "tier 1" data centers, or something in between? Distance and quantity versus complexity and scaling versus cost and risk. Sometimes no matter what you choose, you might be wrong. Earth is a single point of failure, where is your backup site?
Earth is a single point of failure, where is your backup site?
This reminds me of the 1996 thread about how MAE-East still had no generator. Same topic, roughly, some of the same people (hi, Sean). Sure, the line about the Earth SPOF is catchy, but in terms of more likely scenarios: how many people stand *outside* the "tier 4" datacenter and imagine a fire marshal pointing at the building and saying, "Turn *that* off, now." I've seen that happen a couple times since the WilTel POP thing in 1996. Stephen
Wasn't Authorize.net affected by this? We received a support ticket about why Authorize.net is down today (I don't know either, I don't ask too many questions). Jeff On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Tomas L. Byrnes<tomb@byrneit.net> wrote:
Earth is a single point of failure, where is your backup site?
[TLB:] Given that all my customers are on Earth, I don't need one if my customers also are "down".
-- Jeffrey Lyon, Leadership Team jeffrey.lyon@blacklotus.net | http://www.blacklotus.net Black Lotus Communications of The IRC Company, Inc. Look for us at HostingCon 2009 in Washington, DC on August 10th - 12th at Booth #401.
Yes it was. On Jul 3, 2009, at 4:29 PM, Jeffrey Lyon wrote:
Wasn't Authorize.net affected by this? We received a support ticket about why Authorize.net is down today (I don't know either, I don't ask too many questions).
Jeff
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Tomas L. Byrnes<tomb@byrneit.net> wrote:
Earth is a single point of failure, where is your backup site?
[TLB:] Given that all my customers are on Earth, I don't need one if my customers also are "down".
-- Jeffrey Lyon, Leadership Team jeffrey.lyon@blacklotus.net | http://www.blacklotus.net Black Lotus Communications of The IRC Company, Inc.
Look for us at HostingCon 2009 in Washington, DC on August 10th - 12th at Booth #401.
On Jul 3, 2009, at 4:29 PM, Ben Carleton wrote:
Yes it was.
On Jul 3, 2009, at 4:29 PM, Jeffrey Lyon wrote:
Wasn't Authorize.net affected by this? We received a support ticket about why Authorize.net is down today (I don't know either, I don't ask too many questions).
Authorize.net was for a while completely off the air, and companies that relied upon them were not getting credit card authorizations (and, thus, no ecommerce). I think it is still only partially functional. Authorize.net has been communicating with customers mostly (entirely ?) with twitter - they are @AuthorizeNet with a hash tab of #authorizenet If you go there, you will see a lot of status messages like #authorizenet (cont.) Do not manually submit ARB transactions b/c you run the risk of your merchants being double billed. 10 minutes ago from web (i.e., 4:47 EDT). You will also see a lot of posts from annoyed people if you search on #authorizenet It's an interesting use of Web 2.0 for emergency communications. Regards Marshall
Jeff
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Tomas L. Byrnes<tomb@byrneit.net> wrote:
Earth is a single point of failure, where is your backup site?
[TLB:] Given that all my customers are on Earth, I don't need one if my customers also are "down".
-- Jeffrey Lyon, Leadership Team jeffrey.lyon@blacklotus.net | http://www.blacklotus.net Black Lotus Communications of The IRC Company, Inc.
Look for us at HostingCon 2009 in Washington, DC on August 10th - 12th at Booth #401.
That's a great idea, use some lame Web 2.0 trend to communicate with actual real life customers. </sarcasm> Jeff On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:59 PM, Marshall Eubanks<tme@americafree.tv> wrote:
On Jul 3, 2009, at 4:29 PM, Ben Carleton wrote:
Yes it was.
On Jul 3, 2009, at 4:29 PM, Jeffrey Lyon wrote:
Wasn't Authorize.net affected by this? We received a support ticket about why Authorize.net is down today (I don't know either, I don't ask too many questions).
Authorize.net was for a while completely off the air, and companies that relied upon them were not getting credit card authorizations (and, thus, no ecommerce). I think it is still only partially functional.
Authorize.net has been communicating with customers mostly (entirely ?) with twitter - they are
@AuthorizeNet with a hash tab of #authorizenet
If you go there, you will see a lot of status messages like
#authorizenet (cont.) Do not manually submit ARB transactions b/c you run the risk of your merchants being double billed. 10 minutes ago from web
(i.e., 4:47 EDT).
You will also see a lot of posts from annoyed people if you search on #authorizenet
It's an interesting use of Web 2.0 for emergency communications.
Regards Marshall
Jeff
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Tomas L. Byrnes<tomb@byrneit.net> wrote:
Earth is a single point of failure, where is your backup site?
[TLB:] Given that all my customers are on Earth, I don't need one if my customers also are "down".
-- Jeffrey Lyon, Leadership Team jeffrey.lyon@blacklotus.net | http://www.blacklotus.net Black Lotus Communications of The IRC Company, Inc.
Look for us at HostingCon 2009 in Washington, DC on August 10th - 12th at Booth #401.
-- Jeffrey Lyon, Leadership Team jeffrey.lyon@blacklotus.net | http://www.blacklotus.net Black Lotus Communications of The IRC Company, Inc. Look for us at HostingCon 2009 in Washington, DC on August 10th - 12th at Booth #401.
On Jul 3, 2009, at 5:11 PM, Jeffrey Lyon wrote:
That's a great idea, use some lame Web 2.0 trend to communicate with actual real life customers. </sarcasm>
I would assume they figured it was better than just remaining silent. Regards Marshall
Jeff
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:59 PM, Marshall Eubanks<tme@americafree.tv> wrote:
On Jul 3, 2009, at 4:29 PM, Ben Carleton wrote:
Yes it was.
On Jul 3, 2009, at 4:29 PM, Jeffrey Lyon wrote:
Wasn't Authorize.net affected by this? We received a support ticket about why Authorize.net is down today (I don't know either, I don't ask too many questions).
Authorize.net was for a while completely off the air, and companies that relied upon them were not getting credit card authorizations (and, thus, no ecommerce). I think it is still only partially functional.
Authorize.net has been communicating with customers mostly (entirely ?) with twitter - they are
@AuthorizeNet with a hash tab of #authorizenet
If you go there, you will see a lot of status messages like
#authorizenet (cont.) Do not manually submit ARB transactions b/c you run the risk of your merchants being double billed. 10 minutes ago from web
(i.e., 4:47 EDT).
You will also see a lot of posts from annoyed people if you search on #authorizenet
It's an interesting use of Web 2.0 for emergency communications.
Regards Marshall
Jeff
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Tomas L. Byrnes<tomb@byrneit.net> wrote:
Earth is a single point of failure, where is your backup site?
[TLB:] Given that all my customers are on Earth, I don't need one if my customers also are "down".
-- Jeffrey Lyon, Leadership Team jeffrey.lyon@blacklotus.net | http://www.blacklotus.net Black Lotus Communications of The IRC Company, Inc.
Look for us at HostingCon 2009 in Washington, DC on August 10th - 12th at Booth #401.
-- Jeffrey Lyon, Leadership Team jeffrey.lyon@blacklotus.net | http://www.blacklotus.net Black Lotus Communications of The IRC Company, Inc.
Look for us at HostingCon 2009 in Washington, DC on August 10th - 12th at Booth #401.
Regards Marshall Eubanks CEO / AmericaFree.TV
In article <786BA8C0-B534-40FF-9126-1E33BD11CB3C@americafree.tv>, Marshall Eubanks <tme@americafree.tv> writes
That's a great idea, use some lame Web 2.0 trend to communicate with actual real life customers. </sarcasm>
I would assume they figured it was better than just remaining silent.
I'm about to recommend to an organisation that it [a twitter account] is better than posting news of an outage on their low-volume website, which will get swamped when too many people poll it for news. What does the team think? Paying a lot more to host the website with higher "burst" capacity during an emergency, isn't an option. The only other idea I've had is to sign all the customers up to receive an SMS via some sort of broadcast service (the news will fit easily in one SMS). -- Roland Perry
On Jul 4, 2009, at 6:17 AM, Roland Perry wrote:
In article <786BA8C0-B534-40FF-9126-1E33BD11CB3C@americafree.tv>, Marshall Eubanks <tme@americafree.tv> writes
That's a great idea, use some lame Web 2.0 trend to communicate with actual real life customers. </sarcasm>
I would assume they figured it was better than just remaining silent.
I'm about to recommend to an organisation that it [a twitter account] is better than posting news of an outage on their low- volume website, which will get swamped when too many people poll it for news.
What if the outage takes out their website too ? I don't think that their website was up, and I would guess that they didn't have email either. That is a bad situation to be in. Note, BTW, that twitter itself is subject to frequent planned and unplanned outages. Marshall
What does the team think?
Paying a lot more to host the website with higher "burst" capacity during an emergency, isn't an option.
The only other idea I've had is to sign all the customers up to receive an SMS via some sort of broadcast service (the news will fit easily in one SMS). -- Roland Perry
Regards Marshall Eubanks CEO / AmericaFree.TV
In article <F832A12A-0AED-4A01-955D-E24DCA6181C8@americafree.tv>, Marshall Eubanks <tme@americafree.tv> writes
That's a great idea, use some lame Web 2.0 trend to communicate with actual real life customers. </sarcasm>
I would assume they figured it was better than just remaining silent.
I'm about to recommend to an organisation that it [a twitter account] is better than posting news of an outage on their low- volume website, which will get swamped when too many people poll it for news.
What if the outage takes out their website too ?
The website is hosted elsewhere, however the entire message can be delivered in one Tweet, so there's no need to confirm by looking at a website.
I don't think that their website was up, and I would guess that they didn't have email either. That is a bad situation to be in.
They don't plan to respond to email in real time.
Note, BTW, that twitter itself is subject to frequent planned and unplanned outages.
The question being, how often will they co-incide with the events I'm trying to track? fwiw, I've been using twitter for about three months now, and have never encountered either kind of outage. -- Roland Perry
Personally, I find it difficult to take Twitter seriously. It seems like more of a kids toy than a business tool. Something like a blogspot account would make a lot more sense. Jeff On 7/4/09, Marshall Eubanks <tme@americafree.tv> wrote:
On Jul 4, 2009, at 6:17 AM, Roland Perry wrote:
In article <786BA8C0-B534-40FF-9126-1E33BD11CB3C@americafree.tv>, Marshall Eubanks <tme@americafree.tv> writes
That's a great idea, use some lame Web 2.0 trend to communicate with actual real life customers. </sarcasm>
I would assume they figured it was better than just remaining silent.
I'm about to recommend to an organisation that it [a twitter account] is better than posting news of an outage on their low-volume website, which will get swamped when too many people poll it for news.
What if the outage takes out their website too ?
I don't think that their website was up, and I would guess that they didn't have email either. That is a bad situation to be in.
Note, BTW, that twitter itself is subject to frequent planned and unplanned outages.
Marshall
What does the team think?
Paying a lot more to host the website with higher "burst" capacity during an emergency, isn't an option.
The only other idea I've had is to sign all the customers up to receive an SMS via some sort of broadcast service (the news will fit easily in one SMS). -- Roland Perry
Regards Marshall Eubanks CEO / AmericaFree.TV
-- Jeffrey Lyon, Leadership Team jeffrey.lyon@blacklotus.net | http://www.blacklotus.net Black Lotus Communications of The IRC Company, Inc. Look for us at HostingCon 2009 in Washington, DC on August 10th - 12th at Booth #401.
Le samedi 04 juillet 2009 à 10:47 -0400, Jeffrey Lyon a écrit :
Personally, I find it difficult to take Twitter seriously. It seems like more of a kids toy than a business tool. Something like a blogspot account would make a lot more sense.
Yes. What about (continue to) use old email (inc lists), coupled with some roughly out-of-band like cell/pots/sms service? And in parallel old irc, et al. Any severe problem with, asking us to move over to "portal services"? mh
Jeff
On 7/4/09, Marshall Eubanks <tme@americafree.tv> wrote:
On Jul 4, 2009, at 6:17 AM, Roland Perry wrote:
In article <786BA8C0-B534-40FF-9126-1E33BD11CB3C@americafree.tv>, Marshall Eubanks <tme@americafree.tv> writes
That's a great idea, use some lame Web 2.0 trend to communicate with actual real life customers. </sarcasm>
I would assume they figured it was better than just remaining silent.
I'm about to recommend to an organisation that it [a twitter account] is better than posting news of an outage on their low-volume website, which will get swamped when too many people poll it for news.
What if the outage takes out their website too ?
I don't think that their website was up, and I would guess that they didn't have email either. That is a bad situation to be in.
Note, BTW, that twitter itself is subject to frequent planned and unplanned outages.
Marshall
What does the team think?
Paying a lot more to host the website with higher "burst" capacity during an emergency, isn't an option.
The only other idea I've had is to sign all the customers up to receive an SMS via some sort of broadcast service (the news will fit easily in one SMS). -- Roland Perry
Regards Marshall Eubanks CEO / AmericaFree.TV
-- michael hallgren, mh2198-ripe
Le samedi 04 juillet 2009 à 16:58 +0200, Michael Hallgren a écrit :
Le samedi 04 juillet 2009 à 10:47 -0400, Jeffrey Lyon a écrit :
Personally, I find it difficult to take Twitter seriously. It seems like more of a kids toy than a business tool. Something like a blogspot account would make a lot more sense.
Yes.
What about (continue to) use old email (inc lists), coupled with some roughly out-of-band like cell/pots/sms service? And in parallel old irc, et al.
Any severe problem with, asking us to move over to "portal services"?
Of course not negative with respect to new innovative means... But if we didn't have pidgin: msn, yahoo!, gtalk, icq, facebook,... ... would be hard to manage... and remember who's message to track via what channel... So, the channel I think is much dependent on the audience. The crowd small enough, most any means will be fine. The crowd more universal, well-known, stable communication protocols should be a natural choice. No? mh
mh
Jeff
On 7/4/09, Marshall Eubanks <tme@americafree.tv> wrote:
On Jul 4, 2009, at 6:17 AM, Roland Perry wrote:
In article <786BA8C0-B534-40FF-9126-1E33BD11CB3C@americafree.tv>, Marshall Eubanks <tme@americafree.tv> writes
That's a great idea, use some lame Web 2.0 trend to communicate with actual real life customers. </sarcasm>
I would assume they figured it was better than just remaining silent.
I'm about to recommend to an organisation that it [a twitter account] is better than posting news of an outage on their low-volume website, which will get swamped when too many people poll it for news.
What if the outage takes out their website too ?
I don't think that their website was up, and I would guess that they didn't have email either. That is a bad situation to be in.
Note, BTW, that twitter itself is subject to frequent planned and unplanned outages.
Marshall
What does the team think?
Paying a lot more to host the website with higher "burst" capacity during an emergency, isn't an option.
The only other idea I've had is to sign all the customers up to receive an SMS via some sort of broadcast service (the news will fit easily in one SMS). -- Roland Perry
Regards Marshall Eubanks CEO / AmericaFree.TV
-- michael hallgren, mh2198-ripe
In article <16720fe00907040747k67ca1206kb871420deb5e8163@mail.gmail.com>, Jeffrey Lyon <jeffrey.lyon@blacklotus.net> writes
Personally, I find it difficult to take Twitter seriously. It seems like more of a kids toy than a business tool. Something like a blogspot account would make a lot more sense.
That's the kind of "marketing-led" response I was hoping to hear. But the UK National Rail system now uses Tweets to tell customers about disruptions on the trains, and several major UK government departments and news organisations use it for announcements and "Breaking News". So has it become "respectable" yet? -- Roland Perry
On 04/07/09 17:07, Roland Perry wrote:
That's the kind of "marketing-led" response I was hoping to hear.
But the UK National Rail system now uses Tweets to tell customers about disruptions on the trains, and several major UK government departments and news organisations use it for announcements and "Breaking News".
So has it become "respectable" yet?
When there are open-source equivalents available (e.g. Laconica, OpenMicroBlogger - both of which incidentally are compatible since they are based upon the OMB spec), I do wonder why a commercial or government entity would use a closed-source, non-domestic service.
In article <h2ns2s$kcv$1@ger.gmane.org>, Chris Hills <chaz@chaz6.com> writes
That's the kind of "marketing-led" response I was hoping to hear.
But the UK National Rail system now uses Tweets to tell customers about disruptions on the trains, and several major UK government departments and news organisations use it for announcements and "Breaking News".
So has it become "respectable" yet?
When there are open-source equivalents available (e.g. Laconica, OpenMicroBlogger - both of which incidentally are compatible since they are based upon the OMB spec), I do wonder why a commercial or government entity would use a closed-source, non-domestic service.
That's fair comment, but how do you get your customers to install quirky niche solutions to what's a once-a-year problem? They all seem pretty happy using a multitude of other "non-domestic" solutions, which probably accounts for 99% of the stuff they have on their PCs. So "not sufficiently mature" we can get away with as an excuse, but "Made in America" isn't going to put many people off :) -- Roland Perry
When the local power companies uses twitter, then maybe I'll consider using twitter for our customers. There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear "cool" and "in tune" with customers, but by far and large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their call center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those that call in. And then make sure something gets posted to the website. SMS, Facebook, and Twitter fall in line after all that. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Roland Perry [mailto:lists@internetpolicyagency.com] Sent: Saturday, July 04, 2009 10:38 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Using twitter as an outage notification In article <h2ns2s$kcv$1@ger.gmane.org>, Chris Hills <chaz@chaz6.com> writes
That's the kind of "marketing-led" response I was hoping to hear.
But the UK National Rail system now uses Tweets to tell customers about disruptions on the trains, and several major UK government departments and news organisations use it for announcements and "Breaking News".
So has it become "respectable" yet?
When there are open-source equivalents available (e.g. Laconica, OpenMicroBlogger - both of which incidentally are compatible since they are based upon the OMB spec), I do wonder why a commercial or government entity would use a closed-source, non-domestic service.
That's fair comment, but how do you get your customers to install quirky niche solutions to what's a once-a-year problem? They all seem pretty happy using a multitude of other "non-domestic" solutions, which probably accounts for 99% of the stuff they have on their PCs. So "not sufficiently mature" we can get away with as an excuse, but "Made in America" isn't going to put many people off :) -- Roland Perry
Am 04.07.2009 um 22:59 schrieb Frank Bulk:
When the local power companies uses twitter, then maybe I'll consider using twitter for our customers.
well it seems popular http://www.dell.com/twitter dell made some money with it too http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2009/06/11/delloutlet... :-))
There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear "cool" and "in tune" with customers, but by far and large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their call center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those that call in. And then make sure something gets posted to the website. SMS, Facebook, and Twitter fall in line after all that.
Frank
-----Original Message----- From: Roland Perry [mailto:lists@internetpolicyagency.com] Sent: Saturday, July 04, 2009 10:38 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
In article <h2ns2s$kcv$1@ger.gmane.org>, Chris Hills <chaz@chaz6.com> writes
That's the kind of "marketing-led" response I was hoping to hear.
But the UK National Rail system now uses Tweets to tell customers about disruptions on the trains, and several major UK government departments and news organisations use it for announcements and "Breaking News".
So has it become "respectable" yet?
When there are open-source equivalents available (e.g. Laconica, OpenMicroBlogger - both of which incidentally are compatible since they are based upon the OMB spec), I do wonder why a commercial or government entity would use a closed-source, non-domestic service.
That's fair comment, but how do you get your customers to install quirky niche solutions to what's a once-a-year problem?
They all seem pretty happy using a multitude of other "non-domestic" solutions, which probably accounts for 99% of the stuff they have on their PCs.
So "not sufficiently mature" we can get away with as an excuse, but "Made in America" isn't going to put many people off :) -- Roland Perry
-- Les enfants teribbles - research / deployment Marc Manthey Vogelsangerstrasse 97 D - 50823 Köln - Germany Vogelsangerstrasse 97 Geo: 50.945554, 6.920293 PGP/GnuPG: 0x1ac02f3296b12b4d Tel.:0049-221-29891489 Mobil:0049-1577-3329231 web : http://www.let.de Opinions expressed may not even be mine by the time you read them, and certainly don't reflect those of any other entity (legal or otherwise). Please note that according to the German law on data retention, information on every electronic information exchange with me is retained for a period of six months.
Frank Bulk wrote:
When the local power companies uses twitter, then maybe I'll consider using twitter for our customers.
There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear "cool" and "in tune" with customers, but by far and large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their call center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those that call in. And then make sure something gets posted to the website. SMS, Facebook, and Twitter fall in line after all that.
A plain-text status website and recorded message before the phone tree scale quite well in the event of a major problem. But yeah, Twitter will attract the "what's cool right now" demographic. ~Seth
In article <4A4FC4F3.2010301@rollernet.us>, Seth Mattinen <sethm@rollernet.us> writes
Twitter will attract the "what's cool right now" demographic.
But has it gone from "cool" to "useful" (for this kind of application), in a way that Facebook and other such sites haven't? I remember an employer of mine when I was trying to persuade him to build a modem into a PC so people could exchange what we'd now call emails, and he said "Roland, come back and ask me again, when I can pay your wages through that modem thing". Unfortunately I didn't get the opportunity, as I left there twenty years ago, and Paypal wasn't invented until about ten years ago. -- Roland Perry
On Sat, Jul 04, 2009 at 03:59:48PM -0500, Frank Bulk wrote:
When the local power companies uses twitter, then maybe I'll consider using twitter for our customers.
During the ice storm we had here last winter, the local power company did just that. "psnh" "ice storm" "twitter" etc are all good search terms. I haven't been following this thread closely, so I dunno if that had already been mentioned and your remark was a sardonic one. Nevertheless.. -mm- (probably due for an annual nanog posting)
----- Original Message ----- From: "Frank Bulk" Sent: Saturday, July 04, 2009 10:59 AM Subject: RE: Using twitter as an outage notification
When the local power companies uses twitter, then maybe I'll consider using twitter for our customers.
There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear "cool" and "in tune" with customers, but by far and large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their call center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those that call in. And then make sure something gets posted to the website. SMS, Facebook, and Twitter fall in line after all that.
Frank
I thought this was interesting: "Bonnie Smalley has Internet bragging rights: She has been blocked by Twitter for hand-typing too many tweets in an hour. They thought she was a computer program made to spew spam. Ms. Smalley, it turns out, is a 100 percent human customer service representative for Comcast. She is one of 10 representatives who reach out to customers through social networks, rather than waiting for them to find Comcast's support site." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/technology/personaltech/02basics.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
In article <!&!AAAAAAAAAAAuAAAAAAAAAKTyXRN5/+lGvU59a+P7CFMBAN6gY+ZG84BMpVQcAbDh1IQAA AATbSgAABAAAAAuldg0EWkrSZ9BD0db8+e2AQAAAAA=@iname.com>, Frank Bulk <frnkblk@iname.com> writes
When the local power companies uses twitter, then maybe I'll consider using twitter for our customers.
That's a poor example as far as the UK's concerned. You can't get information from the power company for days if you are a domestic customer.
There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear "cool" and "in tune" with customers, but by far and large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their call center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those that call in.
It's a High School. They don't have a "support desk" (or more than handful of phone lines [1]). Even the local radio station can't cope with one call per school asking them to broadcast the news that they have closed due to bad weather.
And then make sure something gets posted to the website.
Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event. -- Roland Perry
On Sun, Jul 05, 2009, Roland Perry wrote:
Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event.
Is Twitter making a profit or not? This discussion about (ab)using a publicly available message system which isn't currently being charged for would makes me worried^Wamused as hell. (Not that I can't see possible ways of making money off twitter - especially if you offer reliable message dissemination services to companies for a fee, but AFAIK they aren't doing this at the moment.) Adrian
On Jul 5, 2009, at 5:12 PM, Adrian Chadd wrote:
Is Twitter making a profit or not?
The other consideration is scalability and reliability. Twitter has been subject to numerous feature disablements due to capacity issues, as well as complete outages. Furthermore, Twitter does not appear to be deployed in a distributed, highly-available architecture. The Twitter *aggregation/attention model* is what is of great interest, any merits of the specific service aside. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Roland Dobbins <rdobbins@arbor.net> // <http://www.arbornetworks.com> Unfortunately, inefficiency scales really well. -- Kevin Lawton
Is Twitter making a profit or not?
The other consideration is scalability and reliability. Twitter has been subject to numerous feature disablements due to capacity issues, as well as complete outages. Furthermore, Twitter does not appear to be deployed in a distributed, highly-available architecture.
The Twitter *aggregation/attention model* is what is of great interest, any merits of the specific service aside.
exactly, its like VHS versus BETAMAX , not the better system wins,its just better maketing and popularity. just my 2 cents http://identi.ca/macbroadcast/ < the opensource distributed alternative > http://laconi.ca/ -- Les enfants teribbles - research / deployment Marc Manthey Vogelsangerstrasse 97 D - 50823 Köln - Germany Vogelsangerstrasse 97 Geo: 50.945554, 6.920293 PGP/GnuPG: 0x1ac02f3296b12b4d Tel.:0049-221-29891489 Mobil:0049-1577-3329231 web : http://www.let.de Opinions expressed may not even be mine by the time you read them, and certainly don't reflect those of any other entity (legal or otherwise). Please note that according to the German law on data retention, information on every electronic information exchange with me is retained for a period of six months.
On Jul 5, 2009, at 6:12 AM, Adrian Chadd wrote:
On Sun, Jul 05, 2009, Roland Perry wrote:
Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event.
Is Twitter making a profit or not?
The word on the street is that they have not yet "found a revenue model". In other words, they make no money. They seem very dot com 1.0 unconcerned with this. That obviously cannot last. The speculation on how to fix that tend to be either focused advertising http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_ultimate_twitter_revenue_model.php ecommerce http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/2009/6/22/A-real-Twitter-revenue-model---g... or Google type data mining models (you can detect trends very quickly on twitter). These can obviously be combined; who knows if they would be sufficient.
This discussion about (ab)using a publicly available message system which isn't currently being charged for would makes me worried^Wamused as hell.
I don't think it violates the terms of use. But, yes, as I said before, this is a service that goes down. I would not rely on it as the only way to communicate.
(Not that I can't see possible ways of making money off twitter - especially if you offer reliable message dissemination services to companies for a fee, but AFAIK they aren't doing this at the moment.)
No. I haven't even heard this mentioned as a possible revenue model. Good idea, though. Regards Marshall
Adrian
Regards Marshall Eubanks CEO / AmericaFree.TV
In article <9589B202-ED92-4C49-98EE-EEBAA43C87AA@americafree.tv>, Marshall Eubanks <tme@americafree.tv> writes
as I said before, this is a service that goes down. I would not rely on it as the only way to communicate.
I'd be proposing it as an additional way to communicate[1], but people could come to rely upon it. [1] the present system seems to be those few students who can get through to the school then SMS the news to their friends. -- Roland Perry
In article <20090705101237.GC14222@skywalker.creative.net.au>, Adrian Chadd <adrian@creative.net.au> writes
Is Twitter making a profit or not?
This discussion about (ab)using a publicly available message system which isn't currently being charged for would makes me worried^Wamused as hell.
I've seen debates about whether it's possible to monetise Twitter. Operationally, it's an issue if they fail financially, but I don't think the investment in setting up an account is large enough to worry about. Counter-intuitively, I've probably seen more subscription-based services fail, than free ones. -- Roland Perry
On Sun, 5 Jul 2009, Roland Perry wrote:
There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear "cool" and "in tune" with customers, but by far and large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their call center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those that call in.
It's a High School. They don't have a "support desk" (or more than handful of phone lines [1]). Even the local radio station can't cope with one call per school asking them to broadcast the news that they have closed due to bad weather.
If your resources are that tight, do what our local school district did, mandate that all bus schedules will only be available on the web site.
And then make sure something gets posted to the website.
Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event.
Roland, sounds like you should have a few "public service" announcements saying that school closures will be delivered via a certain twitter username. Also send a flyer home with the students. The radio station can pick up the twitter feed like everyone else, and announce closures. That is the way a certain group of people are doing it in the middle east right now, word gets around and word gets out... In your case, the community will know quickly, all from a couple of people logging into twitter and sending a few messages. Sounds like a simple, ideal solution given your budget constraints. -- steve
My gosh, <sarcasm> Ok, how about we use Facebook, myspace and the other assorted community websites/services, no better yet lets use AOL! </sarcasm> Can we kill this thread please (for those that are still on AOL that's PLZ) This list is for professional content, not for boasting about high school websties/services that will die out in the next year or so.
-----Original Message----- From: Steve Pirk [mailto:orion@pirk.com] Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2009 6:43 AM To: Roland Perry Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
On Sun, 5 Jul 2009, Roland Perry wrote:
There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear "cool" and "in tune" with customers, bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t...
In article <Pine.LNX.4.64.0907050334130.23511@mail.pirk.com>, Steve Pirk <orion@pirk.com> writes
It's a High School. They don't have a "support desk" (or more than handful of phone lines [1]). Even the local radio station can't cope with one call per school asking them to broadcast the news that they have closed due to bad weather.
If your resources are that tight, do what our local school district did, mandate that all bus schedules will only be available on the web site.
The school doesn't have any buses. About 80% of the students walk (the average distance maybe a little over a mile) and most of the rest get taken in their parents car.
Roland, sounds like you should have a few "public service" announcements saying that school closures will be delivered via a certain twitter username.
That's what my objective is - to build a sturdy enough case for the school to have a twitter account to use during these events.
Also send a flyer home with the students.
Only about half of those ever reach home (no-one knows where they end up, but it's probably the same place as all those lost Biros). But if the school had a twitter account I'm sure the news would spread rapidly. Most of the students spend hours online every day, even if the school doesn't.
The radio station can pick up the twitter feed like everyone else, and announce closures. That is the way a certain group of people are doing it in the middle east right now, word gets around and word gets out... In your case, the community will know quickly, all from a couple of people logging into twitter and sending a few messages. Sounds like a simple, ideal solution given your budget constraints.
I hope so. -- Roland Perry
On Sun, Jul 05, 2009 at 11:01:43AM +0100, Roland Perry wrote: [snow day notifications]
Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event.
There are web hosting providers whose 18c/year hosting plans can't handle a few thousand requests to a static page over a period of maybe 15 minutes without falling over? The mind boggles. - Matt
In article <20090705113248.GP1499@hezmatt.org>, Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@hezmatt.org> writes
There are web hosting providers whose 18c/year hosting plans can't handle a few thousand requests to a static page over a period of maybe 15 minutes without falling over? The mind boggles.
Apparently so. Of course, they could be deliberately throttled, rather than run on inherently low-bandwidth kit. Which raises the issue of whether such throttling schemes should take account of short bursts. -- Roland Perry
There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear "cool" and "in tune" with customers, but by far and large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their call center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those that call in.
It's a High School. They don't have a "support desk" (or more than handful of phone lines [1]). Even the local radio station can't cope with one call per school asking them to broadcast the news that they have closed due to bad weather.
And then make sure something gets posted to the website.
Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. Really? Um, wow. How big is this school? Is the webserver on an ISDN
I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event. This is a case where it makes *perfect* sense to offload emergency notifications to another, larger system such as twitter, *as well as*
Roland Perry wrote: line? post to the school website (ideally via a blog, so you can use posterus to do both actions in one email). There's no fee, the cost to "set up"[1] is your time to securely configure a posterus account and a list to send to posterus (see below) and then to send an announcement post to posterus (and thus post on the school blog and on twitter) and to send an email to all students and parents notifying them so they can follow the school's announcement feed on twitter. jc [1] To setup: create an announcement mailing list with a name like post72045gh@school.edu - the name is kept private. The mailing list will send to posterus (and yourself - do NOT use this list to send to regular users - if you want to do that make a different list, a public list). This prevents students from sending out snow day emails by forging the school's secretary's email address and sending to posterus themselves - they would need to guess the name of the mailing list and send "from" that name to posterus to forge a snow day email. For even more security, set the list to no approved posters. The people who are authorized to send out the announcement will be authorized to *approve* posts from non-members (who are everyone). Anyone on the school staff can post (but still, keep the address private, only distribute it to those who need to know!). The posts are held for moderation and are sent to the people who can approve, and they have to click on the approval link and approve the post before it gets distributed. Test this system with the people who will use it, so that they understand what happens if they are the first one to click on the approval link, and what happens if someone else is first (no messages left to approve). Also, make sure they can remember the password for moderating the private email list - the whole thing grinds to a halt if none of them can remember their password at 4 am when they try to send a snowday announcement and it remains stuck in the distribution list and never gets out and posted. The usual system people use to remember an infrequently used password (of having a password on a note by the computer in the office) doesn't work at 4 am when everyone is at home. jc
In article <4A50C401.9070307@gmail.com>, JC Dill <jcdill.lists@gmail.com> writes
Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic.
Really? Um, wow. How big is this school? Is the webserver on an ISDN line?
It appears to be at a co-location centre in a distant city. I expect it's provided as part of a package by one of the $5 domain hosting companies. The bandwidth limiting is more likely a quota than a lack of connectivity.
I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event.
This is a case where it makes *perfect* sense to offload emergency notifications to another, larger system such as twitter,
That's my current view, too.
you can use posterus
It's going to be hard enough getting them to be comfortable with Twitter. -- Roland Perry
In article <16720fe00907040747k67ca1206kb871420deb5e8163@mail.gmail.com>, Jeffrey Lyon <jeffrey.lyon@blacklotus.net> writes
Personally, I find it difficult to take Twitter seriously. It seems like more of a kids toy than a business tool. Something like a blogspot account would make a lot more sense.
That's the kind of "marketing-led" response I was hoping to hear.
But the UK National Rail system now uses Tweets to tell customers about disruptions on the trains, and several major UK government departments and news organisations use it for announcements and "Breaking News".
So has it become "respectable" yet?
Roland Perry wrote: there are plenty of examples where twitter is being used for useful notifications. in the sf bay area, there's a user maintained version of what you describe for our commuter rail. a large example of this is comcast's customer service (see http://twitter.com/comcastcares) personally, i like the twitter idea. i can follow/unfollow at will, i can set up sms alerts for specific "users" i follow, etc. sure, twitter had some stability issues, but i think if we're being fair, they've been very stable of late. sure, twitter might be down at the same time, but it seems more likely that the website for the provider in question would be affected and twitter can be updated very quickly using a cell phone either with a twitter app or simply via sms. just my $0.02 worth (perhaps $0.03 and perhaps not worth over $0.01) +m
Roland Perry wrote:
In article <786BA8C0-B534-40FF-9126-1E33BD11CB3C@americafree.tv>, Marshall Eubanks <tme@americafree.tv> writes
That's a great idea, use some lame Web 2.0 trend to communicate with actual real life customers. </sarcasm>
I would assume they figured it was better than just remaining silent.
I'm about to recommend to an organisation that it [a twitter account] is better than posting news of an outage on their low-volume website, which will get swamped when too many people poll it for news.
What does the team think?
I don't understand why this is an either/or question. Why not post to both? Twitter is a great method of communication, for those that use twitter. But some people don't use twitter. So use every avenue you have. If you have a customer mailing list for announcements, send email. If you have a blog, post to the blog. I'm in the process of setting up posterous to post to a blog, myspace, facebook, and twitter all with one email. Can't get much simpler than that for getting the word out via all the channels (assuming that outbound email is working). (Obviously some businesses don't want/need myspace or facebook, but if you use them, post there too.) http://posterous.com/autopost Quoting: How does autoposting work? Just set up your other accounts here. The next time you post to posterous, we will instantly autopost everywhere else. Facebook profile newsfeeds will be updated each time you post to notify your friends. You can also autopost photos to your photo album and embed your blog directly in your profile. Twitter messages will use the title of your post up to 130 characters, and then append a shortened post.ly url. Flickr photos will be put automatically in your photostream. If you attach multiple photos, we'll post them all in the order we receive them. Blogs will be updated with the full content you send us. We'll host your images, music and files, so you don't have to lift a finger. You control where we post. Just email the right address and we'll do the right thing. Post Everywhere? post@posterous.com as usual Twitter? twitter@posterous.com Flickr? flickr@posterous.com Facebook? facebook@posterous.com Tumblr? tumblr@posterous.com Any other blog? blog@posterous.com Posterous only? posterous@posterous.com Combine them! flickr+twitter@posterous.com You can also address an email to #{text}@posterous.com and it will post to any site where the url contains that text. #apple@posterous.com will go to apple.wordpress.com and flickr.com/apple, but NOT banana.blogspot.com. jc
In article <4A4F5E3C.5040301@gmail.com>, JC Dill <jcdill.lists@gmail.com> writes
That's a great idea, use some lame Web 2.0 trend to communicate with actual real life customers. </sarcasm>
I would assume they figured it was better than just remaining silent.
I'm about to recommend to an organisation that it [a twitter account] is better than posting news of an outage on their low-volume website, which will get swamped when too many people poll it for news.
What does the team think?
I don't understand why this is an either/or question. Why not post to both?
Yes, that can be done. What I'm trying to anticipate is the objection to *also* posting to Twitter, which might be raised on the grounds that it's too "unofficial", or "unsupported" or something like that.
You control where we post.
Just email the right address and we'll do the right thing. Post Everywhere? post@posterous.com as usual Twitter? twitter@posterous.com Flickr? flickr@posterous.com Facebook? facebook@posterous.com Tumblr? tumblr@posterous.com Any other blog? blog@posterous.com Posterous only? posterous@posterous.com Combine them! flickr+twitter@posterous.com
It's this richness which confuses the ordinary person. How are they to know which bit of the scattergun approach is the right one to use? Or whether "posting everywhere" has some hidden disadvantage. -- Roland Perry
Roland Perry wrote:
What I'm trying to anticipate is the objection to *also* posting to Twitter, which might be raised on the grounds that it's too "unofficial", or "unsupported" or something like that.
Anyone who makes that argument is just showing how little they know about Twitter. It would be like complaining you shouldn't use email because "not everyone has email".
You control where we post.
Just email the right address and we'll do the right thing. Post Everywhere? post@posterous.com as usual Twitter? twitter@posterous.com Flickr? flickr@posterous.com Facebook? facebook@posterous.com Tumblr? tumblr@posterous.com Any other blog? blog@posterous.com Posterous only? posterous@posterous.com Combine them! flickr+twitter@posterous.com
It's this richness which confuses the ordinary person. That's a lot like saying Perl is too complicated for the ordinary person so never use Perl. :-) How are they to know which bit of the scattergun approach is the right one to use? Or whether "posting everywhere" has some hidden disadvantage.
You can configure it and use it however YOU want. If it's too confusing to use it selectively - sometimes posting in all places, sometimes posting in just one place, then configure it for your preferred use and use the regular "post everywhere" method each time you post. For network outage announcements it would work perfectly to post to Twitter and your company blog(s) in one step. Bonus - if it can't reach one system at least the post gets posted on the other system. For this reason your company may want to setup a shadow blog on one of the free blogging platforms, in addition to a blog on the company website. This way if your website is down, the news on the other blog is still out there for those that follow the blog to find/read. The configurable aspects of posterous are most helpful for people who have more diverse posting habits - who want to post news to some (but not all) channels, who sometimes post chatty things they want to go to facebook, sometimes post business things they don't want to go to facebook, who post photos they want to go to flickr and facebook but not their blog, etc. If you are active with social networking it would be perfect. I you just use it as an announcement tool, just use the defaults. jc
In article <4A4F6EF5.9030502@gmail.com>, JC Dill <jcdill.lists@gmail.com> writes
What I'm trying to anticipate is the objection to *also* posting to Twitter, which might be raised on the grounds that it's too "unofficial", or "unsupported" or something like that.
Anyone who makes that argument is just showing how little they know about Twitter.
So that's 98% of the population then...
It would be like complaining you shouldn't use email because "not everyone has email".
But email has become respectable, although I still see "people who know better" starting speeches with 'of course, ten years ago none of us used email, but now....' which shows they are very late adopters themselves.
You control where we post.
Just email the right address and we'll do the right thing. Post Everywhere? post@posterous.com as usual Twitter? twitter@posterous.com Flickr? flickr@posterous.com Facebook? facebook@posterous.com Tumblr? tumblr@posterous.com Any other blog? blog@posterous.com Posterous only? posterous@posterous.com Combine them! flickr+twitter@posterous.com
It's this richness which confuses the ordinary person.
That's a lot like saying Perl is too complicated for the ordinary person so never use Perl. :-)
You are confusing the tool with the platform.
How are they to know which bit of the scattergun approach is the right one to use? Or whether "posting everywhere" has some hidden disadvantage.
You can configure it and use it however YOU want.
Again, that's about the platform called posterous. How can I explain to the School Board that posterous has enough credibility to be used. I don't think it has. All they ever hear about other Web2.0 like Facebook and Bebo is how dangerous they are for kids. But I'm beginning to think that finally maybe Twitter has the right profile for this application. -- Roland Perry
Roland Perry wrote:
In article <4A4F6EF5.9030502@gmail.com>, JC Dill <jcdill.lists@gmail.com> writes
What I'm trying to anticipate is the objection to *also* posting to Twitter, which might be raised on the grounds that it's too "unofficial", or "unsupported" or something like that.
Anyone who makes that argument is just showing how little they know about Twitter.
So that's 98% of the population then...
We aren't talking about the general population. IMHO anyone in Network Operations or NOC management who doesn't know about emerging and cutting edge communications is in the wrong job or the wrong industry.
It would be like complaining you shouldn't use email because "not everyone has email".
But email has become respectable, although I still see "people who know better" starting speeches with 'of course, ten years ago none of us used email, but now....' which shows they are very late adopters themselves.
How many of them are running Internet Networks?
It's this richness which confuses the ordinary person.
That's a lot like saying Perl is too complicated for the ordinary person so never use Perl. :-)
You are confusing the tool with the platform. Twitter is a tool just like Perl. You can reach twitter from any browser, and most mobile phones.
How are they to know which bit of the scattergun approach is the right one to use? Or whether "posting everywhere" has some hidden disadvantage.
You can configure it and use it however YOU want.
Again, that's about the platform called posterous. How can I explain to the School Board that posterous has enough credibility to be used.
You explain that it's a tool. You configure it and then you give a demonstration. Send a post, then show them how users who keep up with local news will find the info depending on what channels they use most often to get important info. Even easier, you make an email address on your system that is an alias to posterous. So they send to "post@schoolsystem.edu" which .forwards out to posterous, which posts to the school blog, myspace, facebook, twitter, and any other system you configure. Show them how a radio station can retweet the info and then announce "to get info on school closings, follow us on twitter at...." and everyone can send the info TO the radio station and get the info FROM the radio station quickly and easily.
I don't think it has. All they ever hear about other Web2.0 like Facebook and Bebo is how dangerous they are for kids.
Sheesh. Cars and bikes are far more dangerous for kids than Facebook and Bebo. That's why kids are taught the rules of the road, to always wear bike helmets, to always buckle up in the car, and they get driver training.
But I'm beginning to think that finally maybe Twitter has the right profile for this application.
Again, why limit yourself? Use all the tools available. jc
For DR issues (among many others, of course) think of Twitter as a paging system of global proportions: not a lot to be said, but if you get the message right its broadcast and amplification capabilities are unmatched. -- ***Stefan http://twitter.com/netfortius On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 5:19 PM, JC Dill <jcdill.lists@gmail.com> wrote:
Roland Perry wrote:
In article <4A4F6EF5.9030502@gmail.com>, JC Dill <jcdill.lists@gmail.com> writes
What I'm trying to anticipate is the objection to *also* posting to
Twitter, which might be raised on the grounds that it's too "unofficial", or "unsupported" or something like that.
Anyone who makes that argument is just showing how little they know about
Twitter.
So that's 98% of the population then...
We aren't talking about the general population. IMHO anyone in Network Operations or NOC management who doesn't know about emerging and cutting edge communications is in the wrong job or the wrong industry.
It would be like complaining you shouldn't use email because "not
everyone has email".
But email has become respectable, although I still see "people who know better" starting speeches with 'of course, ten years ago none of us used email, but now....' which shows they are very late adopters themselves.
How many of them are running Internet Networks?
It's this richness which confuses the ordinary person.
That's a lot like saying Perl is too complicated for the ordinary person
so never use Perl. :-)
You are confusing the tool with the platform.
Twitter is a tool just like Perl. You can reach twitter from any browser, and most mobile phones.
How are they to know which bit of the scattergun approach is the right
one to use? Or whether "posting everywhere" has some hidden disadvantage.
You can configure it and use it however YOU want.
Again, that's about the platform called posterous. How can I explain to the School Board that posterous has enough credibility to be used.
You explain that it's a tool. You configure it and then you give a demonstration. Send a post, then show them how users who keep up with local news will find the info depending on what channels they use most often to get important info.
Even easier, you make an email address on your system that is an alias to posterous. So they send to "post@schoolsystem.edu" which .forwards out to posterous, which posts to the school blog, myspace, facebook, twitter, and any other system you configure. Show them how a radio station can retweet the info and then announce "to get info on school closings, follow us on twitter at...." and everyone can send the info TO the radio station and get the info FROM the radio station quickly and easily.
I don't think it has. All they ever hear about other Web2.0 like Facebook
and Bebo is how dangerous they are for kids.
Sheesh. Cars and bikes are far more dangerous for kids than Facebook and Bebo. That's why kids are taught the rules of the road, to always wear bike helmets, to always buckle up in the car, and they get driver training.
But I'm beginning to think that finally maybe Twitter has the right
profile for this application.
Again, why limit yourself? Use all the tools available.
jc
So does twitter address the mass public, or those who are Web 2.0 literate or techies? I'm glad to see that Dell reached two million people, but how many more people call in or visit its web page every day? My point in another fork of this thread is that for most people, the traditional forms of communication are *it*. I'm not saying that twitter hasn't been used and found a way to reach the some portion of the population -- the traditional methods (announcement at top of phone tree & note on homepage) should be maintained and as one more additional way to communication. I think you mentioned that yourself a few posts ago. =) Frank -----Original Message----- From: JC Dill [mailto:jcdill.lists@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, July 04, 2009 5:20 PM Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Using twitter as an outage notification Roland Perry wrote:
In article <4A4F6EF5.9030502@gmail.com>, JC Dill <jcdill.lists@gmail.com> writes
What I'm trying to anticipate is the objection to *also* posting to Twitter, which might be raised on the grounds that it's too "unofficial", or "unsupported" or something like that.
Anyone who makes that argument is just showing how little they know about Twitter.
So that's 98% of the population then...
We aren't talking about the general population. IMHO anyone in Network Operations or NOC management who doesn't know about emerging and cutting edge communications is in the wrong job or the wrong industry.
It would be like complaining you shouldn't use email because "not everyone has email".
But email has become respectable, although I still see "people who know better" starting speeches with 'of course, ten years ago none of us used email, but now....' which shows they are very late adopters themselves.
How many of them are running Internet Networks?
It's this richness which confuses the ordinary person.
That's a lot like saying Perl is too complicated for the ordinary person so never use Perl. :-)
You are confusing the tool with the platform. Twitter is a tool just like Perl. You can reach twitter from any browser, and most mobile phones.
How are they to know which bit of the scattergun approach is the right one to use? Or whether "posting everywhere" has some hidden disadvantage.
You can configure it and use it however YOU want.
Again, that's about the platform called posterous. How can I explain to the School Board that posterous has enough credibility to be used.
You explain that it's a tool. You configure it and then you give a demonstration. Send a post, then show them how users who keep up with local news will find the info depending on what channels they use most often to get important info. Even easier, you make an email address on your system that is an alias to posterous. So they send to "post@schoolsystem.edu" which .forwards out to posterous, which posts to the school blog, myspace, facebook, twitter, and any other system you configure. Show them how a radio station can retweet the info and then announce "to get info on school closings, follow us on twitter at...." and everyone can send the info TO the radio station and get the info FROM the radio station quickly and easily.
I don't think it has. All they ever hear about other Web2.0 like Facebook and Bebo is how dangerous they are for kids.
Sheesh. Cars and bikes are far more dangerous for kids than Facebook and Bebo. That's why kids are taught the rules of the road, to always wear bike helmets, to always buckle up in the car, and they get driver training.
But I'm beginning to think that finally maybe Twitter has the right profile for this application.
Again, why limit yourself? Use all the tools available. jc
-----Original Message----- From: Frank Bulk [mailto:frnkblk@iname.com] Sent: Saturday, July 04, 2009 4:51 PM To: 'JC Dill' Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: Using twitter as an outage notification
So does twitter address the mass public,
[TLB:] The whole point of Twitter is that it works with SMS.
My point in another fork of this thread is that for most people, the traditional forms of communication are *it*. I'm not saying that twitter hasn't been used and found a way to reach the some portion of the population -- the traditional methods (announcement at top of phone tree & note on homepage) should be maintained and as one more additional way to communication. I think you mentioned that yourself a few posts ago. =)
Frank
[TLB:] I think everyone agrees it's not an "Either/Or". The argument that Twitter is a good, inexpensive, way to mass communicate operational issues with those that are able to use it, is kind of axiomatic. I'm not, in general, a fan of Twitter. To me, twits are those in my killfile (yes, I know they call it "tweets"), however, as a way of using Other People's Money to reduce your OPEX while improving CSI, it seems like a no-brainer to me.
In article <4A4FD58B.2000703@gmail.com>, JC Dill <jcdill.lists@gmail.com> writes
Even easier, you make an email address on your system that is an alias to posterous. So they send to "post@schoolsystem.edu" which .forwards out to posterous, which posts to the school blog, myspace, facebook, twitter,
It doesn't have any of those, that's the point really. Is twitter the one I should get them started with first?
Show them how a radio station can retweet the info
It's have to be automated as there are hundreds to do over a periods of a few tens of minutes (the schools don't generally announce they are closing until they see how many teachers made it to work, and that's not long before they have to open - students get marked down for being late, even in bad weather, so can't delay setting out from home; it's an interesting operational model.)
and then announce "to get info on school closings, follow us on twitter at...."
http://twitter.com/trentfmnews (but it's not exactly high traffic)
and everyone can send the info TO the radio station and get the info FROM the radio station quickly and easily.
The radio station would probably be overwhelmed if they got much more than one tweet per school.
I don't think it has. All they ever hear about other Web2.0 like Facebook and Bebo is how dangerous they are for kids.
Sheesh. Cars and bikes are far more dangerous for kids than Facebook and Bebo. That's why kids are taught the rules of the road, to always wear bike helmets, to always buckle up in the car, and they get driver training.
Part of my day job is getting that sort of training about using the Internet, into schools. So far most of them have only got as far as teaching the students how to operate Powerpoint (yes I know that's not an Internet application), and installing filters to try to keep them off YouTube during lessons.
But I'm beginning to think that finally maybe Twitter has the right profile for this application.
Again, why limit yourself? Use all the tools available.
One step at a time :) -- Roland Perry
On Jul 5, 2009, at 6:23 AM, Roland Perry wrote:
In article <4A4FD58B.2000703@gmail.com>, JC Dill <jcdill.lists@gmail.com
writes Even easier, you make an email address on your system that is an alias to posterous. So they send to "post@schoolsystem.edu" which .forwards out to posterous, which posts to the school blog, myspace, facebook, twitter,
It doesn't have any of those, that's the point really.
Is twitter the one I should get them started with first?
I would say this partially would depend on how and what you want to communicate. If there is just going to be one pronouncement per day (the school is up / down / delayed), then facebook and / or myspace would suggest themselves. They are to date free, and the students will know what they are. I would start with facebook. If you look at the #AuthorizeNet situation, there was a lot of back and forth. Will the schools have a need for back and forth ? If they do, then, yes, twitter might be part of the solution and you might start with it. It's free, cross-platform, and you can also assume that the students (if not their parents) know what it is. This might also be a good for teachers and the school to communicate, say by DM (direct messages). Note that this will take people answering questions / dealing with issues on twitter. Specifically, someone would have to pay attention to it during any quasi-emergency period - do the schools have such a person ? Also, if the school looses power in a storm, is there a backup means of getting to the Internet ? Regards Marshall
Show them how a radio station can retweet the info
It's have to be automated as there are hundreds to do over a periods of a few tens of minutes (the schools don't generally announce they are closing until they see how many teachers made it to work, and that's not long before they have to open - students get marked down for being late, even in bad weather, so can't delay setting out from home; it's an interesting operational model.)
and then announce "to get info on school closings, follow us on twitter at...."
http://twitter.com/trentfmnews (but it's not exactly high traffic)
and everyone can send the info TO the radio station and get the info FROM the radio station quickly and easily.
The radio station would probably be overwhelmed if they got much more than one tweet per school.
I don't think it has. All they ever hear about other Web2.0 like Facebook and Bebo is how dangerous they are for kids.
Sheesh. Cars and bikes are far more dangerous for kids than Facebook and Bebo. That's why kids are taught the rules of the road, to always wear bike helmets, to always buckle up in the car, and they get driver training.
Part of my day job is getting that sort of training about using the Internet, into schools. So far most of them have only got as far as teaching the students how to operate Powerpoint (yes I know that's not an Internet application), and installing filters to try to keep them off YouTube during lessons.
But I'm beginning to think that finally maybe Twitter has the right profile for this application.
Again, why limit yourself? Use all the tools available.
One step at a time :) -- Roland Perry
Regards Marshall Eubanks CEO / AmericaFree.TV
In article <0D357934-85DE-4935-8F58-02F5FCC1DC8A@americafree.tv>, Marshall Eubanks <tme@americafree.tv> writes
I would say this partially would depend on how and what you want to communicate. If there is just going to be one pronouncement per day (the school is up / down / delayed), then facebook and / or myspace would suggest themselves.
There's going to be a handful a year. Such as "school closed today due to snow". or "remember - school closed today for staff training" [a curious British phenomenon].
They are to date free, and the students will know what they are. I would start with facebook.
If you look at the #AuthorizeNet situation, there was a lot of back and forth. Will the schools have a need for back and forth ?
No, if the school's closed, it's closed. No debate allowed.
Note that this will take people answering questions / dealing with issues on twitter. Specifically, someone would have to pay attention to it during any quasi-emergency period - do the schools have such a person ?
Such a person could be designated.
Also, if the school looses power in a storm,
Schools in urban areas here very rarely lose power in storms. All the cables are underground. Of course, losing power would be another excuse to close the school :)
is there a backup means of getting to the Internet ?
A laptop with a 3g modem would suffice, or for Twitter someone with a suitably configure mobile phone. -- Roland Perry
On 7/4/09 7:50 AM, Roland Perry wrote:
What I'm trying to anticipate is the objection to *also* posting to Twitter, which might be raised on the grounds that it's too "unofficial", or "unsupported" or something like that.
Anecdotal, of course, but I found twitter to be very useful during the SF Bay Area fiber cuts a few months back. I was able to fairly quickly get reports of who was down (UnitedLayer) and who wasn't (everyone else), and made some good contacts, some of whom I've done business with since (Cernio). Set up a twitter account for outage/event notifications, and don't *ever* use it for marketing.
Aleksandr Milewski wrote:
On 7/4/09 7:50 AM, Roland Perry wrote:
What I'm trying to anticipate is the objection to *also* posting to Twitter, which might be raised on the grounds that it's too "unofficial", or "unsupported" or something like that.
Anecdotal, of course, but I found twitter to be very useful during the SF Bay Area fiber cuts a few months back. I was able to fairly quickly get reports of who was down (UnitedLayer) and who wasn't (everyone else), and made some good contacts, some of whom I've done business with since (Cernio).
Set up a twitter account for outage/event notifications, and don't *ever* use it for marketing.
I'd agree on this one. We use it for outage/event/coverage expansion notifications. Originally, we thought a blog style website somewhere outside our network was the way to go, but twitter has so many more angles, like RSS feed capability, an API to integrate it somewhere on your website and mobile clients. On top of that, you can update it via SMS if needed. The hype some people are pushing twitter on, I can't follow, but for those type of notifications, it's perfect, also because it's not part of your own infrastructure. Kind regards, Martin List-Petersen -- Airwire - Ag Nascadh Pobail an Iarthair http://www.airwire.ie Phone: 091-865 968
In article <4A50A3C9.3080009@airwire.ie>, Martin List-Petersen <martin@airwire.ie> writes
for those type of notifications, it's perfect, also because it's not part of your own infrastructure.
From an operational resilience point of view, that's a very important feature. -- Roland Perry
Roland Perry wrote:
In article <4A50A3C9.3080009@airwire.ie>, Martin List-Petersen <martin@airwire.ie> writes
for those type of notifications, it's perfect, also because it's not part of your own infrastructure.
From an operational resilience point of view, that's a very important feature.
It's the main reason for choosing something like twitter, blogspot etc. If you want to communicate an outage, it might be as bad as your infrastructure is gone, even though that you'd might hope, that you've designed your network in a way, that it never happens. But let's just take the scenario, where some event basically whipes your ASN of the face of global BGP :) . It doesn't have to be a physical outage, that causes it. Talking about monetizing twitter, there's a very simple approach, just based on this type of service: Service Providers, Carriers etc., that use Twitter can pay a monthly fee for the service and twitter sends them responses, private messages etc. by more organized means. Just my 2c on another approach, but I can see that happening and I wouldn't mind paying a few bob for the service. As for some responses on this tread and also some reactions from a few customers (childish, "my kids use twitter, i don't", etc.): - some people think twitter is a hype, that's ignorant in my eyes. Sure it's overhyped by some, it doesn't make twitter a hype. - some people think twitter is a child's toy. It can be used as such, but that's not it's primary function or intention. - some people say it's the next Google. I can pretty much see, where that idea comes from. Real time search, while Google didn't pick very fast up on the fires (Seattle, Toronto), you'd be able to find tweets on them within minutes on Twitter. It would take hours before any of it appears on Google. - and as the last thing, with companies like AT&T, authorize.net and various others using it for service notifications or interaction with customers, my above point actually is just even more valid. Calling it a lame web 2.0 is pretty much off, when it's actually used for something sensible. Just my 2c Kind regards, Martin List-Petersen -- Airwire - Ag Nascadh Pobail an Iarthair http://www.airwire.ie Phone: 091-865 968
In article <4A50ACB7.6070901@airwire.ie>, Martin List-Petersen <martin@airwire.ie> writes
Calling it a lame web 2.0 is pretty much off, when it's actually used for something sensible.
I seem to be trying to find the middle ground between members of the public who think "The Internet isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me in college 20 years ago" and those who say "Web 2.0 isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me in college 5 years ago". Shouldn't we at least be giving it the benefit of the doubt? -- Roland Perry
Roland Perry wrote:
In article <4A50ACB7.6070901@airwire.ie>, Martin List-Petersen <martin@airwire.ie> writes
Calling it a lame web 2.0 is pretty much off, when it's actually used for something sensible.
I seem to be trying to find the middle ground between members of the public who think "The Internet isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me in college 20 years ago" and those who say "Web 2.0 isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me in college 5 years ago".
Shouldn't we at least be giving it the benefit of the doubt?
Since when has, what has been teached in college ever been a defining standard for what is happening on the internet or what the trend in computing is ? A lot of people never touch Linux during studies, and don't get any of it in college, however are faced with it in the corporate or public world. Kind regards, Martin List-Petersen -- Airwire - Ag Nascadh Pobail an Iarthair http://www.airwire.ie Phone: 091-865 968
In article <4A50BB87.8000301@airwire.ie>, Martin List-Petersen <martin@airwire.ie> writes
Calling it a lame web 2.0 is pretty much off, when it's actually used for something sensible.
I seem to be trying to find the middle ground between members of the public who think "The Internet isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me in college 20 years ago" and those who say "Web 2.0 isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me in college 5 years ago".
Shouldn't we at least be giving it the benefit of the doubt?
Since when has, what has been teached in college ever been a defining standard for what is happening on the internet or what the trend in computing is ?
It shouldn't be, but I'm guessing this is where much of the conservatism is coming from. -- Roland Perry
On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 7:15 AM, Roland Perry <lists@internetpolicyagency.com
wrote:
In article <4A50ACB7.6070901@airwire.ie>, Martin List-Petersen < martin@airwire.ie> writes
Calling it a lame web 2.0 is pretty much off, when it's actually used for something sensible.
I seem to be trying to find the middle ground between members of the public who think "The Internet isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me in college 20 years ago" and those who say "Web 2.0 isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me in college 5 years ago".
Shouldn't we at least be giving it the benefit of the doubt?
Well, I'm no social media expert, and I don't spend a whole lot of time on any of the social networking sites (I particularly dislike Facebook, actually). (And yet, I'm probably about as qualified for the SME title as 90% of those who claim to be...) However, I was a student fairly recently, and so maybe my perspective will hold some value. I really like the Posterous+Twitter+Facebook+etc. combo. To manage the Fb side, you could probably tap a trusted student to make the School an Fb page. A lot of the students will check there. Parents will probably check the Posterous or Twitter pages. Some of the more tech-savvy students and parents will sign up for Twitter and get SMS notifications. And then, additionally, there are plenty of ways to grab that data and copy it onto the school website as well (at least until it crumbles under the load), and you could broadcast it over a mailing list to people's email address. The idea, I think, is to deliver your message to as much of your audience as you can. By delivering your message over multiple mediums, you're making it easy for your audience to hear the message, since they can do it in the way that's most comfortable to them. And the redundancy doesn't hurt.
On Fri, 2009-07-03 at 13:21 -0700, Tomas L. Byrnes wrote:
Earth is a single point of failure, where is your backup site?
[TLB:] Given that all my customers are on Earth, I don't need one if my customers also are "down".
Bad Day !
In a message written on Fri, Jul 03, 2009 at 03:22:14PM -0400, Sean Donelan wrote:
Are you better off with a single "tier 4" data center, multiple "tier 1" data centers, or something in between?
It depends entirely on your dependency on connectivity. One extreme is something like a Central Office. Lots of cables from end-sites terminate in the building. Having a duplicate of the head end termination equipment on the opposite coast is darn near useless. If the building goes down, the users going through it go down. "Tier 4" is probably a good idea. The other extreme is a pure content play (YouTube, Google Search). Users don't care which data center they hit (within reason), and indeed often don't know. You're better off having data centers spread out all over, both so you're more likely to only loose one at a time, but also so that the loss of one is relatively unimportant. Once you're already in this architecture, Tier 1 is generally cheaper. There are two problems though. First, most folks don't fit neatly in one of these buckets. They have some ties to local infrastructure, and some items which are not tied. Latency as a performance penality is very subjective. A backup 1000 miles away is fine for many things, and very bad for some things. Second, most folks don't have choices. It would be nice if most cities had three each Tier 1, 2, 3 and 4 data centers available so there was choice and competition but that's rare. Very few companies consider these choices rationally; often because choices are made by different groups. I am amazed how many times inside of an ISP the folks deploying the DNS and mail servers are firewalled from the folks deploying the network, to the point where you have to get to the President to reach common management. This leads to them making choices in opposite directions that end up costing extra money the company, and often resulting in a much lower uptimes than expected. Having the network group deploy a single point of failure to the "Tier 4" data center the server guys required is, well, silly. However, more important than all of this is testing your infrastructure. Would you feel comfortable walking into your data center and ripping the power cable out of some bit of equipment at random _right now_? If not, you have no faith your equipment will work in an outage. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Power to some of the affected sections of the building has been restored via existing onsite generators. The central power risers cannot be connected to current generators in a timely manner due to excessive damage to the electrical switching equipment (and those generators may still be in standing water). These provide power to a number of colocated systems. Temporary generators are on order to be connected to the central risers, and the site expects that to be complete sometime late this evening. As best I can tell, there is still no utility power connected to any of the systems. The AC systems (chiller and crac) are currently not working. It is not clear to me whether these will be brought back on line when the temporary generators are available, but I am assuming so. It was pleasant to see the general positive attitude, sharing of information and offers of assistance that were made by representatives of the various tenants, customers and carriers that were on the scene. The usual suspects (companies and individuals) stepped up and took care of things, as they always seem to. --D On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:
In a message written on Fri, Jul 03, 2009 at 03:22:14PM -0400, Sean Donelan wrote:
Are you better off with a single "tier 4" data center, multiple "tier 1" data centers, or something in between?
It depends entirely on your dependency on connectivity.
One extreme is something like a Central Office. Lots of cables from end-sites terminate in the building. Having a duplicate of the head end termination equipment on the opposite coast is darn near useless. If the building goes down, the users going through it go down. "Tier 4" is probably a good idea.
The other extreme is a pure content play (YouTube, Google Search). Users don't care which data center they hit (within reason), and indeed often don't know. You're better off having data centers spread out all over, both so you're more likely to only loose one at a time, but also so that the loss of one is relatively unimportant. Once you're already in this architecture, Tier 1 is generally cheaper.
There are two problems though. First, most folks don't fit neatly in one of these buckets. They have some ties to local infrastructure, and some items which are not tied. Latency as a performance penality is very subjective. A backup 1000 miles away is fine for many things, and very bad for some things.
Second, most folks don't have choices. It would be nice if most cities had three each Tier 1, 2, 3 and 4 data centers available so there was choice and competition but that's rare.
Very few companies consider these choices rationally; often because choices are made by different groups. I am amazed how many times inside of an ISP the folks deploying the DNS and mail servers are firewalled from the folks deploying the network, to the point where you have to get to the President to reach common management. This leads to them making choices in opposite directions that end up costing extra money the company, and often resulting in a much lower uptimes than expected. Having the network group deploy a single point of failure to the "Tier 4" data center the server guys required is, well, silly.
However, more important than all of this is testing your infrastructure. Would you feel comfortable walking into your data center and ripping the power cable out of some bit of equipment at random _right now_? If not, you have no faith your equipment will work in an outage.
-- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
-- -- Darren Bolding -- -- darren@bolding.org --
Leo: That presumes the people at the bottom care about the big picture. I'd hazard to guess that the people who participate in this listserv *do* care, but if Dilbert has even any correlation to real life, then just as often there are people who build DNS/DHCP/etc redundantly because that's what they were told to do, but don't have the initiative or weren't directed to look at the bigger picture. At the end of the day it depends on these grunts' managers to be sure that things are being designed and implemented properly. And even then, we know how personalities, resources, and internal inertia more of than not develop and grow networks that aren't BCP-friendly. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Leo Bicknell [mailto:bicknell@ufp.org] Sent: Friday, July 03, 2009 3:40 PM To: NANOG list Subject: Re: Fire, Power loss at Fisher Plaza in Seattle <snip> Very few companies consider these choices rationally; often because choices are made by different groups. I am amazed how many times inside of an ISP the folks deploying the DNS and mail servers are firewalled from the folks deploying the network, to the point where you have to get to the President to reach common management. This leads to them making choices in opposite directions that end up costing extra money the company, and often resulting in a much lower uptimes than expected. Having the network group deploy a single point of failure to the "Tier 4" data center the server guys required is, well, silly. <snip>
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009415571_apwafisherpla zafire1stldwritethru.html -----Original Message----- From: David Hubbard [mailto:dhubbard@dino.hostasaurus.com] Sent: Friday, July 03, 2009 1:05 PM To: NANOG list Subject: RE: Fire, Power loss at Fisher Plaza in Seattle From: Seth Mattinen [mailto:sethm@rollernet.us]
Apparently it took authorize.net with it, too: http://twitter.com/authorizenet
~Seth
No technical explanation of course but it also took down their 'backup facility' according to them on twitter; I assume some bad routing/DNS if they do actually have a backup facility. Lots of online stores are offline right now because of this, and the holiday is unfortunately keeping those store owners from knowing they are not making sales right now. Life in ecommerce... David
participants (32)
-
Adrian Chadd -
Aleksandr Milewski -
Ben Carleton -
Chris Hills -
Darren Bolding -
David Hubbard -
Erik Soosalu -
Frank Bulk -
JC Dill -
Jeffrey Lyon -
Joe Blanchard -
Leo Bicknell -
Marc Manthey -
Mark E. Mallett -
Marshall Eubanks -
Martin List-Petersen -
Matthew Palmer -
Michael Hallgren -
Michael J McCafferty -
Michael K. Smith - Adhost -
Michael Painter -
mike -
Neil -
Roland Dobbins -
Roland Perry -
Sean Donelan -
Seth Mattinen -
Stefan -
Stephen Stuart -
Steve Pirk -
Tomas L. Byrnes -
William Herrin