May be, you are quite right; I think we'll hear a lot of stories aboiut Y2K, and 90% of them will be the fiction of the journalists. The kind of the 'foulish day' or the 'carnaval'. I mean. On 21 Dec 1999, Sean Donelan wrote:

Date: 21 Dec 1999 00:28:44 -0800 From: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> To: alex@virgin.relcom.eu.net Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Internet Y2K and Europe, South America, and Middle East

On Mon, 20 December 1999, "Alex P. Rudnev" wrote:

...

What do you want to monitor? real time problems are not supposed to appear, billing and accounting problems are not monitored at all. Why so many people aware unexisting problems (some computer refuse to work due to Y2K - let me smile for a 10 minutes hearing this - and so few people really understand Y2K problems (billing systems, accounting systems, daily-log-analysing systems, and so on). But this means that real Y2K problems appear approximateky 3 - 10 of january, not at 12:00 31-December.

And this means all this ISP monitoring is useless, you'll monitor not more than people's paranoia about Y2K and will not monitor any real problems.

I don't actually think the monitoring will pick up any Y2K problems. I'm interested in the communications and monitoring to pickup all the other problems, and trying to head off rumors when something inevitably doesn't work.

For example, tonight if you go to the US government's Y2K web site it's not working. It appears to be a server problem with http://www.y2k.gov/ and not a network problem. You get an error "The request did not specify a valid virtual host." I don't think its Y2K problem, and if we could contact the operators, we might find out what's wrong.

If something like that happened in the early morning of January 1, without good information, rumors will spread.

Aleksei Roudnev, (+1 415) 585-3489 /San Francisco CA/