Though I appreciate the sarcasm in your letter, this may actually be of interest: There is an "outage" mailing list, outage@dal.net that may be more what you have in mind. (directly from the "welcome" message) ------------------------------------------------------------------ This mailing list, as most of you who're on it have already discovered, is to get and circulate e-mail concerning general internet network problems/downtime. What SHOULD go to this list: * Postings concerning Sprint/MCI/etc downtime, cut fiber lines, explosions at the MAE's, anything that kills access through one of the major backbones. What should NOT go to this list: * Postings about DALnet servers going down for any reason, as well as 'aftermath' posts in case a server goes down unexpectedly. This includes any of the WWW and FTP sites, as well as the IRC servers and services. The list for that content is dalnet-outage@dal.net * ISP downtime. Unless your ISP is a major provider like sprint/MCI/uunet/mae-west/bbn/ibm/netcom/etc., this list isn't the place to report downtime. * Vacations/hospitalizations/other human-related downtime. This list is for networks and servers - NOT humans. Who SHOULD be on this list: * Anyone interested in what goes up and down on the internet in general, whether for technical reasons or general interest. Goals for this list: I would like this to be a list to which anyone can subscribe and find out what's going on with the major backbones of the internet as well as what's happening with DALnet servers. I do *not* want it to be high-volume - that would make the list useless. Sprint was the first network that had the foresight to have a *public* mailing list concerning network outages. Posts from that list automatically get redirected here. Posts from MCI's list, while less frequent, are also redirected here. Certain other backbones either keep their lists private or don't have one because "We never go down." I personally think this is an insane point of view, because everything and anything will fail at some point, and telling yourself (and others) that failure (or upgrades) will NEVER happen is pretty closed-minded. Anyhow - if you are either internal to a backbone provider or get these reports yourself and don't mind bouncing them to this list, then I'd be very grateful if you could do that. Please make sure the source of these advance trouble notices won't mind horribly if you do this, though - I don't want anything bad happening because of this list. As a side note to everyone subscribing, one of the reasons backbone providers haven't let their outage notices be public is that they're afraid of some marketing person or novice journalist getting ahold of the messages and saying that their network sucks because of it. Everyone subscribed to this list should know that EVERY network, no matter what you do or how well you plan for disaster, will go down at some point. It's inevitable - while 100% uptime is desirable, it's just not possible. So I ask that if you see a network's announcement of being down for some reason or other, that you not use just that or just this list to judge a provider. Not everyone will have the amount of goodwill that this requires, but I really hope that everyone on this list can meet that goal. Thanks, be merry, and be more educated about the Internet in general. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The typical 'subscribe' message to outage@dal.net will get you on. Cheers, Scott VanRavenswaay Systems Administrator DFW Internet Services On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, Rodney Joffe wrote:

Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 16:32:22 -0700 From: Rodney Joffe <rjoffe@genuity.net> To: 'NANOG' <nanog@merit.edu> Subject: NANOG mailing list charter

I stand corrected. And I apologize to the list.

This morning I posted a 'heads-up' about an AOL problem. My rationale for doing so was that the information was important to my operations group, because AOL represents 10 million end users who spend a portion of their online life connecting to websites that we host. And our customers measure our performance based on the number of hits per minute/hour/day that they are getting. When this rate changes uncharacteristically, the web customer immediately assumes that it is our network that is failing, and calls our operations group to complain, or inquire. Knowing that AOL is experiencing a problem (which would not show up in any of our peer monitors) helps our ops guys to avoid a wild goose chase.

I assumed this was the case for most ISPs.

I received a number of (thankfully) private flames, asking me why I thought anyone on the list cared. Obviously I thought many of you would. I was wrong. So I went to look at the NANOG charter (based on the crud that shows up on NANOG, one could be forgiven for being confused). I thought that the charter covered operational issues. It doesn't.

Specifically, from the NANOG web site:

"The NANOG mailing list is established to provide a forum for the exchange of technical information and the discussion of specific implementation issues that require cooperation among network service providers. <snip>."

It covers implementation and co-operation issues.

Sorry to create improper noise.

Is anyone aware of a good newsgroup that does cover mundane issues like fiber cuts, DNS and root server failures, NAP problems, Route leaks, backbone poisoning, etc? Or is NANOG a good place for this, depending on who is doing the posting? In which case, where should the clueless unwashed like me go?

Thanks...

Rodney Joffe Chief Technology Officer Genuity Inc., a Bechtel company http://www.genuity.net