On Sun, 23 Apr 1995, Tim Salo wrote:

...

From: Geoff Huston <G.Huston@aarnet.edu.au> [...] After some years being associated with the IEPG the observation I have to make is that the operations folk who really do understand how the Internet is glued together are way too busy keeping it strung together to do anything else. [...]

So, the operational folks are too busy to transfer their knowledge to new recruits (who might actually help them keep the Net running), and then the experienced operational folks wonder why they are so busy?

Something doesn't seem quite right with this picture...

Namely that it doesn't have to require large amounts of time from senior operational people to have a junior person with some research and writing skills (as well as networking skills) tag along and document many of the procedures carried out and why and how etc... The research skills come into play when this junior person hunts up the key documents available on the net and uses those documents and their notes to build up a somewhat coherent tutorial to network operations and places it on a WWW server. Yes, it will have gaps, yes it may have mistakes caused by the junior person's lack of intimate understanding, but at least it's a start. This is not unlike the days (a couple of years ago) when there were _no_ printed books on how to use the Internet and we all used various tutorials that were thrown together by network staff at some of the larger sites. They weren't perfect, but they helped a lot of people get started on the net. Right now it is possible for each new operations person at a new ISP to hunt through all the RFC's for relevant documents, look through the IETF mailing lists for relevant lists and then hunt through those lists for relevant messages, etc.... However, it would be far more efficient to have one technically skilled researcher do this and distill the important info for the rest of us. In fact, given the growth of the Internet (# of nodes and networks) I would think that it would even be worth while for some of the major NSP's (ANS, Sprint, et al.) to spend a few bucks and finance such a project. It would pay off down the road in smoother operations *AND* a larger pool of talent for ANS, Sprint et al. to draw new people from. Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-549-1036 Network Operations Fax: +1-604-542-4130 Okanagan Internet Junction Internet: michael@junction.net http://www.junction.net - The Okanagan's 1st full-service Internet provider