You would think that a person working at UUNET might be able
to find a counterpart at Abovenet and ask directly, rather than
floating a "ha ha look - Abovenet crashed!" message on the NANOG
mailing list.
Could be a few different reasons.
a) Curiousity
b) Concern it may have a root cause shared by other providers
c) Lack of notification via formal channels
d) Spite
e) All of the above
What's the only thing worse for a network engineer than having his
network crash? No one noticing it crashed.
I'm really surprised more providers haven't figured out one way to
keep people from posting about their outages is by setting up peering
agreements with NDA's and then keeping the other providers informed
about problems. Of course if there isn't an NDA or they learn about
the outage from other sources, they are free to inform the world about
the outage.
Oh well, another Sprint exec Gerry Degruiter is going to stop by next
week. I hope he can tell me why our Sprint line failed last November,
no one else has been willing too. I'll keep you posted
Personally, I'm glad it was posted. I have a friend who has two servers
at abovenet and they were not told, and definatly not 3 times, what the cause
of the downtime was. I realise it is one of the hazards of co-location of
your servers, not to be able to run to it, but still would be nice to know
it wasn't your machines that were down.
or a combo of b) and f) A fairly large network goes down, which could lead
to priceless operational experience on bootstrapping from scratch. Avi
already mentioned dampening issues with the SPF calculations. And how to
architect this to prevent meltdown in the future. Partitioning the IGP
areas, etc etc etc.
Of course my original message was very badly phrased and for that I
apologize.
In Above.Net's defense, and without making any comment on the cause or the
fix of the problem, I can vouch as a "disinterested party" that three
separate messages went out the tech list @ above.net regarding this issue.
Perhaps your friend is not correctly registered on the contact list or
something?
Additionally, without commenting on the cause or the fix or even Above.Net's network, I must say Above.Net does a good job of trying to keep
their customers informed. I've seen notifications for things which might
not have been noticed by customers - things other providers might have
tried to sweep under the rug.
TTFN,
patrick
I Am Not An Isp - www.ianai.net
ISPF, The Forum for ISPs by ISPs, <http://www.ispf.com>
"Think of it as evolution in action." - Niven & Pournelle
(No, I still don't have enable.)
They do seem to have an excellent rep in other circles.
Phil Greenspun of Ars Digita, whom I'm sure is a polarizing concept
( seems to like them real well...
(For those who've never run across Phil, he wrote "How To Be A Web
Whore Just Like Me", aka "Creating Database Backed Websites" -- some
publishers have _no_ sense of humor. http://photo.net)
Hmmm - you may want to check with Avi or their noc@above.net address and
make sure that your friend is actually on their notification list - but I
in fact was notified the 3 times that Avi does speak about - of course I
had already called the NOC re: same moments after it happenend and
informed that Leo was already working on it. And yes - it was handled
quickly and proffesionally.
seems to like them real well...