Come on folk. The useful, as opposed to ISP-bashing, answers are:
o All ISPs have an outage mailing list. Ask your ISP to get on theirs.
I agree. Tell your ISP you want an outage mailing list, and you would
like it if the ISP actually posted outage information to that list. I
got back on the Sprint list, my subscription having vanished, and Sprint
list has improved a lot. CNN and http://www.news.com/ still seem to
"scoop" most providers though.
o For overall info, Stan Barber is running an outage mailing list.
I just checked my subscription, and I think I'm still subscribed to it.
But I haven't seen anything posted on outage-discuss@academ.com since
last year. The last thing I remember was a brief announcement of
Craig's Inter-Provider Notification web pages. The outage list hosted
by dal.net seems to have more traffic, although a lot of it obviously
involves dal.net IRC servers.
I just checked my subscription, and I think I'm still subscribed to it.
But I haven't seen anything posted on outage-discuss@academ.com since
last year.
Maybe Stan should subscribe it to the outage lists of all major ISPs. But I
fear that three months out it will be swamped with irrelevant outage notices
from TeenieNet telling us that their usenet news server is down, and we'll
all unsubscribe. Maybe I am being to cynical?
Essentially, it is hard to get balance at the scale of the net as it is
today. One either gets too much or too little. And this problem will not
be decreasing in the near future.
The last thing I remember was a brief announcement of Craig's Inter-
Provider Notification web pages.
Another failure of what seemed to be a good idea. Folk did not seem to look
at it before calling our touble desk. So we stopped posting planned outages
to it. But maybe we did not know how many people checked it and did not
call. But the call rate did not go up when we stopped posting to IPN.
randy