Let me see if I correctly understand this. The RA services at MAE-West
were never declared operational, yet there are service & transit providers
using them for production services?If so, this will still be interpreted as a black eye for the RSs.
Surely, since the RA services (AFAIK) have been explicitly experimental
for some time, and it was no secret that there was a potential
single point of failure at MAE-WEST, this should be interpreted
as a black eye for those people who decided to use the RSes anyway?
Sean.
P.S.: Surely the RA has enough self-inflicted black eyes without
people blaming them for something that some form of payment
by the non-NSF93-52 clients of the RSes easily could have prevented?
Remember that MAE-WEST is (unfortunately) not the priority NAP
in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Of course, this depends alot on how one inteprets:
"Route servers are to support stable routing of the
Internet and to provide for simplified routing information to NSPs
and other attached networks" [nsf9352 s. C para. 2]
and in particular what one considers an "attached network".
(The term NSP is very clearly defined in the solicitation).
Personally, I believe that given that the only other place
in "NSF 93-52 - NETWORK ACCESS POINT MANAGER, ROUTING ARBITER, REGIONAL
NETWORK PROVIDERS, AND VERY HIGH SPEED BACKBONE NETWORK SERVICES
PROVIDER FOR NSFNET AND THE NREN(SM) PROGRAM" where these
words are used are with respect to networks attached to
the NSFNET NAPs, the folks at MAE-WEST may not really be covered by
the award at all.
Certainly the bulk of the people affected in the current outage
aren't doing much with respect to the NSFNET and the NREN program.
[One could also be a weasel and argue that there's not much
more simple than no routing information at all...]
Of course, I don't have a copy of the RA award handy,
and I've never seen any of the NSF<->RA communications
about the RA's obligations to MAE-WEST, so please take
this for what it's worth until someone really in the know
says something concrete.