I totally agree with you Richard.
But, in this case all im getting is the run-around from GBLX when
calling them about it. I managed to open up a trouble ticket with them
but their Techs weren't telling me anything other than they will look
into it and call me back.
Even though I am a customer, im not getting any answers so I tried the
list as a last ditch effort to get some info.
On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 12:34:33PM -0400, Joel Perez said something to the effect of:
I totally agree with you Richard.
So do I, but probably more so with his encouraging your patience than you
appear to.
But, in this case all im getting is the run-around from GBLX when
calling them about it. I managed to open up a trouble ticket with them
but their Techs weren't telling me anything other than they will look
into it and call me back.
Just out of curiosity, why did you phrase the above as "*managed* to open
a trouble ticket"? Did GBLX's unwillingness to describe the nature of
the outage that you allege also extend to their willingness to help you
in general? What you're saying sounds as though they were both relucatant
to open a ticket for you *and* to tell you why they wouldn't and, frankly,
I find that difficult to believe.
I haven't (and I wouldn't want to either, as I've seen how much interference
they have to run and how much ebb and flow is involved in the climate and
the info they receive), but If you have ever been in the employ of a
provider's customer-facing NOC during an outage, you know the following:
while it is standard practice to give at least short-but-informative
answers to customer questions in those situations, it is imperitive that
task priority also be lent to remediation of the problem and managing call
volume, particularly in the early stages of an incident.
(By my estimations based on when you started querying this list, you called
GBLX within an hour of the fiber cut, when it stands to reason that the
providers are doing their own recon on what happened and are less likely to
be able or willing to disseminate what may amount to misinformation.)
Also, are you aware that the groups handling customer circuits and calls
is often disparate from the one managing the state of a backbone outage?
Even though I am a customer, im not getting any answers so I tried the
list as a last ditch effort to get some info.
How last ditch, by the way? How many people did you talk to?
By no means am I trying to antagonize you with these questions, but am
taking the opportunity to conduct my own study on the average customer
threshold for information gathering and return on investment in
informational resources made available to them.
Good luck,
--ra
Speaking in my personal, non-list-administrator, not having discussed this with anybody else, capacity, I think that notifications of large-scale outages affecting large numbers of networks are a really useful thing to have on the NANOG list.
Assuming this list has large numbers of people who operate networks and have to troubleshoot problems when they see them, telling people that the problem is already being worked on can save a lot of people some work (and can hopefully also reduce the number of phone calls that NOC people have to juggle).
To that end, the first couple of messages in this thread are the sort of thing I wish the NANOG list would have more of.
-Steve
If we started posting about every fiber cut of every carrier anywhere in
North America every time it happened there wouldn't be any room left on
this list for talking about spam, senderid, DNS RFCs, E911 for VoIP
carriers, err... wait which side am I arguing again? 
My concern would be that by openly encouraging people to send in more
reports of or inquiries about outages, we are going to see a lot more
noise from unqualified folks wanting to "be cool". I personally don't want
to hear about it every time someone wants to vendor bash ("@#$%^&ing GX is
down again and their customer support sucks"), every time a T1 in
Bumblescum Nowhere goes down, or otherwise completely useless posts ("did
anyone see anything funky on level 3 on the east coast yesterday?").
Now don't get me wrong, the technique of publicly embarassing the stupid
and inept is time honored and effective, but we need to remember to keep
it in reasonable doses. For every one such useful post, we see 10 useless
"will someone from X company contact me" e-mails from people who have
either not taken the time to look into the issue at all, who have made no
effort to try contacting them directly, or who don't understand that the
best place to complain about your unsatisfactory customer experience is to
your sales rep.
This same exact route was cut for over 12 hours by a directional boring
machine last month, but we don't piss and moan about it on NANOG because
we know a) stuff happens, and b) if you are buying unprotected circuits
you should damn well know how to have proper path diversity. Trust me, if
anyone from a reasonable sized network wanted to complain on nanog every
time one of their vendors managed to suck in some way that "shouldn't" be
acceptable, there really would be no room for anything else on this list.
If you really feel you need to share it with the world just for the sake
of sharing, go get a "vendornameheresucks" livejournal account or
something.
Please, if any of you are reading this and planning on using nanog as your
own personal toilet for dumping complaints about your vendors or other
networks, at least do us the favor of making certain you research the
issue and exhaust the normal methods of communication.
I don't operate even a mid-size network, but when there's an outage that effects more than a handful of locations, it's useful to know about it...
Not that there's anything I can do about it... but when customers are calling and asking why they can't reach their application servers, it's nice to be able to tell them there's a problem at $location and that no, I don't know when it'll be fixed, but they can be sure it's being worked on.
Sure, I can tell 'em that there's no problem with our network, and that our connectivity is fine... and leave them to figure out if there's a break someplace - and I do.
But I think NANOG is certainly an appropriate forum for medium/large-scale outages - unless someone's created an outage list someplace.
I will agree that it's not the place to bitch about a vendor not giving more specifics, dumping on vendors in any way, actually...
My concern would be that by openly encouraging people to send in more
reports of or inquiries about outages, we are going to see a lot more
noise from unqualified folks wanting to "be cool". I personally don't
want
to hear about it every time someone wants to vendor bash ("@#$%^&ing GX
is
down again and their customer support sucks"), every time a T1 in
Bumblescum Nowhere goes down, or otherwise completely useless posts
("did
anyone see anything funky on level 3 on the east coast yesterday?").
Perhaps the best way to deal with that problem is to wait and
see if it actually happens. In the past NANOG has carried a lot
of these outage reports during a time when the net was less
reliable than it is today. It didn't overwhelm the list back then.
I would assume that because of the level of effort that operators
put into having resilient networks, there would not be a huge
amount of these outage reports because most real outages will
remain invisible to customers.
--Michael Dillon
nanog-outage@ ? ? ?
must agree with him and Steve, though I do understand Richard's
concerns there, and they're valid ones.
The Internet needs a PA system.
Problem is, the people who are equipped to talk, and, by and large,
many of the people who want to listen, are all *here*.
Cheers,
-- jra
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
From down here, like Dave, at the relative bottom of the food chain, I
must agree with him and Steve, though I do understand Richard's
concerns there, and they're valid ones.The Internet needs a PA system.
Problem is, the people who are equipped to talk, and, by and large,
many of the people who want to listen, are all *here*.
OK, make a separate list (i.e. nanog-alerts) with posting restricted to those on nanog-alerts-post, and we develop a policy for being accepted/removed on the -post list. Easy enough.
pt
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
The Internet needs a PA system.
There is this sparsely deployed technology called multicast which would work for this application.
Pete
Well, that's fine, at the transport layer, but I think more an
application layer solution is called for.
Something akin to news.announce.important on Usenet?
Cheers,
-- jra
It barely works for any application. I hesitate to think how well it work work during unforseen failure modes.
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
It seems like it's taking more time to discuss it than it actually would take to create a nanog-outage list.
Maybe it's not being done because doing so would be threatening to a lot of people.
Having a large sounding board for outages will make it very difficult for larger providers to cover up outages. Having a web archive of postings during the outages will make it harder for people to forget those outages after they're corrected. Seeing lots of [reported/speculated] outages on a web archive from a larger NSP/ISP might make that network look bad, even though a large network might have a small percentage of outages when measured against the number of customers it serves. Furthermore, when someone does something stupid, it will be harder too forget/ignore the lessons learned. I'm sure that's bound to make someone feel threatened. 
And last but not least: nanog-outage may become more operationally relevant than this list.
-Jerry
>The Internet needs a PA system.
There is this sparsely deployed technology called multicast which would
work for this application.
Note that the original poster did use multicast for his
query. He sent one copy to nanog@merit.edu where his
email was replicated and forwarded to multiple recipients
who had subscribed to that stream.
IP multicast is not the only way to do multicasting
on the Internet.
--Michael Dillon