Gordon,
I know what happened :-).
The SprintLink Stockton 9 router lost power for a little over
an hour. This was just a hardware failure, so I doubt it really belongs
on NANOG. Routers will go down.
If you are asking why we are backing up our Utah POP with a T1
then it's really related to costs. We can't afford multi T1 backup (we
are one of the last not for profit regionals) and until recently, a T1
as backup allowed at least minimal connectivity (email, etc.). We seem
to have passed a threshold that makes it useless (but that line is still
useful as a backup for our Idaho POP). Of course that discussion doesn't
belong on NANOG either.
Your friend should have also gotten a later message from the
SprintLink INSC outages list (forwarded into the westnet outages list)
that described what happened, but I guess he didn't forward that to you.
Just to make sure we have at least something that DOES belong
on NANOG, I'd like to ask if we should create a centralized outages
mailing list. SprintLink has an outages email list that they are starting
to use in a useful way, it would be nice if MCI did the same.
The old NSFnet nsr list was a big help. I'd see the messages
go by and I knew pretty much who was having problems in case I got
calls.
I know in a commercial environment it can be viewed as a
competitive disadvantage to let people know about your outages. Can
we find a way around that? Maybe only allowing people who participate
onto the mailing list?
I'm thinking of a list just for outage announcements (not
discussion of outages). It should probably only be for outages that
affect large sites, or large numbers of sites (I doubt anyone outside
the Granite School District needs to know if Olympus Junior High
School loses power).
Would SprintLink be willing a forward their outages mailing
list into a centralized list, assuming other NSPs like MCI and ANS
did the same?