Re: mae-west route servers are both down hard

[Sean Doran <smd () icp net>]

| 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.

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