Re: Outage (planned and unplanned) notification

[Dalvenjah FoxFire <dalvenjah () dal net>]

Billy Biggs put this into my mailbox:
> On Fri, 11 Apr 1997, Sean Donelan wrote:
>
> > I've noticed the sprint outage list has become very quiet, as has the
> > MCI outage list.  They seem to be quiet even during and after widely
> > known problems.  The same is true of most providers I bother to track.
> > Even those providers I have signed agreements which include notification
> > requirements.
> > [...]
> > Is there anything that will encourage pro-active notification?
>
> I'm thinking that it might be useful about now to set up a decent 
> notification organization that can seek out network status and outage 
> information both through standard channels and agreements, as well as
> using objective monitoring tools positioned at different ends (what 
> ends?!) of the net.map.

I've tried to do this to an extent with outage () dal net. (e-mail
majordomo () dal net with a body of 'subcribe outage' to subscribe). Currently,
Sprint and MCI's outage lists forward here, and as people see outages from
other sites, they forward them here. (We also send notices of IRC server
outages here, so the general nanogite may not necessarily want to
subscribe.) It's not perfect, and it's far from complete, but it's helpful.

As a statistic, Sprint has always been very verbose and wonderful about
posting outages and downtimes to their list. MCI, while they occasionally
post outages, seem to make use of their list pretty rarely.

A good general list like this that ISPs/whoever could subscribe to and know
exactly what's down where would be a good first step in avoiding the mountains
of phonecalls/etc. demanding to know what broke. (Who knows, maybe we could
even move the messages about "wtf is wrong with XXXX and YYYY" off of nanog..)

If anyone wants to subscribe 'outage () dal net' to their general outage list,
feel free...

-dalvenjah

-- 
 Dalvenjah FoxFire (aka Sven Nielsen)  College is a fountain of knowledge...
 Founder, the DALnet IRC Network       and the students are there to drink.
 
 e-mail: dalvenjah () dal net             WWW: http://www.dal.net/~dalvenjah/
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