Our primary Internet connection was down for 2 days this weekend. The main purpose of this message isn't to air our dirty laundry but to provide some humor and some lessons learned. Check out the article that our local newspaper wrote on the subject:
http://www.dailytidings.com/2003/news0630/063003n3.shtml Good thing nobody else uses that Various Internet service provider! (It was supposed to say Verio.) Although the exact numbers in the article are obviously wrong, it's true that our main connection is a DS3 through Verio up to Portland. Our backup is 3 T1's down to Sacramento and we learned the hard way that this doesn't provide a very good DS-3 backup, albeit a cost-effective one. Isn't that the classic tradeoff? We'll be getting a higher-capacity backup soon now that the powers that be understand the consequences of being cheap. Other things learned: The devil is in the details. The connection that failed was actually not handled by Verio but by some small company that worked with some other small company, who worked with some other company who recently went out of business. The part that failed was an Ethernet/ATM MUX, or at least that's what we were told after 2 days, and it wasn't something Verio managed, but the company that went out of business. Never throw away phone numbers. The right phone number to use to reach anyone who would troubleshoot the problem was finally found on a yellow sticky note in someone's wallet. We'll be paying for monitoring and service on this part of the network in the future! But can redundancy ever really be fail-safe? Something is bound to be a single point of failure, eh? OK, back to work now. It sure is nice to have high-speed Internet access back, though, so I can waste time on Group Study! :-) Priscilla Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=71751&t=71751 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
