On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 02:05:58PM -0700, Steve Gibbard wrote:
>
> 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.
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.
--
Richard A Steenbergen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)
