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At 4:42 PM 3/30/95, Hans-Werner Braun wrote: >I wonder by how much the problem could be reduced as such, if service >providers (including campus service providers) would have accessible >servers about network status information, being kept current by some >local NOC. At 4:56 PM 3/30/95, Chris Dorsey (510)422-4474 wrote: > .... Of course there will >always be some NSP's that would never implement such a server >for business purposes. H-W, Chris, et al; Some service providers already post system-wide planned outages and even system-wide unplanned outages (like NSFnet backbone outages) on public mailing lists. We don't need another protocol to support this -- it would be a simple matter for everyone to gateway system-wide trouble ticket reports to a Web page. As Chris points out, even if today we could do this, in future it will become more difficult as competitive pressures mount. In the past I have managed NOCs where there were pressures on the NOC to sugar-coat the public trouble tickets. A certain amount of this is appropriate, since it is possible for NOC controllers, network engineers and other technical support people to become frustrated with their peers and I have some vivid memories of particular frustrations coming out in system-wide trouble tickets. It doesn't help either party for shouting and name-calling to show up in trouble tickets, but it can easily happen, as we all know. So when the pressure inevitably mounts on everyone to treat their system-wide trouble tickets like press releases, the information content that we seek will tend toward zero. Therefore I feel that if such a public system were created it would inevitably devolve to minimize useful information, such as who is really screwing up or where the difference of opinion actually lies. We need a new pressure point, like traceroute became for routing or throughput became for router benchmarks. If you all kept incident notes and someone sent out a survey every quarter, would you be interested in a Consumer Reports style of NOC performance metric? :-) This might be worth thinking about in the IP Perf Metric BOF next week. I just don't see any other pressure point. There has to be an outside evaluation tool and a general understanding of how to interpret it. --Kent
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