North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Outage (planned and unplanned) notification
> The corporate establishment generally frowns at amateurish attempts to > do "damage control" public relations. That's the job for P.R. people, > not engineers, you see? Now, the only question is where to find P.R. > people who can tell cidr from cider. > It's not only peers, it's customers as well. I take full BGP from 3 people. I normally do my best to ensure when we have a routing related problem we get some qualified personnel to ring the provider concerned. Attached is an example phone call (provider = P, customer = C). I've hidden the identities concerned as I'm sure it wasn't actually the fault of the personnel concerned, and composited 2 calls. But this seems to be becoming the norm. Why "yes we have a major problem, we're looking at it, and we'll keep you up to date by email and by phone if necessary" doesn't work is beyond me. Then I can switch them off and switch them back on when they've fixed it. Alex Bligh Xara Networks -- P: Network Operations, X speaking, how can I help? C: We seem to be having problems with backtraffic to us through your network. Can you check you see us right at (say) MAE-East? P: Um, no, I'm not near a terminal at the moment. C: Ur, could you move to a terminal, or transfer me to someone who is near a terminal please? P: All the terminals are busy at the moment. C: Oh well, could you tell me if you are running BGP Dampening on your MAE-East router? P: Well I think we run BGP at MAE-East. (so on for five minutes until transfered) P: Y speaking, how can I help? C: We seem to be having problems with backtraffic to us through your network. Can you check you see us right at (say) MAE-East? P: Your BGP session has been up for a while. C: OK, well [NSP] (for instance) can't reach us. Traceroutes star out when it hits an [NSP] router. P: I can ping your router. C: Yes, and I can get to your NOC fine. But I can't get to [NSP]. P: We can get to [NSP] fine. It must be a problem in your network. C: Can you check you are sending [NSP] are routes? They claim they aren't hearing them from you. P: There are no problems between us and [NSP]. < repeat for 10 minutes > C: Are you sure you have no other network problems at the moment? P: Not really. C: None? [NSP] said you might have had some. P: Well we do have a few problems at the moment. But everything is still working. C: Can you tell me what the problems are? P: They don't affect you. < repeat until bored> Eventually it transpires an East/West fibre cut prevented all East coast customers of C reaching all West coast [NSP] destinations. ... sigh... - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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