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Re: GBLX congestion in Dallas area

  • From: Steve Gibbard
  • Date: Tue Jun 07 17:14:24 2005


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.

-Steve

On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, Rachael Treu Gomes wrote:

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 12:34:33PM -0400, Joel Perez said something to the effect of:
I totally agree with you Richard.
So do I, but probably more so with his encouraging your patience than you
appear to.

But, in this case all im getting is the run-around from GBLX when
calling them about it. I managed to open up a trouble ticket with them
but their Techs weren't telling me anything other than they will look
into it and call me back.
Just out of curiosity, why did you phrase the above as "*managed* to open
a trouble ticket"?  Did GBLX's unwillingness to describe the nature of
the outage that you allege also extend to their willingness to help you
in general?  What you're saying sounds as though they were both relucatant
to open a ticket for you *and* to tell you why they wouldn't and, frankly,
I find that difficult to believe.

I haven't (and I wouldn't want to either, as I've seen how much interference
they have to run and how much ebb and flow is involved in the climate and
the info they receive), but If you have ever been in the employ of a
provider's customer-facing NOC during an outage, you know the following:
while it is standard practice to give at least short-but-informative
answers to customer questions in those situations, it is imperitive that
task priority also be lent to remediation of the problem and managing call
volume, particularly in the early stages of an incident.

(By my estimations based on when you started querying this list, you called
GBLX within an hour of the fiber cut, when it stands to reason that the
providers are doing their own recon on what happened and are less likely to
be able or willing to disseminate what may amount to misinformation.)

Also, are you aware that the groups handling customer circuits and calls
is often disparate from the one managing the state of a backbone outage?

Even though I am a customer, im not getting any answers so I tried the
list as a last ditch effort to get some info.
How last ditch, by the way?  How many people did you talk to?

By no means am I trying to antagonize you with these questions, but am
taking the opportunity to conduct my own study on the average customer
threshold for information gathering and return on investment in
informational resources made available to them.

Good luck,
--ra
--------------------------------------------
Joel Perez    |  Network Engineer
305.914.3412  |  Ntera
--------------------------------------------


-----Original Message-----
From: Richard A Steenbergen [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 12:28 PM
To: Joel Perez
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: GBLX congestion in Dallas area

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 12:09:26PM -0400, Joel Perez wrote:
Is anybody seeing any congestion in the Dallas area for Global
Crossing?
I'm seeing packet loss to some of my equipment up there.
There is a large fiber cut in the area (somewhere between Dallas and
Houston), affecting a lot of capacity coming out of Dallas on several
carriers (including GX and Qwest at the very least). Two of our OC48s on

this path have been down since around 14:57 UTC.

That said, this isn't the proper place to whine about congestion.
Normally
I would say that is what customer support numbers are for, but since
there
is nothing they can do to splice it any faster, I'm going to recommend a

healthy dose of suck it up and deal. :)

--
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)
--
rachael treu gomes                            [email protected]
              ..quis custodiet ipsos custodes?..
(this email has been brought to you by the letters 'v' and 'i'.)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Gibbard				[email protected]
+1 415 717-7842	(cell)			http://www.gibbard.org/~scg
+1 510 528-1035 (home)