North American Network Operators Group
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Re: how to write an incident report

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Sat Oct 20 15:27:33 2007


On 20-Oct-2007, at 1304, Hank Nussbacher wrote:

On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Joe Abley wrote:

For those who don't recognise the name (presumably many people), Citylink are a disruptive high-speed metro transport provider in Wellington, New Zealand. They run the most elaborate and scary layer-2 switched ethernet network I've ever heard of, and the other week they ran into some problems which caused a prolonged outage.

Here's their writeup:

http://news.clnz.net/2007/10/19#Loopback-Saturday-Discussion

Why don't I have any suppliers like this?

Probably because your suppliers run everything thru their lawyers.

I've had a few responses like this, but I don't buy it. I've worked in many places, some in New Zealand and more elsewhere, where there was a general culture of fear about making public statements about operational incidents. I don't ever remember people sending proposed text to legal and having it pushed back with changes; what happened instead was that text wasn't written in the first place.

Maybe Simon's level of detail is such that no legal department would ever condone it. But there's such a tremendous distance between Simon's text and the usual "there are no known issues at this time" that I suspect people just aren't trying.


Joe