[78565] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Clue on Europe
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Per Gregers Bilse)
Wed Mar 9 16:19:32 2005
From: Per Gregers Bilse <bilse@networksignature.com>
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 21:18:58 +0000
To: nanog@merit.edu
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
By popular request ... saves more people from asking.
Q: What did MFS do to my (AS286, EUnet at the time) box at MAE-West?
A: (You need to know that we were in Amsterdam in The Netherlands, and
shipped a box to them for them to install.)
It was installed offsite in another facility, in a private, colocated
cabinet belonging to a local company (otherwise not in the Internet
business, they just had a corporate WAN in the area), then connected
back up with MFS's favourite ethernet-over-ATM kit; all undocumented.
We never knew until we wanted to replace it. MFS agreed that they could
see its MAC address in local ARP caches, so obviously it did exist and
was connected, somehow, somewhere. I thought they would be able to find
its port on the switch and trace the cabling from there, but that was
somehow not possible (probably all unlabeled). I then set up a small
script to stay logged in and repeatedly run "test leds", while two or
three people on their side went through rack after rack looking for slow
blinking LEDs. They found it on the third day of searching.
On the positive side, they didn't try to deny facts, they openly
explained what had happened. Also something mumbled about the
original install engineer being known as "Loco".-)
Best,
-- Per
