[79012] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: outage/maintenance window opinion
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Nash)
Mon Mar 28 12:40:48 2005
Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 09:42:26 -0800 (PST)
From: Bill Nash <billn@billn.net>
To: Matthew Kaufman <matthew@eeph.com>
Cc: "'Luke Parrish'" <lukep@centurytel.net>, nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <000c01c533bb$e189c2d0$02c7cac6@matthewdesk>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Also, the possibility of equipment failure should *always* be factored
into backout/recovery plans. You can have all the faith in your hardware
that you want, but Murphy has enable/root.
If it's something has simple as having redundant capacity to shift the
load to, or as drastic as having a spare chassis sitting on hand, it's
always a possibility, however remote.
- billn
On Mon, 28 Mar 2005, Matthew Kaufman wrote:
>
> My opinion:
>
> For the customer, the outage starts when their service stops working* and
> ends when their service starts working again. Your goal should be to make
> that all happen during the maintenance window. If it doesn't, then the part
> that was during the window is "planned outage" and the part that wasn't is
> "unplanned outage".
>
> Good ISPs have good explanations for, and sometimes even monetary credit,
> for "unplanned outages". "Planned outages" can simply be explained by
> pointing at the announced maintenance interval policy.
>
> Matthew Kaufman
> matthew@eeph.com
>
> *Note that this can be different times for different customers, and "stops
> working" means different things to different people... Some customers are
> unhappy if their traffic is taking the slightly longer alternate path,
> others are happy as long as they can reach CNN, even if the rest of the net
> disappears.
>
