Re: MCI outages

["James A. Farrar" <jfarrar () usa net>]

At 06:02 PM 6/24/97 GMT, William Allen Simpson wrote:
> Well, we could talk about the repeated outages of MCI....

Ok. 

> Last Thursday and again on Sunday, I saw all my traffic between myself
> in Michigan and my client in Mississippi going to Atlanta and a black
> hole, instead of via Houston and Memphis.  This went for several hours
> before I called MCI NOC.

Perhaps you would like to share exactly what you told the MCI NOC and what
their response was? (offline of course, where it should be)
BTW: I would also be interested in knowing the source and destination
addresses you were having problems with.

> I used to think the MCI NOC did an exemplary job.  I guess that was when
> they were using BBN.

Thank you, I will ignore the second sentence.

> Unfortunately, nowadays, IP address of routers are meaningless.  They
> want "circuit numbers".  Of course, I have no idea what _their_ circuit
> numbers are.  Heck, I don't pay any attention to those under my control.

Yes, circuit numbers usually determine if a person is a customer of
provider X or Y that is calling to utilize provider Z's resources.
Generally, it is a good practice to inquire about problems with the service
provider that provides you services.  

> The end result was they refused to take a trouble ticket, even though
> it was clearly their mis-routing problem.  They did admit that there
> might be maintenance going on in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.

Perhaps an emergency maintenance was happening as a result of an unforeseen
outage as I doubt a large service provider would schedule maintenance on a
Sunday afternoon.

> The excuse was that "I'm not a direct customer on either end".  Heck,
> even my next level up service provider isn't a direct customer.
The last time I recall MCI uses their customers circuit ID to open a
service inquiry with. They generally don't open tickets for non customers
that can't get to www.xyz.com although, my experience is that they are
generally receptive to a notification of a possible problem that may be
occurring within their network.

> Long gone are the days when folks cooperated to resolve trouble reports.

I respectfully disagree with that statement.

> And has anyone else noticed a heck of a lot of route flapping between
> MCI and PSI, also through Atlanta?

Does this mean you think MCI's use of the Cisco default for route dampening
should be adjusted? 

> WSimpson () UMich edu
>    Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32
> BSimpson () MorningStar com
>    Key fingerprint =  2E 07 23 03 C5 62 70 D3  59 B1 4F 5E 1D C2 C1 A2

-jim