External Events (was Re: www.etrade.com has no DNS A record !)

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

On Tue, 25 January 2000, John Hawkinson wrote:
> Is your goal to get the word out to network providers of people
> who use E*TRADE? Do you really expect that many of them will
> forward this announcement or make good use of it? Should
> a message be sent to NANOG every time CNN, Netscape, or Yahoo
> go down?
>
> Am I missing something here? [Like a sense of humor?]

External events have an affect on network service and network operators.
Why do most NOC's have one or more monitors tuned to CNN and the Weather
channel all day and all night?  Ok, I know the real reason, but what is
the reason the sales people tell prospective clients?

The question is really one of editorial policy and how significant is
any individual event.  I don't think there is really one answer which
can cover everything.

The Internet (RTM) worm affected only VAX and Sun computers, an estimated
10% of the Internet of the day.  If you didn't use Sun or VAXen, it would
have been an irrelevent event for you.  When AOL forgot to put a GUARDIAN
password on its domains, and there where changed to a tiny ISP, if you
didn't use AOL it may have been irrelevent to you.  When Cisco, Bay and
GATED BGP implementations had a disagreement on whether ASNs could be
repeated in an as-path, it may have been irrelevent to you if you used
a different BGP implementation or router.

Whether a particular NSI problem, an E*Trade problem, or an Ebay problem,
or a Cisco CCO problem is really significant enough to talk about semi-
publically is tough.  It would be nice if each company was willing to
make timely disclosures about problems.  But as we've seen time and time
again, companies would prefer to never to acknowledge they had any problem
until it becomes impossible to ignore (e.g. Worldcom's 10 days of hell
last summer).