qwest outage no notice

Thu Jan 7 17:04:13 UTC 2010

> Yeah, they refused to notify due to security concerns from what they 
> told me last night. Notification was performed after maintenance was 
> complete.

Ok, so the next question is, what harm would a simple advance notice of 
'emergency maintenance' caused, vs the very real hassle and 
inconvenience that DS3-down in the middle of the night caused for 
operations staff? I personally was yanked out of bed by my network 
monitoring systems and had to spend at least 5 minutes looking at logs 
and perf monitors and so forth so I had enough information before making 
the call to qwest support, thinking we took a hit on our fiber. Some 
others reported getting 7 or more hours of advance notice - this would 
have been enough for me, even tho of course I don't like it - and I 
suspect it could have saved many many others from a similar fate of 
responding to the event so late.

Just saying "we need to do this", does not give the bad guys any ammo 
with which to attack, and would go a long ways twords preventing 
needless heroics such as middle of the night investigations by senior 
staff. The follow up email we subsequently received was fine and we 
appreciated learning it really was a necessary upgrade and seems 
justified now with that knowledge, I would simply have appreciated not 
having to engage my emergency processes for something that was planned.

Mike-