After hours contact numbers...[was: Re: hmm -- Get a load of this. Fwd'd]

Tue Nov 18 02:25:38 UTC 1997

James D. Butt put this into my mailbox:
> 
> In looking at this message that someone forwarded me.. It looks like the 
> message originated at one of our customers web servers.. I have called 
> and left messages for the sysadmins of this school.. We do not have any 
> after hours numbers.

Speaking of after hours contact numbers...do folks as a matter of practice
keep these on file, or do people still rely on the 'business phone' method
of contacting people?

Reason I ask is partly because of this, and partly because of an incident
a couple of weeks ago, when one of my servers was getting smurfed; we managed
to leave lots of messages on the smurf relay sites' contact numbers, but
rarely got ahold of a real person. This was on a Friday night, and of
course the smurf continued well into Saturday, and probably would've
continued till Monday or later had we not convinced the person to stop.

I personally tried calling PSI concerning a couple of their customers;
the operator I spoke with only had the phone number that was listed
in InterNIC's records for the domain in question, and that number gave
the "disconnected or no longer in service" message when called. I left
a message on the voice mail of the perpetrator's dialup in Australia,
and didn't get a call back till the next Monday.

I realize people have to sleep }:> and that 24h contact numbers should not
be made public, for fear of one's more inept users finding it and using
it for 'tech support', but it seems that there are some emergencies that
would require waking up one's sysadmin/network engineer out of bed to help
solve a problem.

Also, if only for future reference, what's the best way to contact people
after hours? Go through their uplinks till I get a human, or what?
Most of these problems seem to happen outside of 'normal business hours',
and attacks like these end up occurring at times when we simply have to
grin and bear it until someone wakes up and checks the night's messages,
and that seems to be something of a problem.

(This seems to be on topic; if I knew where to find a good cheap (free?)
Cisco tutorial, I might even be able to tell you how to configure your
router for it }:P .)

-dalvenjah

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