FYI ONLY >> Non-Operational (at least directly)

David O'Leary doleary at juniper.net
Tue Apr 13 23:35:37 UTC 1999


At 04:40 PM 4/13/99 -0500, Sean Donelan wrote:
[details about fiber mangling cut (no pun intended :-) ]
>In ten years (I ordered my first circuit in 1989), I've never gotten a
>good, coherent answer why any of my diversely, redundent circuits were
>both out-of-service at the same time due to the same event.  Lots of
>credits, lots of apologies, but never a straight answer why something
>that should never happen, modulo the end of the world, happened.

Sometime in 1991 or so, when we were moving the SURAnet backbone from
university campuses (campii?) to collocation space in MCI POPs throughout
the southeast, I was talking to one of the MCI techs about the physically
diverse T1s that MCI was contracted to deliver.  He said if the same
person engineered the routing for the circuits at the same time (which 
would only be done if it was specified on each order), then we might
get lucky.  Even if diversity is engineered in at first, shuffling
circuits on cross connects and such would decrease the likelihood over
time (an amazingly short amount of time) - and he also indicated that
after a while, it was unlikely that anyone would even be able to 
determine on demand the actual path that any given circuit takes... :-/

I certainly hope that the systems for tracking this have improved,
and also that they keep better track of DS3s and SONET better than
they do DS1s.... but I'm skeptical.

have fun out there,
					dave (now celebrating my 8th year
						of retirement from running 
						networks :-)

>Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
>  Affiliation given for identification not representation
>





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