outage/maintenance window opinion

Bill Nash billn at billn.net
Mon Mar 28 17:42:26 UTC 2005



Also, the possibility of equipment failure should *always* be factored 
into backout/recovery plans. You can have all the faith in your hardware 
that you want, but Murphy has enable/root.

If it's something has simple as having redundant capacity to shift the 
load to, or as drastic as having a spare chassis sitting on hand, it's 
always a possibility, however remote.

- billn


On Mon, 28 Mar 2005, Matthew Kaufman wrote:

>
> My opinion:
>
> For the customer, the outage starts when their service stops working* and
> ends when their service starts working again. Your goal should be to make
> that all happen during the maintenance window. If it doesn't, then the part
> that was during the window is "planned outage" and the part that wasn't is
> "unplanned outage".
>
> Good ISPs have good explanations for, and sometimes even monetary credit,
> for "unplanned outages". "Planned outages" can simply be explained by
> pointing at the announced maintenance interval policy.
>
> Matthew Kaufman
> matthew at eeph.com
>
> *Note that this can be different times for different customers, and "stops
> working" means different things to different people... Some customers are
> unhappy if their traffic is taking the slightly longer alternate path,
> others are happy as long as they can reach CNN, even if the rest of the net
> disappears.
>



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