Level3 worldwide emergency upgrade?

Wed Feb 6 16:16:28 UTC 2013

>

OK, having had that first cup of coffee, I can say perhaps the main
reason I was wondering is I've gotten used to Level3 always being on
top of things (and admittedly, rarely communicating). They've reached
the top by often being a black box of reliability, so it's (perhaps
unrealistically) surprising to see them caught by surprise. Anything
that pushes them into scramble mode causes me to lose a little sleep
anyway. The alternative to what they did seems likely for at least a
few providers who'll NOT manage to fix things in time, so I may well
be looking at longer outages from other providers, and need to issue
guidance to others on what to do if/when other links go down for
periods long enough that all the cost-bounding monitoring alarms start
to scream even louder.

I was also grumpy at myself for having not noticed advance
communication, which I still don't seem to have, though since I
outsourced my email to bigG, I've noticed I'm more likely to miss
things. Perhaps giving up maintaining that massive set of procmail
rules has cost me a bit more edge.

Related, of course, just because you design/run your network to
tolerate some issues doesn't mean you can also budget to be in support
contract as well. :) Knowing more about the exploit/fix might mean
trying to find a way to get free upgrades to some kit to prevent more
localized attacks to other types of gear, as well, though in this case
it's all about Juniper PR839412 then, so vendor specific, it seems?

There are probably more reasons to wish for more info, too. There's
still more of them (exploiters/attackers) than there are those of us
trying to keep things running smoothly and transparently, so anything
that smells of "OMG new exploit found!" also triggers my desire to
share information. The network bad guys share information far more
quickly and effectively than we do, it often seems.

-R>