Best practices for sending network maintenance notifications

Wed Apr 6 20:02:41 UTC 2016

On 4/6/16 3:56 PM, Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:
> All,
> 
> We recently, at $dayjob, had one of our peers (at Symantec)  send out a
> network maint notification, putting 70 addresses in the "To:" field,
> rather than using BCC or the exchange's mailing list.
> 
> Naturally, when you mail 30 addresses, of the forms peering@ and noc@
> various organizations, you're likely to hit at least a few
> autoresponders and ticket systems...
> 
> And at least one or two of those autoresponders are of course brainded
> and configured to reply-all.  (In this case, Verizon's ServiceNow setup
> was such a stupid responder).  And that made things fun in our own
> ticket system, as our RT setup happily created a bunch of tickets.
> 
> My question for the group -- does anyone know if there's a "best
> practices" for sending maint notifications like this?  An RFC sort of
> thing?

In general I'd push for a little automation for the sending of
notifications as reducing the likelihood of mishap.

Targeting bcc is nice, but so does simply generating a message for each
peer precludes this. we store contact information which bgp neighbor
parameters in our config generation.

> While it would define a social protocol, rather than a truly technical
> one, if there's not such a document, it seems like it could useful.  And
> once such a thing exists, exchanges could of course helpfully point
> their members AT it (for both their humans, and ticket systems, to follow).
> 
> -Dan
> 

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