- NZNOG - lists.nznog.org

Network Systems Miniconference
by Nigel Roberts 03 Jan '07

03 Jan '07

The link for this is broken on nznog.org: http://www.nznog.org/networksystemsminiconference.html So those in the know, what's this all about then? Happy new year, Nigel

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Re: [nznog] Bus/Train to NZNOG
by Martin Kealey 03 Jan '07

03 Jan '07

Darn, I'm going to have to get to Curry more often... this is much the same idea I had. Count me in, plus 2 others from Ihug. How many people have you heard from so far? I ask because we're hoping we can get Ihug to pay for a bus, which means it'll be very cheap for the individuals travelling. If we get enough we'll get a coach (in which case it WILL be cheap, because I'll be driving). As I see it, the only snag is agreeing on dates & times; my preference would be for a longer period -- go for the first tutorial, back after taking a weekend tour of the town (and visiting friends) -- but it's not essential. -Martin > -----Original Message----- > From: Joel van Velden [mailto:joel(a)tpnz.co.nz] > Sent: Tuesday, 19 December 2006 12:01 > To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz > Subject: [nznog] Bus/Train to NZNOG > > Hi all > > The idea was floated at last weeks Curry in Auckland about > hiring a bus > to travel to NZNOG, as there would possibly be quite a number > of people > between Auckland and Palmerston North interested in a less > stressful and > cheaper means of getting there. > > I have no idea of what numbers would be required at this stage or what > the cost would be. Obviously it would be cheaper than flying, but take > longer to get there. > > The other alternative might be to group-book the train, which has > tables, not sure about AC power, you can walk around, is apparently > newly-refurbished, but probably takes a little longer than a bus, and > possibly more expensive. > > Is anyone is interested? > Contacting me off-list would be best. > > Regards, > Joel van Velden > > _______________________________________________ > NZNOG mailing list > NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz > http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog > >

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Re: [nznog] Telstra's Outage
by jdmwoolley＠ihug.co.nz 01 Jan '07

01 Jan '07

Steve Wray wrote: > Redundancy isn't really what I mean; more > forward-thinking. So if a TelstraClear engineer thought about it really hard the truck would have missed the fibre? Personally, I don't think the power of prayer is a valid network protection scheme. Though when I used to work there, it was useful on occassion ;) > From what I've heard out of Telstra people -- and > thats just the faults and 'helpdesk' people, the > attitude seems to be that a 'truck hitting a > pole' is not something that could have been > foreseen and that therefore there was no point in > having a contingency plan to deal with it. > > To me, this just seems wrong-headed. > > My question for Telstra is, was there a plan? How > well did it work out? > If they didn't have a plan or if it didn't work out > well, how are they going to address this in future? > And the answers I've been getting back from Telstra > people are rather disconcerting. A quick talk about how things are done in a Telco may be in order. 1. You need money to do everything. This includes laying fibre, writing plans and taking a toilet break. 2. There are two types of money to be spent - OPEX and CAPEX (OPerational expenditure and CAPital expenditure). 3. OPEX is evil. Accountants see it as a black hole that money is thrown down. It is not an investment. It is paying some guy for something you already own. OPEX is constantly cut. Many things that should be done as OPEX are classed as CAPEX by squinting your eyes and with the aid of smoke and mirrors. 4. CAPEX is ok - it is investing money in something with the expectation of a return at some point in time. Dig a hole, lay a cable, charge people to use it, eventually they've paid you more than it cost you to lay - this is CAPEX. You need a business case to spend CAPEX. This will consist of all likely and unlikely costs and revenues; and consequently a best, worst and expected-case return on investment. If the company thinks this is the best way to spend it's money it will do it. If it thinks it can make a larger profit or the same profit in a shorter time frame elsewhere it will do that. This is The Way It Works(tm) for a Telco and most businesses. If you can write a business case showing that getting 1000 monks in Tibet to pray for the safety of TelstrClear's network will turn a profit then they will do it. If prayer wasn't what you meant by "forward-thinking", and redundancy wasn't it then I'm at a loss. What else could they do? Not lay the fibre there? That location was probably the place that brought the best return on investment to justify the CAPEX. Could there have been a better place to put it - probably. Do companies have the time to second guess every decision made? Or will someone else beat you to the punch if you do that? Sorry for the massive rant, but berating a company, any company, for doing their best to fix a fault caused by some truck driver who was likely high on P at the time just seems like cynical people trying to complain about nothing to me. Sure, if you were one of the people affected it must've really sucked. In the end them's the breaks. On a lighter note, Merry Christmas to everyone - try to shake off the cynicism and anger that accumulated through the year at the beach this summer! Jonathan

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Virus alert
by Lesley Walker 28 Dec '06

28 Dec '06

Looks like there's a new email worm/virus epidemic on the go. We've quarantined over 1100 incoming emails since 2pm, and we normally only get a trickle. ClamAV reports "postcard.exe contains Trojan.Downloader-388", and the subject line is "Happy New Year". Just what we all need. :-( Lesley W (Happy to be running Ubuntu)

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Re: [nznog] Telstra's Outage
by Steve Wray 28 Dec '06

28 Dec '06

(sorry about lack of threading etc, I clipped the text out of the web-based archive) Jonathan wrote: > David Robinson wrote: >> >> "For a start, it takes more than two fibre cuts in the > North Island to >> disrupt us" >> >> And also remember back early in the year when one slip on the Hutt >> motorway took out all services in Wellington. >> >> What is so wrong with Telstra's network that single events can affect >> so many people, when supposable it takes more than two fibre cuts to >> disrupt them? > > This post you've quoted was related to the core network - > i.e. the bits that connect Wellington to Auckland etc. This > is a fault in the access network i.e. the bit that connects > Mary and Bob (or in this case Kandallah) to the core > network. NO operator has full redundancy in the access > network for residential services. What amazes me is that Telstra maintain that a truck hitting a pole was a *completely* unforseeable event and that even in retrospect they could not have been expected to have forseen that *one* *day* a truck would hit a 'single-point-of-failure pole' and that they could not have been expected to have planned for it. I ask you, is that really reasonable? I thought that engineers were the types of folk would look at diagrams of such a network and say: "well this pole is a single point of failure and its right by a road. Sooner or later its going to get hit by something, we'd better plan for that". I don't get the feeling that TC *had* planned for it... though maybe they did and if they hadn't planned for it we'd be disconnected till the new year... Insights anyone? Also, is there anywhere which keeps a log of outages experienced by NZ ISP's, how long they last etc? Thanks

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Connection reliability (was Re: Telstra's Outage)
by Matthew Poole 21 Dec '06

21 Dec '06

On Thu, 21 Dec 2006, David Robb wrote: > On Thu, 21 Dec 2006, Simon Allard wrote: > >> You can't expect good uptimes and run your business which requires high >> availability internet on a $39.95 DSL account. > > Good, Fast, Cheap. Pick any two. > Where Good==Reliable, I assume? Since the relative goodness of broadband products for most consumers is often associated with their fastness and cheapness, with reliability (provided one can actually pass packets, of course) being an unconsidered factor. I do agree with Dean that we know you can't reasonably expect multiple nines of reliability from a residential service, but we, as geeks, have far different expectations from the average consumer. Plus, with NZ's high incidence of home-based businesses, how many users have actually had ANY choice of carrier until quite recently? I can probably get Woosh at home, and we have a Telecom landline. What are my other choices? TCL is still delivering over TCNZ's cable, so that's a non-starter. I could maybe get hooked into Vector's fibre, though I don't think it comes quite far enough down Great South Rd. And I'm in a better position than a lot of residential users, who can't get Woosh and aren't even close to someone's fibre network. When people have no choice, is it any wonder that they expect the earth for nothing? Nobody's telling them about the limitations of the one service they can afford, and nobody's offering them anything with better reliability for a reasonable price - what would one pay for a 2Mbps frame connection that, while unquestionably giving better upstream performance, comes in, at best, at half the downstream speed of a DSL connection? Many, many multiples of $40/month, that's for sure. Total no-brainer. We can sneer at the great unwashed, but the reality is that the marketroids aren't offering anything to fill the gaping void between DSL and frame/ISDN (does anyone even use ISDN for data anymore?). PS: Why pay metric boatloads for something like frame when Telecom won't give you credit if their network fails? Nobody got a cent out of them after the rat and the errant backhoe took out much of the country for several hours, so what's the point in handing them extra? Pardon the pun. -- Matthew Poole "Don't use force. Get a bigger hammer."

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Re: [nznog] Telstra's Outage
by Simon Allard 20 Dec '06

20 Dec '06

Actually, I think it's the other way around. The reason NZ has 3rd rate broadband, is customers expect the world for free. You can't expect good uptimes and run your business which requires high availability internet on a $39.95 DSL account. I agree with everything Dean said, and I bet I am not the only one. -----Original Message----- From: John @ netTRUST [mailto:john(a)nettrust.net.nz] Sent: Thursday, 21 December 2006 11:19 a.m. To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: [nznog] Telstra's Outage > Nothing used to piss me off more than the cable customer who used to > compain (without logging trouble tickets BTW) that thier home business > was losing money because their cable modem was down.... > > You buy a residential service - thats what you get. This type of arrogance from a NOC is why NZ has 3rd rate broadband. ADSL and cable are widely marketed to businesses and indeed business connections usually makes up the lions share of revenuw generated by these services. Let's hopen they keep you, and others with the same opinion, in the back room as far from customers as possible -or- put another way you should be using your l33t skills to substantally improve the reliability rather then having too much time on your hands digging for excuses. _______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog

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Re: [nznog] Telstra's Outage
by jdmwoolley＠ihug.co.nz 20 Dec '06

20 Dec '06

John @ netTRUST wrote: > antedotal evidence Erm, perhaps you meant anecdotal? http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/antedotal http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/anecdotal (sorry, couldn't resist - beer!)

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Telstra's Outage
by David Robinson 20 Dec '06

20 Dec '06

Hi, With Telstra's outage taking out the Northern and Western suburbs of Wellington. For what I gather it was a single truck crash bringing down the overhead wires. A single truck crash is a single point of failure, but I remember this email http://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/nznog/2005-June/010158.html which says: "For a start, it takes more than two fibre cuts in the North Island to disrupt us" And also remember back early in the year when one slip on the Hutt motorway took out all services in Wellington. What is so wrong with Telstra's network that single events can affect so many people, when supposable it takes more than two fibre cuts to disrupt them? David

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Re: [nznog] Telstra's Outage
by jdmwoolley＠ihug.co.nz 20 Dec '06

20 Dec '06

David Robinson wrote: > > "For a start, it takes more than two fibre cuts in the North Island to > disrupt us" > > And also remember back early in the year when one slip on the Hutt > motorway took out all services in Wellington. > > What is so wrong with Telstra's network that single events can affect > so many people, when supposable it takes more than two fibre cuts to > disrupt them? This post you've quoted was related to the core network - i.e. the bits that connect Wellington to Auckland etc. This is a fault in the access network i.e. the bit that connects Mary and Bob (or in this case Kandallah) to the core network. NO operator has full redundancy in the access network for residential services. If you want that, you need to pay through the nose to get a business service, even then most services give you only a single copper pair/fibre/cable to your premises which is still a single point of failure. Jonathan

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