I'm with Richard here on getting in touch with reality. I always like to quote a report written by the Yankee Group. Yeah I know reports like these written by these professional 'opinionators' at are questionable at best, but one of the things they quantify which is interesting to me is a 31% attribution to human error. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/437/services/rt59/documents/yankee_report.p... The reason why that is significant is the only way you'll get over that is institutional diversity. Change the associated humans and you'll avoid a 31% contributor to the cause of your potential downtime in your future. Not to mention all the other causes. I've had this argument before. http://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/nznog/2005-June/010170.html Another point of reference I have is a conversation with someone involved with APNIC (previously was with Telstra) back in '99 who had the view the boils down to this: "Why does a telco waste money on making their network 5 nines, when they'll never practically realise that? Why does a customer spend money on that? Why doesn't a customer spend money of parallel sourcing 2 x '3 nines' networks and combining that together with the knowledge that they'll actually truly realise a 5 nines solution?" Now of course the customer being able to achieve that is dependent on their own internal reliability, but you're all at 5 nines availability yourselves right guys? Course you are. Silly me. That's why there's been little noise. Now, back on topic. The failure over the weekend was I presume not due to operator error. But if you've developed a strategy to deal with operator error, you've probably also dealt with an outage that is a little bit longer than normal. And in that case you're probably feeling cool right now. Otherwise you're a little hot under the collar. Nevermind, lesson learnt. Jamie -----Original Message----- From: Richard Naylor [mailto:richard.naylor(a)r2.co.nz] Sent: Monday, 30 June 2008 6:34 p.m. To: Pshem Kowalczyk; Chris Hodgetts Cc: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: [nznog] Vector, did you try turning it off and then on again At 01:15 p.m. 30/06/2008, Pshem Kowalczyk wrote: <snip>

Updates 4h into the problem saying - no ETA and about 2h later - it will be fixed tomorrow are just not enough. The fact that it was virtually impossible to get hold of anyone that actually had a clue is not something that an average business is willing to accept.

If a network connection is that important to the "average" business, then it should do something about it. What worries me is that people on this list think that a network operator should be infallible. If the Internet is that important to your business, then have more than one provider. If you have clue, you'll use one with a different layer 3, 2, 1, or maybe even 0 route topology. Its far simpler to have multiple providers and networks than paying a fortune to have some undeliverable level of reliability. And besides *you* have control over it. My business relies heavily on the Internet. We use 5 providers for our network and around 5 for the services. We mix dsl with wireless (3 forms), we have 4 satellite links, fiber and are known to run our own cable when we can't get what we want where we want it. A Km or two is no real issue. If a company uses a UPS for its computer, why doesn't it invest in a second link. Even crappy dsl will at least keep something going. Rich _______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog