Re: MCI outages

[James A. Farrar]

At 06:02 PM 6/24/97 GMT, William Allen Simpson wrote:
>Well, we could talk about the repeated outages of MCI....

Ok. 

>
>Last Thursday and again on Sunday, I saw all my traffic between myself
>in Michigan and my client in Mississippi going to Atlanta and a black
>hole, instead of via Houston and Memphis.  This went for several hours
>before I called MCI NOC.

Perhaps you would like to share exactly what you told the MCI NOC and what
their response was? (offline of course, where it should be)
BTW: I would also be interested in knowing the source and destination
addresses you were having problems with.

>
>I used to think the MCI NOC did an exemplary job.  I guess that was when
>they were using BBN.

Thank you, I will ignore the second sentence.

>
>Unfortunately, nowadays, IP address of routers are meaningless.  They
>want "circuit numbers".  Of course, I have no idea what _their_ circuit
>numbers are.  Heck, I don't pay any attention to those under my control.

Yes, circuit numbers usually determine if a person is a customer of
provider X or Y that is calling to utilize provider Z's resources.
Generally, it is a good practice to inquire about problems with the service
provider that provides you services.  

>
>The end result was they refused to take a trouble ticket, even though
>it was clearly their mis-routing problem.  They did admit that there
>might be maintenance going on in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.
>

Perhaps an emergency maintenance was happening as a result of an unforeseen
outage as I doubt a large service provider would schedule maintenance on a
Sunday afternoon.

>The excuse was that "I'm not a direct customer on either end".  Heck,
>even my next level up service provider isn't a direct customer.
>
The last time I recall MCI uses their customers circuit ID to open a
service inquiry with. They generally don't open tickets for non customers
that can't get to www.xyz.com although, my experience is that they are
generally receptive to a notification of a possible problem that may be
occurring within their network.

>Long gone are the days when folks cooperated to resolve trouble reports.
>

I respectfully disagree with that statement.

>And has anyone else noticed a heck of a lot of route flapping between
>MCI and PSI, also through Atlanta?
>

Does this mean you think MCI's use of the Cisco default for route dampening
should be adjusted? 

>WSimpson@UMich.edu
>    Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32
>BSimpson@MorningStar.com
>    Key fingerprint =  2E 07 23 03 C5 62 70 D3  59 B1 4F 5E 1D C2 C1 A2
>

-jim