[Outages-discussion] Mod: Clarification on Scope

Jay R. Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Thu Mar 9 18:10:51 EST 2017


[ Apologies; it's been an unusually busy week; I just got back to the list ]

[ Please direct all replies to -discussion; not the main list.  If you feel 
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<moderator>
There's been some question again lately about what's in-scope for this list.

Obviously, that include things which are directly related to the networking
of the Internet and of other major communications networks; notification of
last night's AT&T 911 outage was in-scope, for example.

It includes backbone links and routers, IX problems, and problems with 
upper-layer services that apply to a large number of end-sites, like DDoS
attacks on Cloudflare, Akamai, etc.

We've also defined it to apply to outages and sub-outage problems (whether
functional or regional) in endpoint services, like AWS, Azure and other
cloud providers, and to large end-user services whether they host there or
in other places, like Netflix.

The goal of including things like this, often considered out of scope in 
other venues, is to provide information to those who work at eyeball networks
like cable ISPs or college resnets, and who might get a lot of support 
calls on a Netflix outage, for example.

SUGGESTIONS:

It's been a tradition on both mailing lists and Usenet (remember Usenet?) for
years and years that if you ask a question, you take the replies directly and
summmarize, rather than inviting people to reply directly to the list or
group.  This approach will serve us well here, too, I suspect.

I know that this list cannot be all things to all people, and that being useful
to some will make it less useful to others, and there's not too much Virendra
and I can do about that as moderators.  But, if possible, I'd like it if people 
could tell *me* if things are getting out of hand, rather than each other.

I'm not always following the list myself, but I'm happy to step in if someone
points out a problem -- I do try to look in at least once a day, but that's not
always enough, clearly.

In any event: 

METOO and NOTME is almost always off-topic for the main list.

The NVIDIA service outage is probably not of sufficiently pervasive interest
to be on-topic for the main list either; it's not going to generate lots of
support inquiries *to network providers*, though people might scream at NVIDIA 
themselves a bit. :-)

911 was on-topic.

In my humble opinions.

Again, please direct further discussions about this to -discussions.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
</moderator>
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates       http://www.bcp38.info          2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA      BCP38: Ask For It By Name!           +1 727 647 1274


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