What does it mean to be connected to the Internet?
Alan believes that its when a user can get to anywhere she likes. If the user can't get there, then that end-point is not on the Internet.
How does a provider deal with trouble report concerning an end-point not on their network?
Work on this was done a couple of years ago and the Remedy system was selected, however it's not free and not widely deployed.
Alan asks if a public domain solution would be well received and if so how do we do it?
Most of the other regionals either had legacy ticket systems or no time to get the Remedy system installed.
How would information get in the database? It is suggested a centralized http server would be a good idea.
Alan suggests that the folks in the organization who declare outages would be the ones to populate the database.
Alan also suggests that there should be some standard developed to report the outage.
A number of folks agree that it would be useful, however there is a clear concern that the sales agents in organizations would use the information as leverage in a sales.
Additionally, there is some concern on what length of outage should be logged.
It has also been suggested that route server can provide this information based on the presence of a route.
Guy Almes was tangentially involved in this effort. He recalls that when the Remedy licenses became available, the mid-levels were involved with the transition from the NSFNET to the current environment. There was also a spirit at the time that the new environment was more competitive than cooperative. These days, that may have changed. Folks are now realizing that the environment is both competative and cooperative. Guy also suggests that the original concept may have been flawed. He suggested that some programatical mechanism be created (perhaps as suggested by an earlier individual). He further suggests that the problem to be solved is really providing information in a scalable fashion.
Another individual comments that the information in Route Server is not directly related to knowledge end-point (or a path to it).
Sean Donelan suggests that folks would be motivated by self-interest. If a system exists, folks will have a ready resource of information.
Elise Gerich is curious about sharing of outage information. Would folks actually do it?
A mailing list has been established to continue this discussion. The list is outage-discuss@academ.com and you can subscribe with a subscribe message to outage-discuss-request@academ.com.