151 Front Street in Toronto Fire (TorIX and others)
FYI There is a fire at 151 Front Street in Toronto, which is home to TorIX as well as a variety of other network providers. Rumor is the fire may have ORIGINated in the Peer1 suite. Seems a bad weekend for fires given what happened in Seattle as well. Drive Slow
Re: 151 Front Street in Toronto Fire (TorIX and others)
Paul Wall wrote: FYI There is a fire at 151 Front Street in Toronto, which is home to TorIX as well as a variety of other network providers. Rumor is the fire may have ORIGINated in the Peer1 suite. Seems a bad weekend for fires given what happened in Seattle as well. Peer1 confirms it on their status page: http://forums.peer1.com/viewtopic.php?f=37t=117 They say power was cut to the whole building. A post on webhostingtalk says only their suite and one below.
RE: 151 Front Street in Toronto Fire (TorIX and others)
Peer1 confirms it on their status page: http://forums.peer1.com/viewtopic.php?f=37t=117 They say power was cut to the whole building. A post on webhostingtalk says only their suite and one below. That's incorrect unless the rest of us are running on generators now. We are on the 7th floor. We are partially up, therefore clearly power was not entirely cut to the whole building. The one below may refer to their 7th floor suite, not sure. BTW, we're glad to help out those affected in any way we can...feel free to contact me off-list. Erik
Re: 151 Front Street in Toronto Fire (TorIX and others)
Erik (Caneris) wrote: Peer1 confirms it on their status page: http://forums.peer1.com/viewtopic.php?f=37t=117 They say power was cut to the whole building. A post on webhostingtalk says only their suite and one below. That's incorrect unless the rest of us are running on generators now. We are on the 7th floor. We are partially up, therefore clearly power was not entirely cut to the whole building. The one below may refer to their 7th floor suite, not sure. BTW, we're glad to help out those affected in any way we can...feel free to contact me off-list. Yeah, I didn't really believe their whole building claim; high rise fires usually only result in specific floors/areas being cut and alerting one above and one below. Since this seems to be a fire-on-the-floor issue (aren't these relatively rare?) vs. utility vault, I'd be very interested to know what kind of fire suppression was in place and how effective it was. As I check now they've redacted the whole building claim and are now saying 7th and 8th floors. ~Seth
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
In article 4a4fc4f3.2010...@rollernet.us, Seth Mattinen se...@rollernet.us writes Twitter will attract the what's cool right now demographic. But has it gone from cool to useful (for this kind of application), in a way that Facebook and other such sites haven't? I remember an employer of mine when I was trying to persuade him to build a modem into a PC so people could exchange what we'd now call emails, and he said Roland, come back and ask me again, when I can pay your wages through that modem thing. Unfortunately I didn't get the opportunity, as I left there twenty years ago, and Paypal wasn't invented until about ten years ago. -- Roland Perry
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
On Sun, Jul 05, 2009, Roland Perry wrote: Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event. Is Twitter making a profit or not? This discussion about (ab)using a publicly available message system which isn't currently being charged for would makes me worried^Wamused as hell. (Not that I can't see possible ways of making money off twitter - especially if you offer reliable message dissemination services to companies for a fee, but AFAIK they aren't doing this at the moment.) Adrian
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
In article 4a4fd58b.2000...@gmail.com, JC Dill jcdill.li...@gmail.com writes Even easier, you make an email address on your system that is an alias to posterous. So they send to p...@schoolsystem.edu which .forwards out to posterous, which posts to the school blog, myspace, facebook, twitter, It doesn't have any of those, that's the point really. Is twitter the one I should get them started with first? Show them how a radio station can retweet the info It's have to be automated as there are hundreds to do over a periods of a few tens of minutes (the schools don't generally announce they are closing until they see how many teachers made it to work, and that's not long before they have to open - students get marked down for being late, even in bad weather, so can't delay setting out from home; it's an interesting operational model.) and then announce to get info on school closings, follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/trentfmnews (but it's not exactly high traffic) and everyone can send the info TO the radio station and get the info FROM the radio station quickly and easily. The radio station would probably be overwhelmed if they got much more than one tweet per school. I don't think it has. All they ever hear about other Web2.0 like Facebook and Bebo is how dangerous they are for kids. Sheesh. Cars and bikes are far more dangerous for kids than Facebook and Bebo. That's why kids are taught the rules of the road, to always wear bike helmets, to always buckle up in the car, and they get driver training. Part of my day job is getting that sort of training about using the Internet, into schools. So far most of them have only got as far as teaching the students how to operate Powerpoint (yes I know that's not an Internet application), and installing filters to try to keep them off YouTube during lessons. But I'm beginning to think that finally maybe Twitter has the right profile for this application. Again, why limit yourself? Use all the tools available. One step at a time :) -- Roland Perry
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
On Jul 5, 2009, at 5:12 PM, Adrian Chadd wrote: Is Twitter making a profit or not? The other consideration is scalability and reliability. Twitter has been subject to numerous feature disablements due to capacity issues, as well as complete outages. Furthermore, Twitter does not appear to be deployed in a distributed, highly-available architecture. The Twitter *aggregation/attention model* is what is of great interest, any merits of the specific service aside. --- Roland Dobbins rdobb...@arbor.net // http://www.arbornetworks.com Unfortunately, inefficiency scales really well. -- Kevin Lawton
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
On Jul 5, 2009, at 6:12 AM, Adrian Chadd wrote: On Sun, Jul 05, 2009, Roland Perry wrote: Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event. Is Twitter making a profit or not? The word on the street is that they have not yet found a revenue model. In other words, they make no money. They seem very dot com 1.0 unconcerned with this. That obviously cannot last. The speculation on how to fix that tend to be either focused advertising http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_ultimate_twitter_revenue_model.php ecommerce http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/2009/6/22/A-real-Twitter-revenue-model---gasp-_731.aspx or Google type data mining models (you can detect trends very quickly on twitter). These can obviously be combined; who knows if they would be sufficient. This discussion about (ab)using a publicly available message system which isn't currently being charged for would makes me worried^Wamused as hell. I don't think it violates the terms of use. But, yes, as I said before, this is a service that goes down. I would not rely on it as the only way to communicate. (Not that I can't see possible ways of making money off twitter - especially if you offer reliable message dissemination services to companies for a fee, but AFAIK they aren't doing this at the moment.) No. I haven't even heard this mentioned as a possible revenue model. Good idea, though. Regards Marshall Adrian Regards Marshall Eubanks CEO / AmericaFree.TV
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
Is Twitter making a profit or not? The other consideration is scalability and reliability. Twitter has been subject to numerous feature disablements due to capacity issues, as well as complete outages. Furthermore, Twitter does not appear to be deployed in a distributed, highly-available architecture. The Twitter *aggregation/attention model* is what is of great interest, any merits of the specific service aside. exactly, its like VHS versus BETAMAX , not the better system wins,its just better maketing and popularity. just my 2 cents http://identi.ca/macbroadcast/ the opensource distributed alternative http://laconi.ca/ -- Les enfants teribbles - research / deployment Marc Manthey Vogelsangerstrasse 97 D - 50823 Köln - Germany Vogelsangerstrasse 97 Geo: 50.945554, 6.920293 PGP/GnuPG: 0x1ac02f3296b12b4d Tel.:0049-221-29891489 Mobil:0049-1577-3329231 web : http://www.let.de Opinions expressed may not even be mine by the time you read them, and certainly don't reflect those of any other entity (legal or otherwise). Please note that according to the German law on data retention, information on every electronic information exchange with me is retained for a period of six months.
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
On Sun, 5 Jul 2009, Roland Perry wrote: There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear cool and in tune with customers, but by far and large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their call center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those that call in. It's a High School. They don't have a support desk (or more than handful of phone lines [1]). Even the local radio station can't cope with one call per school asking them to broadcast the news that they have closed due to bad weather. If your resources are that tight, do what our local school district did, mandate that all bus schedules will only be available on the web site. And then make sure something gets posted to the website. Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event. Roland, sounds like you should have a few public service announcements saying that school closures will be delivered via a certain twitter username. Also send a flyer home with the students. The radio station can pick up the twitter feed like everyone else, and announce closures. That is the way a certain group of people are doing it in the middle east right now, word gets around and word gets out... In your case, the community will know quickly, all from a couple of people logging into twitter and sending a few messages. Sounds like a simple, ideal solution given your budget constraints. -- steve
RE: Using twitter as an outage notification
My gosh, sarcasm Ok, how about we use Facebook, myspace and the other assorted community websites/services, no better yet lets use AOL! /sarcasm Can we kill this thread please (for those that are still on AOL that's PLZ) This list is for professional content, not for boasting about high school websties/services that will die out in the next year or so. -Original Message- From: Steve Pirk [mailto:or...@pirk.com] Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2009 6:43 AM To: Roland Perry Cc: na...@merit.edu Subject: Re: Using twitter as an outage notification On Sun, 5 Jul 2009, Roland Perry wrote: There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear cool and in tune with customers, bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t... bunch of $h1t, bunch of $h1t...
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
On Jul 5, 2009, at 6:23 AM, Roland Perry wrote: In article 4a4fd58b.2000...@gmail.com, JC Dill jcdill.li...@gmail.com writes Even easier, you make an email address on your system that is an alias to posterous. So they send to p...@schoolsystem.edu which .forwards out to posterous, which posts to the school blog, myspace, facebook, twitter, It doesn't have any of those, that's the point really. Is twitter the one I should get them started with first? I would say this partially would depend on how and what you want to communicate. If there is just going to be one pronouncement per day (the school is up / down / delayed), then facebook and / or myspace would suggest themselves. They are to date free, and the students will know what they are. I would start with facebook. If you look at the #AuthorizeNet situation, there was a lot of back and forth. Will the schools have a need for back and forth ? If they do, then, yes, twitter might be part of the solution and you might start with it. It's free, cross-platform, and you can also assume that the students (if not their parents) know what it is. This might also be a good for teachers and the school to communicate, say by DM (direct messages). Note that this will take people answering questions / dealing with issues on twitter. Specifically, someone would have to pay attention to it during any quasi-emergency period - do the schools have such a person ? Also, if the school looses power in a storm, is there a backup means of getting to the Internet ? Regards Marshall Show them how a radio station can retweet the info It's have to be automated as there are hundreds to do over a periods of a few tens of minutes (the schools don't generally announce they are closing until they see how many teachers made it to work, and that's not long before they have to open - students get marked down for being late, even in bad weather, so can't delay setting out from home; it's an interesting operational model.) and then announce to get info on school closings, follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/trentfmnews (but it's not exactly high traffic) and everyone can send the info TO the radio station and get the info FROM the radio station quickly and easily. The radio station would probably be overwhelmed if they got much more than one tweet per school. I don't think it has. All they ever hear about other Web2.0 like Facebook and Bebo is how dangerous they are for kids. Sheesh. Cars and bikes are far more dangerous for kids than Facebook and Bebo. That's why kids are taught the rules of the road, to always wear bike helmets, to always buckle up in the car, and they get driver training. Part of my day job is getting that sort of training about using the Internet, into schools. So far most of them have only got as far as teaching the students how to operate Powerpoint (yes I know that's not an Internet application), and installing filters to try to keep them off YouTube during lessons. But I'm beginning to think that finally maybe Twitter has the right profile for this application. Again, why limit yourself? Use all the tools available. One step at a time :) -- Roland Perry Regards Marshall Eubanks CEO / AmericaFree.TV
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
On Sun, Jul 05, 2009 at 11:01:43AM +0100, Roland Perry wrote: [snow day notifications] Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event. There are web hosting providers whose 18c/year hosting plans can't handle a few thousand requests to a static page over a period of maybe 15 minutes without falling over? The mind boggles. - Matt
sniffing x.25 on SUN/Solaris
Hello, I am trying to capture x.25 traffic from a Sun Machine and i wonder if snoop supports it because i asked my customer to capture it and send it over but the trace doesnt include anything x/25 related. Regards, Kas
Re: sniffing x.25 on SUN/Solaris
Kas, I would assume that the x.25 traffic is using async ports on the Sun (or is it over IP)? If its async, you are out of luck, and should use some RS232 (I assume...) sniffer which can recognize x.25 Arie On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 2:56 PM, Kasper Adel karim.a...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, I am trying to capture x.25 traffic from a Sun Machine and i wonder if snoop supports it because i asked my customer to capture it and send it over but the trace doesnt include anything x/25 related. Regards, Kas
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
Aleksandr Milewski wrote: On 7/4/09 7:50 AM, Roland Perry wrote: What I'm trying to anticipate is the objection to *also* posting to Twitter, which might be raised on the grounds that it's too unofficial, or unsupported or something like that. Anecdotal, of course, but I found twitter to be very useful during the SF Bay Area fiber cuts a few months back. I was able to fairly quickly get reports of who was down (UnitedLayer) and who wasn't (everyone else), and made some good contacts, some of whom I've done business with since (Cernio). Set up a twitter account for outage/event notifications, and don't *ever* use it for marketing. I'd agree on this one. We use it for outage/event/coverage expansion notifications. Originally, we thought a blog style website somewhere outside our network was the way to go, but twitter has so many more angles, like RSS feed capability, an API to integrate it somewhere on your website and mobile clients. On top of that, you can update it via SMS if needed. The hype some people are pushing twitter on, I can't follow, but for those type of notifications, it's perfect, also because it's not part of your own infrastructure. Kind regards, Martin List-Petersen -- Airwire - Ag Nascadh Pobail an Iarthair http://www.airwire.ie Phone: 091-865 968
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
In article 0d357934-85de-4935-8f58-02f5fcc1d...@americafree.tv, Marshall Eubanks t...@americafree.tv writes I would say this partially would depend on how and what you want to communicate. If there is just going to be one pronouncement per day (the school is up / down / delayed), then facebook and / or myspace would suggest themselves. There's going to be a handful a year. Such as school closed today due to snow. or remember - school closed today for staff training [a curious British phenomenon]. They are to date free, and the students will know what they are. I would start with facebook. If you look at the #AuthorizeNet situation, there was a lot of back and forth. Will the schools have a need for back and forth ? No, if the school's closed, it's closed. No debate allowed. Note that this will take people answering questions / dealing with issues on twitter. Specifically, someone would have to pay attention to it during any quasi-emergency period - do the schools have such a person ? Such a person could be designated. Also, if the school looses power in a storm, Schools in urban areas here very rarely lose power in storms. All the cables are underground. Of course, losing power would be another excuse to close the school :) is there a backup means of getting to the Internet ? A laptop with a 3g modem would suffice, or for Twitter someone with a suitably configure mobile phone. -- Roland Perry
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
In article 20090705101237.gc14...@skywalker.creative.net.au, Adrian Chadd adr...@creative.net.au writes Is Twitter making a profit or not? This discussion about (ab)using a publicly available message system which isn't currently being charged for would makes me worried^Wamused as hell. I've seen debates about whether it's possible to monetise Twitter. Operationally, it's an issue if they fail financially, but I don't think the investment in setting up an account is large enough to worry about. Counter-intuitively, I've probably seen more subscription-based services fail, than free ones. -- Roland Perry
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
In article 9589b202-ed92-4c49-98ee-eebaa43c8...@americafree.tv, Marshall Eubanks t...@americafree.tv writes as I said before, this is a service that goes down. I would not rely on it as the only way to communicate. I'd be proposing it as an additional way to communicate[1], but people could come to rely upon it. [1] the present system seems to be those few students who can get through to the school then SMS the news to their friends. -- Roland Perry
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
In article pine.lnx.4.64.0907050334130.23...@mail.pirk.com, Steve Pirk or...@pirk.com writes It's a High School. They don't have a support desk (or more than handful of phone lines [1]). Even the local radio station can't cope with one call per school asking them to broadcast the news that they have closed due to bad weather. If your resources are that tight, do what our local school district did, mandate that all bus schedules will only be available on the web site. The school doesn't have any buses. About 80% of the students walk (the average distance maybe a little over a mile) and most of the rest get taken in their parents car. Roland, sounds like you should have a few public service announcements saying that school closures will be delivered via a certain twitter username. That's what my objective is - to build a sturdy enough case for the school to have a twitter account to use during these events. Also send a flyer home with the students. Only about half of those ever reach home (no-one knows where they end up, but it's probably the same place as all those lost Biros). But if the school had a twitter account I'm sure the news would spread rapidly. Most of the students spend hours online every day, even if the school doesn't. The radio station can pick up the twitter feed like everyone else, and announce closures. That is the way a certain group of people are doing it in the middle east right now, word gets around and word gets out... In your case, the community will know quickly, all from a couple of people logging into twitter and sending a few messages. Sounds like a simple, ideal solution given your budget constraints. I hope so. -- Roland Perry
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
In article 20090705113248.gp1...@hezmatt.org, Matthew Palmer mpal...@hezmatt.org writes There are web hosting providers whose 18c/year hosting plans can't handle a few thousand requests to a static page over a period of maybe 15 minutes without falling over? The mind boggles. Apparently so. Of course, they could be deliberately throttled, rather than run on inherently low-bandwidth kit. Which raises the issue of whether such throttling schemes should take account of short bursts. -- Roland Perry
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
In article 4a50a3c9.3080...@airwire.ie, Martin List-Petersen mar...@airwire.ie writes for those type of notifications, it's perfect, also because it's not part of your own infrastructure. From an operational resilience point of view, that's a very important feature. -- Roland Perry
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
Roland Perry wrote: In article 4a50a3c9.3080...@airwire.ie, Martin List-Petersen mar...@airwire.ie writes for those type of notifications, it's perfect, also because it's not part of your own infrastructure. From an operational resilience point of view, that's a very important feature. It's the main reason for choosing something like twitter, blogspot etc. If you want to communicate an outage, it might be as bad as your infrastructure is gone, even though that you'd might hope, that you've designed your network in a way, that it never happens. But let's just take the scenario, where some event basically whipes your ASN of the face of global BGP :) . It doesn't have to be a physical outage, that causes it. Talking about monetizing twitter, there's a very simple approach, just based on this type of service: Service Providers, Carriers etc., that use Twitter can pay a monthly fee for the service and twitter sends them responses, private messages etc. by more organized means. Just my 2c on another approach, but I can see that happening and I wouldn't mind paying a few bob for the service. As for some responses on this tread and also some reactions from a few customers (childish, my kids use twitter, i don't, etc.): - some people think twitter is a hype, that's ignorant in my eyes. Sure it's overhyped by some, it doesn't make twitter a hype. - some people think twitter is a child's toy. It can be used as such, but that's not it's primary function or intention. - some people say it's the next Google. I can pretty much see, where that idea comes from. Real time search, while Google didn't pick very fast up on the fires (Seattle, Toronto), you'd be able to find tweets on them within minutes on Twitter. It would take hours before any of it appears on Google. - and as the last thing, with companies like ATT, authorize.net and various others using it for service notifications or interaction with customers, my above point actually is just even more valid. Calling it a lame web 2.0 is pretty much off, when it's actually used for something sensible. Just my 2c Kind regards, Martin List-Petersen -- Airwire - Ag Nascadh Pobail an Iarthair http://www.airwire.ie Phone: 091-865 968
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
In article 4a50acb7.6070...@airwire.ie, Martin List-Petersen mar...@airwire.ie writes Calling it a lame web 2.0 is pretty much off, when it's actually used for something sensible. I seem to be trying to find the middle ground between members of the public who think The Internet isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me in college 20 years ago and those who say Web 2.0 isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me in college 5 years ago. Shouldn't we at least be giving it the benefit of the doubt? -- Roland Perry
Re: sniffing x.25 on SUN/Solaris
On 05/07/2009 21:56, Kasper Adel wrote: I am trying to capture x.25 traffic from a Sun Machine and i wonder if snoop supports it because i asked my customer to capture it and send it over ... Try http://docs.sun.com esp. Solstice X.25 9.2 Administration Guide x25trace probably does what you want.
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
Roland Perry wrote: In article 4a50acb7.6070...@airwire.ie, Martin List-Petersen mar...@airwire.ie writes Calling it a lame web 2.0 is pretty much off, when it's actually used for something sensible. I seem to be trying to find the middle ground between members of the public who think The Internet isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me in college 20 years ago and those who say Web 2.0 isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me in college 5 years ago. Shouldn't we at least be giving it the benefit of the doubt? Since when has, what has been teached in college ever been a defining standard for what is happening on the internet or what the trend in computing is ? A lot of people never touch Linux during studies, and don't get any of it in college, however are faced with it in the corporate or public world. Kind regards, Martin List-Petersen -- Airwire - Ag Nascadh Pobail an Iarthair http://www.airwire.ie Phone: 091-865 968
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
Roland Perry wrote: There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear cool and in tune with customers, but by far and large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their call center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those that call in. It's a High School. They don't have a support desk (or more than handful of phone lines [1]). Even the local radio station can't cope with one call per school asking them to broadcast the news that they have closed due to bad weather. And then make sure something gets posted to the website. Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. Really? Um, wow. How big is this school? Is the webserver on an ISDN line? I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event. This is a case where it makes *perfect* sense to offload emergency notifications to another, larger system such as twitter, *as well as* post to the school website (ideally via a blog, so you can use posterus to do both actions in one email). There's no fee, the cost to set up[1] is your time to securely configure a posterus account and a list to send to posterus (see below) and then to send an announcement post to posterus (and thus post on the school blog and on twitter) and to send an email to all students and parents notifying them so they can follow the school's announcement feed on twitter. jc [1] To setup: create an announcement mailing list with a name like post7204...@school.edu - the name is kept private. The mailing list will send to posterus (and yourself - do NOT use this list to send to regular users - if you want to do that make a different list, a public list). This prevents students from sending out snow day emails by forging the school's secretary's email address and sending to posterus themselves - they would need to guess the name of the mailing list and send from that name to posterus to forge a snow day email. For even more security, set the list to no approved posters. The people who are authorized to send out the announcement will be authorized to *approve* posts from non-members (who are everyone). Anyone on the school staff can post (but still, keep the address private, only distribute it to those who need to know!). The posts are held for moderation and are sent to the people who can approve, and they have to click on the approval link and approve the post before it gets distributed. Test this system with the people who will use it, so that they understand what happens if they are the first one to click on the approval link, and what happens if someone else is first (no messages left to approve). Also, make sure they can remember the password for moderating the private email list - the whole thing grinds to a halt if none of them can remember their password at 4 am when they try to send a snowday announcement and it remains stuck in the distribution list and never gets out and posted. The usual system people use to remember an infrequently used password (of having a password on a note by the computer in the office) doesn't work at 4 am when everyone is at home. jc
RE: Using twitter as an outage notification
Hmm... doesn't that kind of defeat the point of using Twitter instead of your own infrastructure to begin with, aside from adding another (Posterous) single point of failure for all your communication mechanisms? Perhaps it is not so important for snow days vs. outage situations, but it seems to me like it would be simpler and more reliable to go directly to the source and not use Posterous. (Besides, I suspect the chances are reasonable that between mail/www/Twitter, you're going to have a low set of users in the other social networking sites crowd who don't have any overlap to begin with. Diminishing returns?) - S -Original Message- From: JC Dill jcdill.li...@gmail.com Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2009 08:18 Cc: na...@merit.edu na...@merit.edu Subject: Re: Using twitter as an outage notification Roland Perry wrote: There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear cool and in tune with customers, but by far and large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their call center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those that call in. It's a High School. They don't have a support desk (or more than handful of phone lines [1]). Even the local radio station can't cope with one call per school asking them to broadcast the news that they have closed due to bad weather. And then make sure something gets posted to the website. Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. Really? Um, wow. How big is this school? Is the webserver on an ISDN line? I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event. This is a case where it makes *perfect* sense to offload emergency notifications to another, larger system such as twitter, *as well as* post to the school website (ideally via a blog, so you can use posterus to do both actions in one email). There's no fee, the cost to set up[1] is your time to securely configure a posterus account and a list to send to posterus (see below) and then to send an announcement post to posterus (and thus post on the school blog and on twitter) and to send an email to all students and parents notifying them so they can follow the school's announcement feed on twitter. jc [1] To setup: create an announcement mailing list with a name like post7204...@school.edu - the name is kept private. The mailing list will send to posterus (and yourself - do NOT use this list to send to regular users - if you want to do that make a different list, a public list). This prevents students from sending out snow day emails by forging the school's secretary's email address and sending to posterus themselves - they would need to guess the name of the mailing list and send from that name to posterus to forge a snow day email. For even more security, set the list to no approved posters. The people who are authorized to send out the announcement will be authorized to *approve* posts from non-members (who are everyone). Anyone on the school staff can post (but still, keep the address private, only distribute it to those who need to know!). The posts are held for moderation and are sent to the people who can approve, and they have to click on the approval link and approve the post before it gets distributed. Test this system with the people who will use it, so that they understand what happens if they are the first one to click on the approval link, and what happens if someone else is first (no messages left to approve). Also, make sure they can remember the password for moderating the private email list - the whole thing grinds to a halt if none of them can remember their password at 4 am when they try to send a snowday announcement and it remains stuck in the distribution list and never gets out and posted. The usual system people use to remember an infrequently used password (of having a password on a note by the computer in the office) doesn't work at 4 am when everyone is at home. jc
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
I agree. It seems (I didn't look for solid proofs of that) twitter went down when MJ's die was revealed. I don't want to know why (not enough cloud computing stuff?), but I still believe there is maybe not always an ultimate solution to all problems. Twitter and its friends may sometimes help, that's for sure. But at an higher level, we don't need the info right here right now, we only want the issues to be solved. Still meaning the DC/ISP/hosting company has to keep a straight and up-to-date list of customers in order to contact them directly if necessary (but this is not part of the problems' resolution, this is commercial/relational matter), which I never saw in real life. Furthermore, I personnaly don't use Twitter and as few social networking whatever websites as I can. Ben Skywing a écrit : Hmm... doesn't that kind of defeat the point of using Twitter instead of your own infrastructure to begin with, aside from adding another (Posterous) single point of failure for all your communication mechanisms? Perhaps it is not so important for snow days vs. outage situations, but it seems to me like it would be simpler and more reliable to go directly to the source and not use Posterous. (Besides, I suspect the chances are reasonable that between mail/www/Twitter, you're going to have a low set of users in the other social networking sites crowd who don't have any overlap to begin with. Diminishing returns?) - S -Original Message- From: JC Dill jcdill.li...@gmail.com Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2009 08:18 Cc: na...@merit.edu na...@merit.edu Subject: Re: Using twitter as an outage notification Roland Perry wrote: There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear cool and in tune with customers, but by far and large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their call center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those that call in. It's a High School. They don't have a support desk (or more than handful of phone lines [1]). Even the local radio station can't cope with one call per school asking them to broadcast the news that they have closed due to bad weather. And then make sure something gets posted to the website. Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. Really? Um, wow. How big is this school? Is the webserver on an ISDN line? I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event. This is a case where it makes *perfect* sense to offload emergency notifications to another, larger system such as twitter, *as well as* post to the school website (ideally via a blog, so you can use posterus to do both actions in one email). There's no fee, the cost to set up[1] is your time to securely configure a posterus account and a list to send to posterus (see below) and then to send an announcement post to posterus (and thus post on the school blog and on twitter) and to send an email to all students and parents notifying them so they can follow the school's announcement feed on twitter. jc [1] To setup: create an announcement mailing list with a name like post7204...@school.edu - the name is kept private. The mailing list will send to posterus (and yourself - do NOT use this list to send to regular users - if you want to do that make a different list, a public list). This prevents students from sending out snow day emails by forging the school's secretary's email address and sending to posterus themselves - they would need to guess the name of the mailing list and send from that name to posterus to forge a snow day email. For even more security, set the list to no approved posters. The people who are authorized to send out the announcement will be authorized to *approve* posts from non-members (who are everyone). Anyone on the school staff can post (but still, keep the address private, only distribute it to those who need to know!). The posts are held for moderation and are sent to the people who can approve, and they have to click on the approval link and approve the post before it gets distributed. Test this system with the people who will use it, so that they understand what happens if they are the first one to click on the approval link, and what happens if someone else is first (no messages left to approve). Also, make sure they can remember the password for moderating the private email list - the whole thing grinds to a halt if none of them can remember their password at 4 am when they try to send a snowday announcement and it remains stuck in the distribution list and never gets out and posted. The usual system people use to remember an infrequently used password (of having a password on a note by the computer in the office) doesn't work at 4 am when
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 7:15 AM, Roland Perry li...@internetpolicyagency.com wrote: In article 4a50acb7.6070...@airwire.ie, Martin List-Petersen mar...@airwire.ie writes Calling it a lame web 2.0 is pretty much off, when it's actually used for something sensible. I seem to be trying to find the middle ground between members of the public who think The Internet isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me in college 20 years ago and those who say Web 2.0 isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me in college 5 years ago. Shouldn't we at least be giving it the benefit of the doubt? Well, I'm no social media expert, and I don't spend a whole lot of time on any of the social networking sites (I particularly dislike Facebook, actually). (And yet, I'm probably about as qualified for the SME title as 90% of those who claim to be...) However, I was a student fairly recently, and so maybe my perspective will hold some value. I really like the Posterous+Twitter+Facebook+etc. combo. To manage the Fb side, you could probably tap a trusted student to make the School an Fb page. A lot of the students will check there. Parents will probably check the Posterous or Twitter pages. Some of the more tech-savvy students and parents will sign up for Twitter and get SMS notifications. And then, additionally, there are plenty of ways to grab that data and copy it onto the school website as well (at least until it crumbles under the load), and you could broadcast it over a mailing list to people's email address. The idea, I think, is to deliver your message to as much of your audience as you can. By delivering your message over multiple mediums, you're making it easy for your audience to hear the message, since they can do it in the way that's most comfortable to them. And the redundancy doesn't hurt.
Soooo... (Was Re: Using twitter as an outage notification)
How do I configure my router for that? Router(config)# no ML jibber-jabber ^ % Invalid input detected at 'twitter' marker. -j -- Jamie Rishaw // .com.a...@j - reverse it. ish. [Impressive C-level Title Here], arpa / arpa labs
