ripe-63








        RIPE Recommendation on Operational Contacts


			D.Karrenberg

                        Version 3.0

			2 June 1992






Purpose

Since there is no managed RIPE backbone with central  opera-
tions  staff,  operational  problems  have to be solved in a
distributed manner.  For this to work network  configuration
information, network status information and operational con-
tact information must be available to  operations  staff  of
all RIPE members.  With this information operations staff of
a RIPE member can pinpoint the causes of a problem and  con-
tact  the  appropriate  operations  staff  of another member
quickly.  Without this information, locating problems  would
either take people and time or be impossible.

The purpose of this recommendation is to  give  guidance  to
the  RIPE  member  organisations  on how to exchange contact
information and network status information in a way which is
easy  to  implement  and which provides enough redundancy to
function when network connectivity is not guaranteed.   This
recommendation  only covers a simple rather informal notifi-
cation scheme.  Recommendations about formal trouble ticket-
ing systems (as under investigation of the IETF User Connec-
tivity Problems Working Group) are beyond the scope of  this
recommendation.



Operational Mailing List

A mailing list called ripe-op should  be  used  to  transmit
operational  information which is of interest to operational
staff of all RIPE members.

Normally mailing lists are  maintained  and  expanded  at  a
specific  host.   Messages intended for the list are sent to
that host from where a copy of the message is sent  to  each
member  of the list.  The ripe-op list is going to be needed
most urgently in case of operational failures.  During  such
failures  some places may be isolated. In this case the list
would not be useful if it was expanded at  only  one  place.
Therefore  the  list  will  be  expanded  locally as much as



     RIPE Recommendation on Operational Contacts (3.0)





                           - 2 -


possible in order to gain as much redundancy as possible. So
every RIPE member organisation is urged to provide an expan-
sion point.

The list of mail addresses itself will be made available  in
the  RIPE Information Server as file ripe-op-list. This list
will be installed and kept  up  to  date  at  all  expansion
points.   The  list of expansion points (hosts) will be made
available in the RIPE Information Server  as  file  ripe-op-
hosts.  This  list  will  contain one line per host with two
strings separated by white space.  The first string will  be
the  fully  qualified  domain  name  of the host. The second
string will be the mail address of  the  maintainer  of  the
local  expansion  point.  This mail address will be notified
every time ripe-op-list changes.

Changes  to  ripe-op-list  should  be  sent   to   <ripe-op-
request@ripe.net>.

All messages to the ripe-op list will  be  archived  on  the
RIPE information server. The last few messages can be viewed
by telenetting to TCP port 7473 at ftp.ripe.net.


Messages on the Operational Mailing List

Messages to ripe-op should be short information about events
affecting network operations including:


   o  link failures

   o  router failures

   o  scheduled outages

   o  degraded performance

   o  excessive traffic

   o  security relevant incidents


The messages should contain at least:



   o  a time stamp of the event concerned (not the message)

   o  a short description of the problem

   o  likely areas affected




     RIPE Recommendation on Operational Contacts (3.0)





                           - 3 -


   o  an address to  contact  for  more  info  (if  not  the
     sender)

   o  an estimated time to fix the problem

   o  actions taken to fix the problem

   o  an indication whether the message is  generated  manu-
     ally or automatically


A suggested format for messages is defined  in  Appendix  A.
Care  should  be  taken  to also report to the list when the
problem has been fixed using a second type of message.

Discussions on the ripe-op list are discouraged.








































     RIPE Recommendation on Operational Contacts (3.0)





                           - 4 -


Appendix A - Suggested Message Format


The example messages below  are  included  as  a  suggestion
only.   They  do not imply a recommendation for a (specific)
formal ticketing system.
________________________________________________________________________________
|                                                                              |
|From:     operator@ripemem.net                                                |
|To:       ripe-op@ripemem.net                                                 |
|Subject:  TICKET ripemem #4711 OPEN                                           |
|                                                                              |
|                                                                              |
|Ticket Number: 4711                  Ticket Status:   open                    |
|Ticket Type:   unscheduled           Ticket Source:   ripe-member             |
|Ticket Scope:  link                  Site/Line:       ripemem, otherripe      |
|Ticket Owner:  operator@ripemem.net  Problem Fixer:                           |
|                                                                              |
|Ticket Opened: 910516 11:40 UTC      Problem Started: 910516 11:10 UTC        |
|       Closed:                                 Ended:                         |
|                                                                              |
|                                                                              |
|Problem Description:                                                          |
|                                                                              |
|               Link between routers router1.ripemem.net and                   |
|               gateway3.otherripe.net is down.                                |
|                                                                              |
|Affected:                                                                     |
|                Traffic between ripemem and otherripe is re-routed            |
|                via nice-net. Performance may suffer due to limited bandwidth |
|                                                                              |
|Actions:                                                                      |
|                Coordinated with operator@otherripe.net.                      |
|                PTT in ripemem-land informed (ticket #1234).                  |
|                PTT in otherripe-state being informed.                        |
|                                                                              |
|Time to fix:                                                                  |
|                no estimate yet                                               |
|______________________________________________________________________________|

















     RIPE Recommendation on Operational Contacts (3.0)





                           - 5 -
_____________________________________________________________________________
|                                                                           |
|From:     operator@otherripe.net                                           |
|To:       ripe-op@otherripe.net                                            |
|Subject:  TICKET ripemem #4711 CONTINUE                                    |
|                                                                           |
|                                                                           |
|Ticket Number: 4711                  Ticket Status:   open                 |
|Ticket Type:   unscheduled           Ticket Source:   ripemem              |
|Ticket Scope:  link                  Site/Line:       ripemem, otherripe   |
|Ticket Owner:  operator@ripemem.net  Problem Fixer:                        |
|                                                                           |
|Ticket Opened: 910516 11:40 UTC      Problem Started: 910516 11:10 UTC     |
|       Closed:                                 Ended:                      |
|                                                                           |
|                                                                           |
|Actions:                                                                   |
|                PTT in otherripe-state informed at 1205 UTC (ticket #5678) |
|                                                                           |
|Time to fix:                                                               |
|                no estimate yet                                            |
|                                                                           |
|___________________________________________________________________________|
_____________________________________________________________________________
|                                                                           |
|From:     operator@ripemem.net                                             |
|To:       ripe-op@ripemem.net                                              |
|Subject:  TICKET ripemem #4711 CLOSE                                       |
|                                                                           |
|                                                                           |
|Ticket Number: 4711                  Ticket Status:   close                |
|Ticket Type:   unscheduled           Ticket Source:   ripemem              |
|Ticket Scope:  link                  Site/Line:       ripemem, otherripe   |
|Ticket Owner:  operator@ripemem.net  Problem Fixer:   operator@ripemem.net |
|                                                                           |
|Ticket Opened: 910516 11:40 UTC      Problem Started: 910516 11:10 UTC     |
|       Closed: 910516 14:30 UTC                Ended: 910516 14:25 UTC     |
|                                                                           |
|                                                                           |
|Fix:                                                                       |
|                PTTs found multiplexer problem.                            |
|                                                                           |
|___________________________________________________________________________|















     RIPE Recommendation on Operational Contacts (3.0)