Internet Info 1994 March/Internet Info CD-ROM (Walnut Creek) (March 1994).iso/inet/ietf/ucp/ucp-minutes-91nov.txt

Text File | 1993-02-17 | 11KB | 301 lines

CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_


Reported by Gene Hastings/PSC and Dan Long/BBN

Minutes of the User Connectivity Working Group (UCP)

Summary

A presentation on the UCP work-in-progress was made at the Farnet
meeting on Monday.  Useful discussion ensued and continued in the ORAD
meeting Tuesday.  The consensus was that the UCP work is important and
should be actively pursued so that initial implementations are in place
in the next 6-12 months.

Encouraged by good suggestions and the support of Farnet and ORAD, the
UCP group met twice and made good progress on these three projects:


  1. A NOC PhoneBook

       o Reviewed collection efforts to date
       o NEARnet database forms-based entry being used
       o 22 NOCs have registered so far
       o Suggested new fields and formats (now incorporated in database)
       o Will advertize to wider audience soon
       o Plan to distribute PhoneBook with a finger-based search tool
       o All searches will also return caution that info is for NOCs
         only

  2. Standardized Network Status Reports

       o Developed a syntax for standard email-based outage reports
       o NOCs will generate these reports which will contain info about
         current, past, or planned outages
       o These reports will be sent to a mailing list which anyone can
         subscribe to
       o People can develop their own tools for parsing and providing
         interactive access to this information
       o Ideally, end-users and NOCs could use such tools to get more
         information about connectivity problems

  3. Standardized Trouble Ticket Handoffs

       o Revised the UCP Trouble Ticket Tracking draft to allow Network
         Service Centers to limit who they are required to accept calls
         from (from last meeting)
       o Network Service Centers will hand off tickets to other Network

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    Service Centers but will stay in the loop with the reporting
    user
  o Developed a syntax for standard email-based trouble ticket
    handoffs between Network Service Centers
  o Several groups are interested in participating in trials of
    this system


For more information, join the list:  [e-mail]

DETAILED NOTES of the 11/19 meeting (first of two) by Gene Hastings


The Distributed Agenda (roughly)


  o Status
  o NSC Phonebook
    -  NISI
    -  Current
    -  Future
  o Reducing Need for Tickets
    -  Notification Schemes
    -  Database of Network Status
    -  New Working Group?
  o UCP Ticket Sharing
    -  What Information to Exchange
    -  Method/Format for Exchange
    -  Implementations

Dan Long (NEARnet) gave an overview of FARNET's interest in UCP
topics.
NSC Phonebook - as of the meeting, there were 18 entries in the
pilot NSC Phonebook.  Note was made of the parallel NISI effort to
collect similar listings for NICs.  Vikas Aggarwal (JvNC)
recommended that contact information be included in DNS TEXT
records.
The present NSC Phonebook Database is in Informix.  Dan Long
volunteered to continue to maintain it and to deploy a finger
<keyword> query agent for it.  Dale Johnson (Merit) offered a
second Informix host for it if someone else would maintain the
actual db.
Vikas volunteered to produce a DNS entry template.
Group consensus was an acknowledgement that these are interim
efforts.
Reducing the need for tickets - that is, reducing the need for
calls from users which require the opening of tickets.  This might
be secured through:

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  o Notification Schemes
  o Database of Network Status
  o End-User diagnostic tools

These are all in keeping with the idea that if users are better
informed about the state of the world, and have easier means of
learning for themselves the nature of difficulties, they will have
less need to call and talk to a person.  An example of this at a
department or campus level might be a bulletin board which lists
scheduled outages and includes explanations of what services will
be affected, along with pointers for further inquiries and help
files explaining the nature of some classes of failure
A strawman proposal was made to distribute email with a standard
format, initially based on the NEARnet trouble tickets.  Discussion
followed as to which problem this proposal was intended to solve.
Uses for standard format mail include:  ease of information
extraction when read; ease of parsing for inclusion in a database
or for triggering alarms; assurance of completeness of information
in report; and the possibility of making many reports
machine-generated.  Desired fields were felt to include:

  o ASN#
  o Net#
  o Net Name
  o Host Address/NSAP
  o Host Name
  o Affected protocol or service
  o Start/End Date & Time
  o Responsible Person or NOC
  o Ticket Cross-reference
  o Last Update
  o Reporting NOC
  o Perspective/Scope
  o EXPLANATION
  o FURTHER EXPLANATION

There is still confusion and some disagreement concerning what
things are or aren't tickets.  There was, and will continue to be,
discussion on use, control and interpretation.  For example,
whether these messages should be intelligible to, and distributed
to, end users.
Michael Patton (MIT) observed that poorly formed information
distributed to the public would generate more calls, not less.
Ittai Hershman (ANS) reported that nsr
<[e-mail]> is now carried in a PSI
newsgroup, so the mechanism for end-users to see those messages is
in place.
Further work on mail format was deferred until the meeting of the
20th.
Discussion returned to the NSC Phonebook.  New fields to add to

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listings:

  o Administrator to escalate to
  o Domain name of NOC
  o Bigger net # field (allow listing of multiple net numbers)
  o Cross references to other nets, centers
  o Bigger phone number fields (multiple numbers)
  o FAX #
  o Discussion of upper vs mixed case for org and net names.
    [there is a practical limitation of the pilot db, in that it
    will not fold case for searches.]

Questions were raised as to what limitations should be placed on
the distribution of this information, if published.  Following
objections to having internal operations numbers available to
arbitrary end-users, Ittai Hershman proposed limiting the
distribution of the information to NOCs & NSCs, with harshly-worded
boilerplate against indiscriminate release.  A quick hack to limit
availability is to include an access string in the finger query,
acting as a pseudo password; Instead of ``finger
[e-mail]'', something like ``finger
[e-mail]''.
DETAILED NOTES of the 11/20 meeting (second of two) by Dan Long
The second meeting focussed on mechanisms for handoffs of tickets
between NSC's.  We agreed that a similar format to that described
above should be used to allow handoffs to be generated and parsed
either manually or automatically.
The group brainstormed a list of fields that would be of interest:

  o Description of problem
  o Description of solution
  o Location (or Source/Destination) of problem:  AS#, Net#, Host
    Address, Service Description, etc.
  o Problem Start/End Date/Time
  o Ticket Open/Close Date/Time
  o Ticket Number (made unique by prepending a unique NSC
    identifier)
  o NSC List (list of NSCs that have handled this problem)
  o Notifications (who should be kept informed about this problem?)
  o Contact Info (who should be worked with to resolve this
    problem?)
  o Notes:  number, date/time, author, text
The group agreed that this list of items will likely need to evolve
but that we should be conservative in the addition of fields so
that the syntax remains simple and that the burden on human
operators is minimized.
There was a fair amount of discussion about notifications and
whether end-users should be notified about steps taken by NSCs
other than the originating NSC. Organizations have different


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policies about how much detail to reveal.  The consensus was that
the originating NSC can use the Notifications field to include the
user (or not) as they see fit and that other NSCs working on the
problem should honor the notifications field to report progress.
In the original paper by Matt Mathis, the idea was for the entire
ticket to be handed off to the appropriate NSC and for the new NSC
to deal with the user.  We agreed on a change whereby the
originating NSC maintains the contact with the user and keeps its
own ticket open on the problem.  It may, as the document describes,
hand the problem off to another NSC but that NSC must then report
back when it is done to the originating NSC who, in turn, will
obtain closure with the user.  The handoff will be handled much as
the original document describes.
The general format of the mail message will be:


To: trouble-ticket-handoff@destination  (the specific address for any given
 NSC is in the NSC PhoneBook)
Subject: ticket-number {handoff, update, close} note-number
(note-number is 0 on 1st handoff,
        1 on 1st note,
        ...
        N+1 on close)
And in the body of the message:
Fieldname: (contents)
   ...
...
Note: 1 Date Time Author
(note text)
...
...



Several people volunteered to begin using these formats for status
updates and ticket handoffs.  Dan Long to publish detailed writeup
of formats so people can get started.

Attendees
Vikas Aggarwal           [e-mail]
Thomas Bajzek            [e-mail]
Robert Blokzijl          [e-mail]
Jeff Erwin
Susan Estrada            [e-mail]
Farrell Gerbode          [e-mail]
John Gong                [e-mail]
Eugene Hastings          [e-mail]
Ittai Hershman           [e-mail]
Dale Johnson             [e-mail]
James Jokl               [e-mail]
Dan Jordt                [e-mail]
Walter Lazear            [e-mail]

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Daniel Long              [e-mail]
Donald Morris            [e-mail]
David O'Leary            [e-mail]
Michael Patton           [e-mail]
Marsha Perrott           [e-mail]
Joe Ragland              [e-mail]
Ron Roberts              [e-mail]
Tom Sandoski             [e-mail]
Bernhard Stockman        [e-mail]
Carol Ward               [e-mail]
Cathy Wittbrodt          [e-mail]
Paul Zawanda             [e-mail]



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