[AusNOG] Primus BGP support

[Sean K. Finn]

For AAPT,

I'm pretty sure that for standard BGP changes, i.e. through the AAPT Customer portal, A human at AAPT makes the changes, then the BGP changes get rolled out at midnight / 1am ish.

I just wish everyone would have a sinkhole community for /32's so that we have some form of control ourselves without having to bug the NOC.

I've found both UECOMM and OPTUS have first level techs that you need to get through, but BGP admins are never far away 24x7.

But for Primus, I have no idea, as I haven't dealt with them.

-S

From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Campbell, Alex
Sent: Sunday, 2 November 2008 4:40 PM
To: skeeve at skeeve.org; ausnog at ausnog.net
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Primus BGP support

Thanks for the reply Skeeve.

I agree it's not reasonable to expect the NOClings to be able to troubleshoot BGP issues, but they need to be able to recognise these issues and know where/how to escalate them to someone who can.

18 hours since we first reported the problem and I still haven't been able to get anyone from Primus to fix this issue.  Even AAPT would have sorted this by now.  I've got on to our account manager but this doesn't seem to be helping.

Does anyone have a clueful contact at Primus who might be able to help tonight?  It appears the problems are configuration issues at their end so it is going to need someone who has enable on their routers.

Cheers,

Alex


From: Skeeve Stevens [mailto:skeeve at skeeve.org]
Sent: Sunday, 2 November 2008 1:54 AM
To: Campbell, Alex; ausnog at ausnog.net
Subject: RE: [AusNOG] Primus BGP support

Their response is certainly not reasonable.... But you will find it the case a lot of the time.

I've had BGP issues with several carriers on the weekends and late at night, and it has always been a nightmare getting them to escalate to someone who has a clue with BGP to look at the issues.... Most of the time the 'NOC' staff don't even know what BGP is much less able to fix it.

It is probably too much to expect the people answering the phones to be know BGP, but they should understand the concepts of their network, and they should be able to escalate the ticket to someone who actually knows what to do - or who to call.  I find that 'hyping' the outage in these cases helps... tell them it is a critical outage involving some large number, or important end customer or some such...  works most of the time.  When that fails I ask for their escalation contacts and start calling account managers mobiles and other people I can annoy who know how to else to annoy.

Does your contract talk about their SLA's?  I find that most SLA's are severely lacking and rarely detail their NOC's response and actions.

If the sales guy said that then there has been a breach of verbal contract - but you'd have fun fighting that.  Go up the line.... Not that it helps sometimes... try talking to Soul... they're TPG's bitch now and barely have any ability to get things done with their upstream network.  Last BGP issue I had with Soul took a huge effort by the Soul people to get the TPG phone monkey to even wake up the on-call engineer - and that took hours.  Soul sales guys have been nice, but in the end, it's a signed deal and they don't really care that much - but Soul has been like that for a while.... I think they sold theirs......  a long time ago ;-)

With Primus... I'd pressure them... raise it as an outage... if you aren't getting the right feed or something like that, then I would consider it an outage, as these kinds of things can have cost implications as well as cause degraded services.  Demand they escalate - get as high as you can and anyone who won't help you, escalate again if possible and remind them they are in breach of their support agreements... usually works.  Then talk to the sales people and get the situation fixed if you can... otherwise, buy elsewhere and let everyone know how you were treated.  If Soul only knew how many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars of revenue and flow on business they have lost because of their extremely slack technical and sales support.

...Skeeve


--
Skeeve Stevens, CEO
eintellego Pty Ltd - The Networking Specialists
skeeve at eintellego.net<mailto:skeeve at eintellego.net> / www.eintellego.net<http://www.eintellego.net>
Phone: (+61) 1300 753 383, Fax: (+612) 8572 9954
Cell +61 (0)414 753 383 / skype://skeeve
--
NOC, NOC, who's there?



From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Campbell, Alex
Sent: Saturday, 1 November 2008 11:39 PM
To: ausnog at ausnog.net
Subject: [AusNOG] Primus BGP support

Hi all,

We have recently started buying transit from Primus in their Melbourne DC.  We have come across a BGP issue with their service and their NOC is telling us that they only do BGP support 9am-5pm Monday-Friday.  I guess they figure that BGP issues are very friendly and usually only arise during business hours.

This is especially frustrating since I actually asked their business development manager during the sales process "does Primus have a 24x7 NOC we can contact, staffed by engineers capable of troubleshooting BGP issues etc" and he said yes.

Has anyone else had similar experiences with Primus?  Does this seem reasonable?

Cheers,

Alex
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