Internet Downtime Reports?

Sandman asks: "Hi Slashdotters, I'm looking for a website or mailing list that has frequent updates on what's down and where online. Something like: The 155mb link between NY and Amsterdam is down, all traffic using 45mb link.. should be fixed in 4 hours. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. " This sounds something like an Internet Traffic Report. Although I doubt the existance of such a resource, what tools would one need to set up something like this on their own?

The best resource for outage informaion

[_ivan]

The best resource for outage information is to
subscribe to the inet-access mailing list [1] and
read the reports from Sean Donelan, resident
outage guru.

[1] You can subscribe to the (_very_ high volume)
inet-access mailing list by sending 'subscribe'
n the body of a message to
'[e-mail]'. Sorry, but this
list is (deliberately) not archived online.

ivan

Some ISPs do them.

[yorkie]

At a previous employee, we initially used Pipex as our ISP, and they had a mailing list of all site admins to which reports of this nature were sent. I believe that it covered problems outside of Pipex's own jurisdiction, but mainly affecting the UK. I recall receiving many outage notifications, and a few security issues with well used pieces of software.

However one prat at my employer began to hold too much power, and changed our ISP to another cheaper one, one that would not even inform us that they had shut down their news-server permanently.

Internet Traffic Report

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried http://www.internettrafficreport.com/ ?

A couple of good stats sites

[Swampfox]

For North American sites, a good synopsis of the big guys is at

http://www.netstat.net/stats.shtml [netstat.net]

Another interesting site is the Internet Weather Report. While it's got a tendency to produce some very large images, and it's a little hard to navigate, there are some really cool visual images of the Internet on there.

It's at http://www.internetweather.com [internetweather.com].

-- Ryan Waldron

Re:A couple of good stats sites

[Swampfox]

Ha! First reply to my own message! Woo woo! Ahem. Sorry, got carried away there.

While it's not a web page, the NANOG mailing list (North American Network Operators Group or some such) at merit.edu gets a bunch of postings like this, close to when they happen, and mostly (it appears) from Sean Donelan at DRA in St. Louis. Dunno why, but he is very good about posting exactlythe sort of things you're asking about. The big drawbacks are that:

• It's a mailing list, not a web page, and
• It can be a chatty mailing list sometimes, particularly if the other operational info doesn't interest you so much.

But it's exactly the sort of thing you asked for, so I thought I'd mention it. You can subscribe by sending the standard "subscribe nanog" to [e-mail].

-- Ryan Waldron

Re:Internet Traffic Report

[bugg]

why'd that get moderated down? its a good site.

uptime robot

[dallen]

No, this isn't precisely what you were asking, but I think it's relevent:

Phil Greenspun and Jin Choi wrote a server uptime monitoring tcl script which queries (your|my|any) web-server every 15 minutes and sends an email if the server seems to be down.

[arsdigita.com]
http://uptime.arsdigita.com/uptime/

Just sign up with an email address and a URL, and you're good to go.

The tcl code is free and open-source, although he says, "The software is pretty simple. The hard part is keeping a relational database up and running 7 days/week, 24 hours/day." It's basically a live demo for Greenspun's book on databases, which uses AOL's server for some reason. It makes a cool live demo, anyway.

I was thinking recently that this service hosted redundently on 5 or 10 sites on different routes across the country (world?) could make a useful service, a personalized "internet weather report" for the total cost of keeping 5 to 10 servers up and running. I can't imagine they would use much bandwidth.

I know of a few companies that will monitor your network for $50/mo. but they do not tell you what networks are slow reaching your site, so far as I know.