Musings, Information and Opinions on E911, NG911 and beyond
You may have heard that there was a pretty substantial outage in Amazon AWS Cloud services November 25, 2020. The summary of what happened can be found at: https://aws.amazon.com/message/11201/ and is emblematic of how a simple maintenance action can lead to layer upon layer of unanticipated effects. Amazon is an amazing company, the AWS service …
Continue reading “Cascading failures, the downside of “Eat your own dogfood””
There is a new vulnerability in a common piece of enterprise networking, from the industry leader in the class of device called a “load balancer” that is particularly nasty: https://www.wired.com/story/f5-big-ip-networking-vulnerability/ The vendor is a well known, generally well respected supplier, and reacted quickly and effectively to the exploit, producing a patch quickly and correctly advising …
Continue reading “Security Vulnerabilities: Discover, React, Deploy – in 72 Hours”
So I needed to create a simple database backend with an api for a mobile app. It’s a small, simple database, with several classical join operations. Perfect for MySQL. It has an unusual characteristic: it’s only going to be used once or twice a month for a few days. It’s a problem management system for …
Continue reading “Trials and Tribulations with serverless in AWS”
I often hear complaints that in many PSAPs, there isn’t any way to get enough redundancy of network connections to get a reliable ESInet. Often these are rural PSAPs, or larger ones where network diversity wasn’t even considered when siting the facility. I’m here to tell you that I think you CAN get a fair …
Continue reading “Getting enough network redundancy at all PSAPs in NG9-1-1”
The FCC has released its report on the December 27, 2018 outage at CenturyLink that affected 9-1-1 service. The problem was a packet storm in a management network that controlled a major part of CL’s optical network. The packets kept multiplying and congesting the system, and since it was in the management network, it was …
One of the bigger architectural decisions when designing an #NG9-1-1 implementation is where the NGCS (central services) go, such as the ECRF, LVF, ESRP and bridge. I’ve been consulting on state-wide NG9-1-1 deployments, and have seen proposals from most of the vendors in the space. I see the following choices: State-specific nodes located in state, …
I will be linking to this post from most of my other posts about #E911 and #NG911. It’s meant to be an introduction to who I am, and where I’m coming from. I’ve been around a while. I learned to code in 1965, and I haven’t stopped yet, although I consider myself a lousy coder. …
See my post here to learn more about me and my point of view. As of this writing, CenturyLink (CL) has recently restored service from a massive outage of their IP network, which affected wireless #E911 service in many areas. We don’t know what happened yet. The FCC is investigating, and we will get a …
Continue reading “Lessons Learned – CenturyLink 911 Outage from August 2018”