Welcome to the Jungerl!

[Chandrashekhar Mullaparthi]

Some people have got the impression that I said Ericsson SSF designers are
sloppy - I neither said nor implied that. Most of our core network is
Ericsson and it does perform very well.

My point was that these things can happen even in the telecoms world, albeit
very rarely. Not necessarily because the people doing this are sloppy, but
probably because of the pressure to deliver something.

cheers
Chandru

-----Original Message-----
From: Chandrashekhar Mullaparthi
[mailto:Chandrashekhar.Mullaparthi@REDACTED]
Sent: 26 February 2003 08:15
To: 'Miguel Barreiro Paz'; Sean Hinde
Cc: erlang-questions@REDACTED
Subject: RE: Welcome to the Jungerl!


A guy who used to work designing the Ericsson SSF blocks works with us now.
He told us that sometimes patches are not really tested, if they are "simple
enough" :-) A desk check is done and off it goes to be tried on a live
network... I'm not saying that's what happened here but that tendency which
is so prevalent in the datacomms world is also prevalent in the telcoms
world - but thankfully on a much much smaller scale.

-----Original Message-----
From: Miguel Barreiro Paz [mailto:enano@REDACTED]
Sent: 25 February 2003 18:55
To: Sean Hinde
Cc: erlang-questions@REDACTED
Subject: RE: Welcome to the Jungerl!



(...)
> Well so do I, sorta, as well, and this is where my personality starts to
> split apart.. My natural instinct is towards the chaos model, but the
> manager in me knows what a thin line we tread when we deploy these 2 week
> creations into our GSM network that millions of customers rely on.
>
> All that it would take is one major service outage at the wrong time for
> folks to start asking difficult questions (and we do seem to be generating
a
> few places who would be happy to see us shut down along the way).

After the Airtel Vodafone outage last thursday[1], we have to be a bit
careful here talking about Erlang as "heavy-duty, used by Ericsson to
build switching control systems..." and the like, or risk angry sarcasm.
Even if it was not Ericsson's fault at all (which I don't know) and Erlang
was not used in the system at all (which I don't know, either).

[1] A software problem during a software upgrade in an Ericsson switch at
the Vodafone backbone took down the entire Vodafone network in Spain (8.7
million customers). No more details are publicly known.



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