On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 08:16:14PM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 09:42:54 -0500, Jared Mauch <jared@puck.nether.net> wrote:
No, cisco providing a time sensitive feature like this implies free upgrades to repair this critical defect. Just like they give out free software to people without contracts when they have a major security vulnerability.
Seems like this falls in the same category to me.
Analogies suck, but look at (for example) Norton AntiVirus. You pay for a year of virus definition updates. Then when the year runs out,
Yes, but this is protection of an end-host/end-node, not a portion of the global internet infrastructure. Bad features like this and bad behaviour are serious issues when they cause these ripple effects. It's flat-out defective software to me. This hurts Ciscos reputation that they are causing pockets of the internet to not work. Next subnets to get allocated will increase the size of those pockets and so on. Then the internet will become less reliable as an end-to-end transport medium, hurting *everyone*. At minimum, cisco should be offering free software updates to people who have the older releases through something simple like a updated maint release of software (same ver they have running but with *CORRECT* filters), but doing the minimum isn't always the best thing as most of us know. Providing a reliable mechanisim for this to happen is important, and possibly something that Cisco could productize and sell a for-fee monthly subscription for (a bgp feed or somesuch like what Team CYMRU provides is an example) but there are those (Hi Rob & Co.) doing it for free already, so the key is getting the blackholes minimized that exist today. If there is software that I can download from CCO that hasn't been deferred that has these old filters in it, Cisco is being a poor net.citizen IMHO. I'm not saying this to trash cisco, many people there know that, but the important thing is insuring that the global internet isn't further harmed, and as more allocations are done the harm becomes greater and it hurts every single person in this industry, providers and vendors alike. - Jared -- Jared Mauch | pgp key available via finger from jared@puck.nether.net clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.