Hello, Please take personal tirades and your vulgarities, originated or not, to private email. Thanks, Alan
At 03:25 PM 10/24/96 -0400, JDF wrote:
Interesting speech from Peter Kline at NANOG today...it seems that AGIS's peering requirements are now so strict that AGIS today would not peer with AGIS of only a few months ago.
Nope. AGIS has been at the specified exchange points for well over a year, long before the trickle of peering requests turned into an ugly, swirling, threat-filled flood.
Then there's Peter's comment to Ron Burleson, Cheif Operating Officer of CAIS Internet (some of you know that CAIS had a very good relationship with Net99, which continued for a while under AGIS.) "Ron, we're going to squish you like a bug."
1. The author of this mail was not present at the conversation, which took place when this guy Burleson, who I've never heard of, cornered me in the empty lunch room outside of the NANOG meeting room.
2. This mail makes it obvious that Burleson deliberately set out to make me say something which could be reported out of context in an attempt to make AGIS look bad. It also explains why he made sure the room was empty.
3. The comment misquoted above is also horribly out of context. Let's review the actual conversation:
RB: Do you know who I am?
ME: No. Should I? Have we met before?
RB: I'm Ron Burleson, self important president of CGX Telecom [who?], which owns CAIS [oh. I thought Cable and Wireless bought an interest in CAIS, but I guess I was wrong.].
ME: OK.
RB: You didn't [blah blah blah tirade tuned out about CAIS and AGIS].
ME: OK.
RB: Why don't you return my phone calls or answer my mail?
ME: For some time now I have received much more mail and many more phone calls than I can personally answer.
RB: I'm going to fuck the AGIS network any way I can.
ME: So, you're going to fuck the AGIS network...
Here I paused to consider my responses, which could have included:
- Thank you. - Thank you very much. - Fuck you. - Fuck you very much. - I'd fuck your network back, but I don't want to catch whatever's given you those running sores. - Fuck your network and the horse it rode in on. - about a million other vulgar things I could think of.
but instead, I said:
"Then I'll squash you like a bug," which seemed to me to be a proportionate, non-vulgar, measured, I'm-the-bigger-person response to a pretty off-the-graph, vulgar, and irresponsible tirade.
Peter is doing wonders for inter-provider relations. What do y'all say that the rest of us follow the older, more friendly model, instead of trying to kill each other?
I didn't start it, and I'm not the one who made the threat. It is big Ron who apparently wants to kill me/AGIS. And I just don't stand around and take crap from people.
Sure, a lot of us are in competition. From today's speech, it seems that AGIS is is more competition than the rest of us.
Competition is either good or bad, pick one. Based on the grip CAIS has on the DC market, I'd guess CAIS was founded based on the idea that competition is good. My relationship with Bob Gibson has always been cordial.
But personally, if I were a small or mid-size provider, I'd rather buy service from somebody that I've seen to be in /friendly/ competition with their peers -- that way, once I got big enough to strike out on my own, I could stay friendly with my old provider on a peer instead of a customer level. This was the intention with the Net99 deal, back when Net99 was known as "the backbone that doesn't suck."
It sucked pretty bad in the end. Joe didn't give Dave any of the tools needed to run a decent network, and I think Dave did an amazing job with what he had.
Back to the point -- like it or not, we all rely on each other and each others' networks to make the Internet happen. We can follow the AGIS model and cut each others' throats until we really are just a bunch of autonomous systems with the occasional path between, or we can interconnect -- network, to use a more laoded term.
AGIS has cordial relationships with other majors like ANS, NETCOM, Sprint, MCI, and uu.net, as well as many others.
I think we should be a network.
(Please note that while I am speaking only for myself, CAIS's business plan is more on the friendly side.)
Then get an email account at AOL. I consider you to be speaking for CAIS.
There's a very serious issue here for CAIS, which is that a man purporting to be its president/owner/whatever acted quite irresponsibly. The way to get even with AGIS, if that's what he needs to do, is to build a bigger better network and win over our customers, not 'fuck' the AGIS network, with all the consequences that suggested action implies for our customers.
In light of Ron's comment to me, I think it would be in the best interest of AGIS's customers to email or call Mr. Ron Burleson of CAIS/CGX (email address conveniently cc'd above by JDF) and ask him how he intends to fuck AGIS (by SYN flooding or other denial of service attack, physically damaging colocates, or what). When he doesn't respond, bury his office with calls and mail, or even better, track him down at IETF or the next NANOG, get him into a corner, and demand to know why he didn't return your calls and mail.
Peter
-- Alan Hannan Not Employed Networking, Ltd. email: alan@mindvision.com. phone: 402/488-0238