David R. Conrad wrote:
Hi,
One reason might be that clueless folk in the US that complain to APNIC or RIPE (or NANOG) directly instead of looking stuff up in the appropriate whois database ("ARIN has all the IP information, right?") and complaining to the people who can actually do something about the problem.
Keep in mind that some of these "clueless folk" may expect individually assigned CIDRs to be registered accurately, and are complaing to the registered contact for the block. If these blocks aren't registered/SWIPed appropriately, your argument is weak. As to the "people who can actually do something about the problem", generally they are the problem. Polite requests for resolution regularly fall on unhearing ears. The problem is escalating to the point where it's much more convenient to simply block an entire /16 or larger, than to attempt to contact the appropriate person, which is quite unfortunate.
Another reason might be that until very recently, sendmail shipped with relay enabled by default and very little in the way of easily understood (particularly by non-native English speakers) documentation on how to disable relaying in the shipped tarball. Not that either matters, of course. Everyone has the same access to knowledge and skills as ISPs in the US, right? Besides, it is so much more productive (or at least cathartic) to whine to a US based mailing list that targets ISPs in North America.
If you know of a more appropriate forum for such a question, I'm listening. This was indeed more a legit question (with a possibly poorly-chosen subject line) than a whining waste of space. Out of curiosity, are you advocating a certain measure of irresponsible network management based on sendmail's somewhat cryptic nature? God forbid a net manager should open a book.
If you think blocking all of Europe/Northern Africa/Former Soviet Union and Asia/Pacific helps you out (after all, the US is the only part of the Internet that matters, right?), knock yourself out. To give you a hand: APNIC allocates out of 202/7, 210/7, and 61/8 (althought we haven't allocated anything out of 211/8 to date) -- should make filters easy.
You've entirely misinterpreted my post. If it appeared as nothing more than an unsubstantiated rant, please accept my apology. Brian -- --=Please direct technical support questions to support@meganet.net =-- ======================================================================= Brian Wallingford voice: 508.646.0030 Network Operations Manager email: brian@meganet.net MEGANET COMMUNICATIONS, TCIX, Inc. http://www.meganet.net =======================================================================