On Thursday, March 7, 2002, at 04:37 , Sean Donelan wrote:
My comment was originally prompted by the meeting minutes which reported on the survey data showing that 100% of carriers are implementing firewalls in their gateways. The 100% is what caught my eye. As the topic comes up in various places, large ISPs repeatedly say they are unable to implement filters or packet screening on their high-speed links such as at peering points.
How recently are ISPs repeatedly saying this? Packet filtering on high-speed optical interfaces has been possible for some time, depending on your router vendor, for some value of "packet filtering". I could understand it if the issue of how to manage packet filter definitions on routers as the network changes was a problem. But if I would be slightly surprised if there was still a universal voice saying "we absolutely cannot filter packets at the edge, because the vendors won't let us". To meet the requirements of what I understood the original quoted fragment to be saying, it's perhaps not necessary to packet filter at the edge, anyway. You can apply a firewall to just the loopback interface of a junos box and arguably consider your control element firewalled. Joe