On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:56:27 -0700 Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> wrote:
Not sure what you mean by this, but the painful reality is that most stuff, once deployed, gets promptly forgotten about, much the same as you might ignore a wall wart power supply under your desk until it started smelling funny or stopped delivering electricity. Thus, I contend that one's routers should be configured to avoid ticking time bombs.
and i am saying that you should use a router configuration *system* that avoids ticking time bombs. no router should be neglected and unloved.
That, I think, is why he distinguished between routers run by "highly clueful people" and routers run by others. I think we all agree on your basic point; it's just that too many people aren't clueful enough to realize that they even have a problem, let alone know how to solve it. (Of course, you and I both have a background in programming languages and compilers, which is why we naturally think of router configurations as a form of assembler language that only a compiler should every emit.) --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb