On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, Leo Bicknell wrote:
What you're missing in my argument is that it doesn't matter. I have no idea who Eddy Marin is, nor do I care. Blocking wcg's corporate mail servers is not the solution. Sure, it may get someone's attention at wcg, but it may also harm a lot of "innocent" communications, sales talking to clients, other wiltel customers requesting support, heck, the secretary ordering lunch to be delivered.
But it's ok when AboveNet does it?...or actually does much worse by secretly and arbitrarily blackholing various networks at will, while advertising connectivity to those networks to their BGP customers and peers? This means anyone connected to AboveNet will be unable to reach those blackholed victims if the routes to those destinations propogated by AboveNet appear to be their "best route" to the affected networks. This breaks connectivity even though we have multiple other transit providers. This is much worse than a Spamhaus (or any other DNSBL) listing since anyone using such services does so by choice and can decide for themself what action to take, if any, for listed addresses. With AboveNet blackhole routing, our only option, once we're aware of the problem, is to make changes to our routing policy and force traffic away from AboveNet and onto one of our other transit providers. We only find out about such AboveNet blackhole routes when we open a ticket with AboveNet to ask why your network is broken when our customers complain of networks they can't reach when using our service (i.e. banks that can't reach their staff training web sites), but they can reach from other service providers, so they inform us that our network is broken. Who's attention is AboveNet trying to get? Anyone taking BGP routes from AboveNet, or worse yet, single homed to AboveNet, ought to be aware of this policy. At the very least, you should make sure whoever does your BGP is aware of it and knows how to reroute traffic when the "best route" doesn't actually work. You also might bring it up with your sales person when it's time to renew. The central image on www.above.net boasts of "Unconstrained Information Exchange". I wish that were true. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis *jlewis@lewis.org*| I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________