In a message written on Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 12:11:54PM -0400, William Allen Simpson wrote:
Leo's remembering the old days (80s - early '90s), when we checked whois and called each others' NOCs directly. That stopped working, and we started getting front line support, who's whole purpose was to filter. Nowadays, I've often been stuck in voice prompt or voice mail hell, unable to get anybody on the phone, and cannot get any response from email, either. Ever. The big ILECs are the worst.
If you're a network operator, you probably know much better resources for getting phone numbers. That's not to say I wouldn't like to see ARIN records cleaned up, I fought that battle for a number of years. INOC DBA? Peeringdb.com? puck.nether.net/netops? I hate to say it, but if you're calling the number in Whois or on the front off www.foo.com then perhaps frontline support is exactly who you should be talking to about these issues. The entire purpose of any support organization is to filter to the appropriate folks. The more clue you show in directing your query, the more clue you'll get in response. Also, it can help if you follow the relationships. Consider two "regional" networks and two "international backbone providers", so you have a network path like: R1----ISP1----ISP2----R2 I understand we'd all like it to work that if R1 needs to reach R2 they call them directly. However sometimes calling ISP1 and making them get involved allows them to get the attention of ISP2, and finally them to get R2 to do something. I can't think of a time I wasn't able to get ahold of the right folks when I needed to do so, using publically available information. But then I don't bother people about a few spams, or 1Mbps "DDOS's", remain calm when I call, provide lots of information, and have a realistic expectation of how quickly they might be able to respond. Having answered abuse phones off and on for many years I can tell you that's the exception, not the rule. More common is to get someone calling to scream at you for 15 minutes about how you're destroying his livelyhood only to figure out that his box was misconfigured. Funny how you never even get an "I'm sorry" when that happens. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/