If a vendor uses ping times and hops to determine closest servers, where does it ping from? Each M$ server? And then how does it tell the client or server where to redirect the traffic? If I read the original post right,
You said, "If I feel like using..(someone's) performance improving gizmo, it's my decision." The problem with this is, in the DI example, it is not your choice. I suppose if you're confortable with the idea of rogue companies trying to enhance internet traffic on their own, whether you agree with the methodology or not and giving you no choice, then that is your perogative. Marc -----Original Message----- From: Patrick W. Gilmore [mailto:patrick@ianai.net] Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 3:17 PM To: nanog@merit.edu; Quibell, Marc Subject: RE: Fwd: Re: Digital Island sponsors DoS attempt At 02:56 PM 10/26/2001 -0500, Quibell, Marc wrote: [...] the
pings came from DI. How does this determine the location of off-site servers? Is this the best way to do it and what is the total bandwidth impact on the internet?
While I agree there may be unintended consequences, even to the point of poor performance or effectively DoS'ing a site, this is not really relevant, or the province of the IETF. If I feel like using cisco's or DI's or Joe-The-Web-Guru's new wiz-bang load-balancer speeder-upper performance-improving reliability-enhancer on MY WEB PAGE, then that is MY decision. Period. And the IETF, IEEE, RFC-editor, NANOG, EFF, PTA, SPCA, or any other alphabet organization has nothing to say about it. (Assuming, of course, I am not violating standards, attacking people, etc.)
The original poster of this message stated afterwards, offline, he's now up to over 2400 pings in three hours. Add this number of pings to the number of servers and the number of clients being pinged. It grows exponentially. Do you not think that there should be some Official Standards developed to accomodate and support this?
Unfortunately, it *MAY* be that DI is violating that "assuming, of course" part above. I honestly am not sure why they would need to send 2400 pings in 3 hours. But I am also not 100% certain that sending 2400 pings is excessive or "wrong". Suppose the end users on that network asked for 500 GB of data from 100 DI customers? Honest, I do not know the answer, and I doubt most people here do either. Without knowing the circumstances on both sides of the connection, it is a bit difficult to say "You did a BAAAAAAD thing". IMHO, of course.
Marc
-- TTFN, patrick