Hi, My name is Sabri. I'm just another dude involved in internetworking and I work for a small isp in The Netherlands. I am concerned. Concerned about people and companies who think they are in the position to be net.gods and for political reasons destroy the free character of the internet. In the history of the internet, people have been trusting each other. On the lower technical levels, great things like peering have been developed. At the various IX'es, commercial and non-profit companies exchange information about each others routes using BGP4 and various other routing protocols. In my opinion, announcing a netblock using BGP4 is making a promise to carry traffic to a destination within that netblock. If you feel that parts of that network are against your ethics or AUP, you should not be announcing such a netblock. If you do so, you will make a promise which you do not forfill. That is not a nice thing to do in a world which is based on trust and agreements between parties. I was shocked to find out that one of the larger transit providers (which the company I work for buys transit from) is actively violating the trust it has been given by the internetworld. Above.net is blocking a host in UUnet IP space. After finding out about this we notified Above.net in The Netherlands and asked what it was about and requested them to stop announcing the netblock if they would continue to nullroute the host involved. After various contacts about this matter, Above.net answered with the following statements (according to the salesdroid it came from Paul Vixie himself):
194.178.232.55/32. --> this tester is part of a /16 belonging to uunet, and sends traffic which is in violation of our AUG. we complained to uunet without any effect. if we have blocked access from this /32 to our backbone, we are within our rights.
After this mail, we contacted Above.net again. They basically told us it was for our own protection because that traffic from that host does not comply to their AUP. We specifically told them we really don't mind them blackholing that host but *announcing* a route for it. So far no response. More information and logs on http://www.bit.nl/~sabri/above/ -- /* Sabri Berisha * * CCNA, BOFH, Systems admin Linux/FreeBSD */