joelja@uoregon.edu (Joel Jaeggli) writes:
Even in an enterprise it's really hard to justify the expenditure that a rapid response to a host security problem involves. For an isp which is not likely to be in the position to recover the cost of being reactive let alone pro-active I can't imagine how they would possibly support desktop issues like this.
and yet, when i consider my nontechnical friends with their DSL and cablemodem connections, i know that if they get hit by an exploding DLL, their ISP is one of the likely places they will place a call. and then they'll carefully nav their way through what they call "voice mail hell" until they can talk to a "live operator", no matter how complex that is, no matter how many steps, and no matter how much musak-on-hold they'll have to listen to. the perfect storm is a million extra customers calling over the course of a week just to explain that they have "exploding DLL symptoms" and listen to a "live operator" tell them that this isn't a network problem and they should contact the dealer where they bought their computer, which is likely CostCo. assuming that this takes less than 60 seconds per affected customer, it's still a nasty unbudgeted expense and as a secondary burn it will make real network problems harder to report. -- ISC Training! October 16-20, 2006, in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering topics from DNS to DHCP. Email training@isc.org. -- Paul Vixie