On Jan 13, 2009, at 1:27 PM, Adrian Chadd wrote:
On Tue, Jan 13, 2009, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
How can anyone seriously argue the ASN owner is somehow wrong and keep a straight face? How can anyone else who actually runs a network not see that as ridiculous?
Speaking purely as an outsider who hasn't had to pull such jack moves with his tiny corner of the world these days, I've frequently seen people pull exactly these jack moves for Traffic Engineering.
So either they're not talking and wish to remain nameless, or they're talking and being hypocritical. But they do exist, and I'm pretty sure they see it as another way of "hacking" the routing system to achieve goals the original implementors didn't explicitly define, but have operational relevance today.
But they're out there, injecting routes to peers to control traffic. I remember the first time I saw it and said "uhm wtf?" followed by "evil but clever." Much like other BGP tricks. :)
The idea that you can do something and get away with it sometimes makes it OK all the time is erroneous. Extreme example: Sprint probably wouldn't post to NANOG or even complain if a little network announced one of their prefixes. Does that make it OK for any network to announce anyone else's prefix? Obviously not. The fact is someone -did- notice, and instead of saying "I'm sorry, I won't do it again", Randy just said "I'm a good guy, doing an experiment" and implied it could not possibly be wrong. Worse, others actually berated the ASN owner for spending time & effort on the issue. If you use my ASN for an experiment or anything else without permission, do not act surprised when I notice. And certainly do not try to act like it is just no big deal. Use your own autonomous system numbers if you want it to be "no big deal". -- TTFN, patrick