On Thu, 10 Dec 2020 18:56:04 -0500, Max Harmony via NANOG said:
Programs have never done what you *want* them to do, only what you = *tell* them to do.
Amen to that - there was the time many moons ago when we launched a copy of a vendor's network monitoring system, and told it to auto-discover the network. It found all the on-campus subnets and most of the machines, and didnt seem to be doing anything else, so we all headed home. Come in the next morning, and discover that our 56k leased line to Nysernet (yes, *that* many moons ago) was clogged with the monitoring system trying to do SNMP probes against a significant fraction of the Internet in the Northeast. Things apparently went particularly pear-shaped when it discovered the MIT/Boston routing swamp... And of course, we *told* it "discover the network", when we *meant* "discover the network in this one /16.". Fortunately, it didn't support "discover the network and perform security scans on machines" - but I'm sure there's at least one security-scanning package out there that makes this same whoopsie all too easy to do, 3+ decades later...