On Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 04:36:56PM +0000, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
actually, working for a largish company, I'd say one aspect not recognized is the scale on their side of the problem... abuse@mci|uu|vzb gets (on a bad month) 800k messages, on a 'good' month only 400k ... how many do yahoo/google/msn get? How many do their role accounts get for hostmaster/postmaster/routing/peering ?? Expecting that you can send an email and get a response 'quickly' is just no reasonable unless you expect just an auto-ack from their ticketting system.
The heart of this problem, like so many other problems before it, is that most people are dumber than dirt itself. When people are posting to NANOG for a contact, they're saying "hey I'm a network engineer who knows what he's talking about, looking for a way to directly contact another network engineer to quickly resolve a problem without having to stay on hold and explain the situation to 20 people who wouldn't understand it anyways for the next 4 hours". Well at least thats how it started, then everyone who reads NANOG started using the same system for their "my traceroute is broken" complaints and now we're flooded with them. The reality is that the vast vast majority of "issues" people take it upon themselves to contact a network over are non-existant, the people doing the contacting are remarkably stupid, and more often than not they're the kind of people who are going to be abusive(*) and threatening about it. I know from my own personal experience the ratio of bogus to legit calls regarding security/hacking is around 10:1 on a good day. If there was a number that anyone could call to speak to a clueful person at Yahoo, said clueful person would quit on the second day after the 500th call threatening to sue him because he's hacking a computer on port 80. Until someone invents a universally recognized system where you can call and say "Hi I'm CCIE #12345, I'm certified to know what I'm talking about and I have an actual network issue, please transfer me to someone with clue", we're going to continue to see the problem of letting the legit calls through while seperating out the calls from J. Random Crackmonkey who is sniffing the ajax. And from the customer perspective, if you don't want to sit on the phone going through the "have you tried rebooting your router" script when you call to complain that BGP on an OC48 is down, try buying from a smaller company who focuses on providing service to clueful networks and who doesn't need call screeners for its customers. (*) My all-time personal favorite (not at all work safe) is: http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras/this-man-hates-spam -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)