The only exception I took with this morning's exercise is that had I known that Mr. Bush was doing legitimate testing I would have allocated my time differently. I would consider this analogous to a customer testing their home alarm system and not letting the alarm company know about the test. The alarm company is going to investigate and I would hope even attempt to call the customer. Upon not being able to reach the customer they decide to err on the side of caution and dispatch someone to investigate. As Mr. Bush said, tools can be used for good or bad. If someone was using my AS to hijack IP space that belonged someone else, I would want to know about it. Would that not be akin to using a stolen identity to commit a crime? Mr. Bush - I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here. (Un)fortunately, you have given a lot of us something to discuss today. ;) - Michienne Dixon Network Administrator liNKCity 312 Armour Rd. North Kansas City, MO 64116 www.linkcity.org (816) 412-7990 -----Original Message----- From: Joe Abley [mailto:jabley@hopcount.ca] Sent: Monday, January 12, 2009 3:52 PM To: Patrick W. Gilmore Cc: NANOG list Subject: Re: Anyone notice strange announcements for 174.128.31.0/24 On 2009-01-12, at 16:16, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
People have been doing it forever. However, it has been considered sketchy at best.
This all seems highly subjective. Considered that way by some, sure (including you, it seems). In my experience prepending someone else's AS to a prefix has only been useful operationally only as a short-term, emergency measure (e.g. when trying to avoid a black-hole between two remote ASes, neither of whom shows any signs of fixing the problem). Randy's application, and Lorenzo's before him also seem like short- term applications designed to explore answering operational questions. Just because something is generally not used, or even if it's only worth using in an emergency, doesn't make it "sketchy". Most knee-jerk reactions to AS_PATH manipulation sound to me like fear of the unusual. Joe