On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 17:15:23 -0400 "Howard C. Berkowitz" <hcb@gettcomm.com> wrote:
At 5:04 PM -0400 10/20/03, Richard Welty wrote:
may i suggest another operational issue then?
how does verisign plan to identify and notify all affected parties when changes are proposed?
for example, in the current case, how do they plan to identify every party running postfix and inform them that they need to upgrade their MTA?
this seems non-trivial to me.
Purely from an operational standpoint, it would be a mark of efficiency to have a central repository of who is running what. That would mean that notifications would only be sent to those that need them, and also would provide objective information to determine how many organizations would be affected by a change. In other words, something that actually would be useful.
i maintain that building this list is phenomenonally difficult. the set of people running mail servers is substantially larger than the set of people who read nanog, run backbones, run regional ISPs, etc., etc. i don't disagree that it would be useful, but how are you going to build it without actively probing mail servers across the internet? and it can't possibly ever be complete, with PIX firewalls obscuring SMTP banners and sysadmins depending on security-by-obscurity who change their banners to elminate MTA identification. richard -- Richard Welty rwelty@averillpark.net Averill Park Networking 518-573-7592 Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security