I think my previous post may have touched on a more global issue. Given the number of such posts I have seen over time, and, my experiences trying to report problems to other ISPs in the past, it seems to me that a high percentage of ISPs, especially the larger ones, simply don't allow for the possibility of a non-customer needing to report a problem with the ability to reach one of their customers. I'm curious how people feel about this. As I see it, there are a number of possible responses: 1. Don't help the person at all. Tell them to contact the customer they are trying to reach and have the customer report the problem. This seems, by far, to be the most popular approach in my experience, but, it makes for a very frustrating experience to the person reporting the problem. 2. Accept any trouble report and attempt to resolve it or determine that it is outside of your network. This approach is the least frustrating to the end user, but, probably creates a resource allocation and cost problem. 3. Have a procedure for triage which allows a quick determination if the problem appears to be within your network. Using that procedure, reject problems which appear to be outside of your network while accepting problems that appear to be within your network. It seems to me that option 3 probably poses the best cost/benefit tradeoff, but, it is the approach least taken from my observations. So, I figured I'd try and start a discussion on the topic and see what people thought. Feel free to comment on list or directly to me (I'll summarize), but, if you want to tell me I'm off-topic or whatever, please complain directly to me without bothering the rest of the people on the list. I believe that this is an operational issue within scope of Nanog, but, I can see the argument that it's a business practices question instead. Owen