Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, Sean Donelan wrote:
Isn't this true of everything (bad source addresses, worms, abuse, etc). Does hiding/ignoring the problem just makes it worse because there is no incentive to fix the problem while it is still a small problem? If it isn't important enough to bother the customer, why bother to fix it?
Let's take a concrete example:
Customer gets hacked, one of their boxen starts spewing traffic with spoofed addresses. The way I understand your solution is to automatically shut their port and disrupt all their traffic, and have them call customer support to get any further.
Do you really think this is a good solution?
I don't see any customer with a choice continuing having a relationship with me if I treat them like that. It will cost me and them too much.
So instead I just drop their spoofed traffic and if they call and say that their line is slow, I'll just say it's full and they can themselves track down the offending machine and shut it off to solve the problem.
Neither one is really all that good but both have merit - some compromises are in order. We shut them off only if it's causing serious problems. If we can mitigate the problem without shutting them off completely we will. The usual example is customers spewing spam on port 25. We block port 25 at the customers CPE and notify them as to why and how to work around the block (use webmail or submission) while they fix the problem. It's amazing how many customers are just plain OK with that and never do get around to fixing the machine - but at least they know that we blocked something for a reason. Anything you do silently tends to cause customers to decide 'you suck' and go elsewhere. Line is slow 'cause there machine is beating it to death? Just get a new provider. When the new one also sucks they either shrug and decide that's the way it is or finally fix the problem. Either way the customer is lost to you 'cause they won't come back even after they figure out it was their problem in the first place. Shutting them off causes churn, leaving problems silently in place also causes churn. The middle road mitigates damage and still manages to keep the customers happy (well.. that might be stretching it a bit...happier?). -- Mark Radabaugh Amplex mark@amplex.net 419.837.5015