COOK: I am going to resurrect the bad advertisement thread because I have some additional knowledge of the subject that I hope will be constructive to share with the Nanog community. After Mat Petach's posts I have done some further research. The 'evil ISP' was jvnc.net also known as GES. I have known these people and their subsequent history in some considerable detail since I joined the staff of the JVNC supercomputer center in September 1987. I had a free account there (in return for my newsletter) from the summer of 1992 until midsummer of this year. From November 1994 until April 17 1996 I used it for all my email activity. In mid April of 1996 a routing problem appeared that made it unusable for me and I switched my email and base of operations to net access. One highly significant thing that has not been said is that this "evil ISP" is the one that Princeton University depends on for its connectivity to the internet. JVNCnet is (was?) one of the NSFnet regionals and has been getting inter regional connectivity money from NSF in order to use MCI to connect Princeton to the rest of the Internet. As Mat Petach wrote, this is not the first time *HE* has had trouble. It is not the first time that many other people have had trouble either. JVNC has lost quite a few major corporate connections over the last 2 or 3 years. And one day early last month Princeton University lost its internet connectivity at roughly 10 AM. It wasn't restored until roughly 6 PM the same day. Less than a week later it suffered a second multi hour outage. I believe that there is ample evidence that the folk at Princeton have to be very aware of the nature of their provider. Yet I have seen no signs that Princeton is ready to pull up its stakes. Yesterday afternoon, I called Ira Fuch's office. (Ira is VP of computing and telecom at princeton if I have his title right.) I told his secretary my concerns indicating I was contemplating going public with them shortly and saying that I'd like to communicate with Ira to get his take on the matter. I called up today at 3:30 pm EST and was told that Ira had no comment on my call nor on the email from this thread that I sent him. I have also called Sergio Heker, the GES CEO and asked his secretary to ask him to call me.... Leaving with her a summary of the reasons for my call. An hour later I received a call from an old acquaintance who happened to be visiting Sergio who apparently didn't feel up to calling me. We talked for an hour and as a result of that conversation I see no reason to change my assessment. An assessment which also has as part of its foundation a continuous input of email messages from various sources describing developments there over the past 6 months. On September 28 matthew petach wrote: I'm going to ask the rest of the NANOG community for their thoughts/opinions on a problem that's been plaguing us periodically that we haven't been able to find a satisfactory solution for yet. There's an ISP back on the East Coast that has been periodically advertising more specific routes for /24's out of our CIDR blocks and black-holing the traffic within their network. We've called all the listed numbers for their technical, admin, billing, and any other contacts we can find, and haven't been able to reach a human; we've left messages of various levels of nastyness, from very sugary on up to vaguely threatening. In every case, including the current one, it's been more than 24 hours, and they still haven't made any response to the problem; in fact, I just got paged by our NOC early this morning informing me they've stolen another one of our /24's. COOK: Matthew tends to assume in his remarks that the "evil ISP" knew what it was doing when it 'stole' his routing announcements. I have evidence that says that is probably not true. In mid April of this year when I would use the 56 kbs connection from my house to log into net access and telnet from there to tigger.jvnc.net to read email, the response from tigger slowed to about 300 baud and I would see several periods an hour where for up to 3 minutes I'd get no echo to my screen of what I was trying to type or read. Traceroutes showed my RETURN traffic was coming by way of the CIX. My connection had become unusable. I did a lot of frantic inquiry and found out that the placement of an AS path filter on the JVNC golden gate router would solve my problem. Calling their NOC, I asked for the filter to be installed and was told that only the net manager could approve such a request. Making multiple calls on April 17 I was told that my request was "under consideration." I spoke that evening to several recent employees and was told that it would probably stay under consideration until hell froze over because there was no one who wanted to touch the routing configs made by a now ex- employee during the transition to MCI in the May- June 1995 time period. Why, because there was no one there who had the knowledge to put things back together if anything broke. Consequently I suspect that the bad routing advertisements may result not from any purposeful action but rather from ignorance. On the basis of further investigation I have also ascertained that staffing has become really stretched and another possibility for the non response to complaints is that the voice mail and email may never have gotten through. Staff turnover at GES between the summer of 92 and 93 was 100%. I have had recent estimates that the current turnover rate may be close to 100% every 6 months. The history of the privatization and spin off of GES from Princeton is in itself an interesting story. One with which I am VERY familiar having been informed of a number of events in 1992 as they were happening and talking directly with people involved on both sides of the story. Unfortunately since that history is now more than 4 years old, none of my sources are willing to go on record and I doubt that I'll be doing any write up of it. Still the situation is that GES (JVNC) is suffering from enormous problems and has been suffering for quite a while. These problems are well known to industry insiders but much less well known to the Nanog community at large. Without clear knowledge of the situation at GES that has been causing these experiences for members of the network community, they are likely to be repeated again and again. With a clearer view of the situation, those involved may be able to decide on the most rational courses of action to take. ************************************************************************ The COOK Report on Internet For subsc. pricing & more than 431 Greenway Ave, Ewing, NJ 08618 USA ten megabytes of free material (609) 882-2572 (phone & fax) visit http://pobox.com/cook/ Internet: cook@cookreport.com For case study of MercerNet & TIIAP induced harm to local community http://pobox.com/cook/mercernet.html ************************************************************************