After the SNMP excitement I asked if anyone had suggestions on how to architect or design a backbone network to be less suspectible to problems. It turns out the telephone industry has written a set of best practices for the Internet. Focus Group 2.A.2: Best Practices on Packet Switching. Karl Rauscher, Lucent Technologies http://www.nric.org/pubs/index.html Mr. Rauscher gave an example of the kind of information to be found there. The best practice used in the example states that critical packet network elements such as control elements, access in signaling gateways and DNS servers, should have firewall protection such as screening and filtering. One hundred percent of the respondents indicated they were implementing this best practice. Cool, who has an OC-192 firewall on their control elements? What is a control element, is that the same as a router or is that a signaling gateway?