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Re: Fw: Administrivia: ORBS

  • From: Damon M. Conway
  • Date: Sat Jan 15 15:14:50 2000

 Greg A. Woods wrote:
>
>[ On Friday, January 14, 2000 at 21:20:19 (-0800), Paul A Vixie wrote: ]
>> Subject: Re: Fw: Administrivia: ORBS 
>> Abovenet seems to be exercising their property rights over their own network.
>> According to reports, they asked ORBS to stop running their SMTP port scanner
>> on Abovenet's address space, and ORBS refused.  Abovenet's only recourse was
>> to block access to ORBS' probe host.  And so, "I can't say as I blame them."
>
>Ummm....  Something's wrong with that logic I think.

there's nothing wrong with that logic.  i used to work for a little company
here in Austin called MIDS.  as sys/net admin on that network i fielded
several requests from other networks to stop sending icmp echo requests to
their network.  we did this in an attempt to chart the "performance" of the
Internet.  you can argue about the validity of those measurements all you
want.  however, when we recieved a request to stop, we stopped.  we then
contacted the person who requested the halt, and explained to them what we
were doing.  if they understood and wished to continue to participate, we
put them back in our lists.  if they didn't want to participate, i thanked
them and put them in a list of networks not to measure.  it's called being
a responsible netizen.  it's just that simple.  i would bet that if ORBS
had taken a similar measure they could have worked out something with
Abovenet.  instead ORBS behaved in an "inappropriate" manner, and Abovenet
took steps to ensure that unauthorized probes of their network were not
allowed to reach their hosts.

damon

note: the only reason MIDS did not contact networks beforehand was because
the time and manpower required were not available.

--
Damon Conway
Black Rock City Ranger...Riding the edge of chaos
"Ana Ng and I are getting old, 
but we still haven't walked in the glow of each other's majestic presence."
   -- TMBG