North American Network Operators Group

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net.terrorism

  • From: Sabri Berisha
  • Date: Tue Jan 09 07:21:55 2001

Hi,

My name is Sabri. I'm just another dude involved in internetworking and I
work for a small isp in The Netherlands.

I am concerned. Concerned about people and companies who think they are in
the position to be net.gods and for political reasons destroy the free
character of the internet.

In the history of the internet, people have been trusting each other. On
the lower technical levels, great things like peering have been developed.
At the various IX'es, commercial and non-profit companies exchange
information about each others routes using BGP4 and various other routing
protocols.

In my opinion, announcing a netblock using BGP4 is making a promise to
carry traffic to a destination within that netblock. If you feel that
parts of that network are against your ethics or AUP, you should not be
announcing such a netblock. If you do so, you will make a promise which
you do not forfill.  That is not a nice thing to do in a world which is
based on trust and agreements between parties.

I was shocked to find out that one of the larger transit providers (which
the company I work for buys transit from) is actively violating the trust
it has been given by the internetworld.

Above.net is blocking a host in UUnet IP space. After finding out about
this we notified Above.net in The Netherlands and asked what it was about
and requested them to stop announcing the netblock if they would continue
to nullroute the host involved. After various contacts about this matter,
Above.net answered with the following statements (according to the
salesdroid it came from Paul Vixie himself):

> 194.178.232.55/32. --> this tester is part of a /16 belonging to
> uunet, and sends traffic which is in violation of our AUG.  we
> complained to uunet without any effect.  if we have blocked access
> from this /32 to our backbone, we are within our rights.

After this mail, we contacted Above.net again. They basically told us it
was for our own protection because that traffic from that host does not
comply to their AUP. We specifically told them we really don't mind them
blackholing that host but *announcing* a route for it. So far no response.

More information and logs on http://www.bit.nl/~sabri/above/

-- 
/*  Sabri Berisha
 *
 *  CCNA, BOFH, Systems admin Linux/FreeBSD
 */