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RE: Fwd: Re: Digital Island sponsors DoS attempt

  • From: Patrick W. Gilmore
  • Date: Fri Oct 26 16:26:02 2001


At 02:56 PM 10/26/2001 -0500, Quibell, Marc wrote:

[...]

>If a vendor uses ping times and hops to determine closest servers, where
>does it ping from? Each M$ server? And then how does it tell the client or
>server where to redirect the traffic? If I read the original post right, the
>pings came from DI. How does this determine the location of off-site
>servers? Is this the best way to do it and what is the total bandwidth
>impact on the internet?

While I agree there may be unintended consequences, even to the point of poor performance or effectively DoS'ing a site, this is not really relevant, or the province of the IETF. If I feel like using cisco's or DI's or Joe-The-Web-Guru's new wiz-bang load-balancer speeder-upper performance-improving reliability-enhancer on MY WEB PAGE, then that is MY decision.

Period.

And the IETF, IEEE, RFC-editor, NANOG, EFF, PTA, SPCA, or any other alphabet organization has nothing to say about it. (Assuming, of course, I am not violating standards, attacking people, etc.)


>The original poster of this message stated afterwards, offline, he's now up
>to over 2400 pings in three hours. Add this number of pings to the number of
>servers and the number of clients being pinged. It grows exponentially. Do
>you not think that there should be some Official Standards developed to
>accomodate and support this?

Unfortunately, it *MAY* be that DI is violating that "assuming, of course" part above. I honestly am not sure why they would need to send 2400 pings in 3 hours. But I am also not 100% certain that sending 2400 pings is excessive or "wrong". Suppose the end users on that network asked for 500 GB of data from 100 DI customers?

Honest, I do not know the answer, and I doubt most people here do either. Without knowing the circumstances on both sides of the connection, it is a bit difficult to say "You did a BAAAAAAD thing". IMHO, of course.


>Marc

--
TTFN,
patrick