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Re: Six PCs caused BigPond problems

  • From: Patrick W Gilmore
  • Date: Fri Apr 15 01:45:39 2005

On Apr 15, 2005, at 1:38 AM, Sean Donelan wrote:

On Fri, 15 Apr 2005, Patrick W Gilmore wrote:
Well configured laptops will not put that much pressure on the roots.
A single misconfigured / broken recursive name server puts a lot more
pressure on the roots than lots of well-configured laptops.

I guess one could argue that the chance of misconfiguration go up as
the number of systems goes up.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/0,2000061744,39188319,00.htm

Disconnecting six compromised personal computers on Tuesday evening eased
the difficulties caused by bogus requests which clogged BigPond's domain
name servers (DNS), slowing customer e-mail and Web site access, Telstra
said.
Precisely my point. The problem is not number of well behaved systems, but the misbehaving ones.

Again, you could argue that the quantity / chance of misconfiguration goes up with the quantity of systems being configured, but the end result still depends a great deal more on how many are misbehaving than how many there are in total.

--
TTFN,
patrick