Slashdot Mirror

The North American Network Operators' Group has two ongoing threads ('What *are* they smoking' and 'Change to .com/.net behavior') with further discussion on this topic.

To save you all some hassles when you're trying to figure out *why* you haven't gotten your emails...

Donotcall.gov has no MX records. No reverse DNS on any of their outbound mail boxes. And they obviously are not processing bounces/complaints/etc. since nothing on that netblock has port 25 open.

It's really sad because one of the guys from AT&T Government services posted in NANOG this week looking for advice on getting his emails through.

The discussions for this are all on NANOG

So yes, the issues of renumbering, routing, address-allocation and 'are IPs property' are getting discussed at length with more technical detail than slashdot

This document defines a Best Current Practice to minimize pollution of the Internet by various types of abuse, using the community's own measures in the absence of effective legal, regulatory and technical measures.

This document defines a Best Current Practice to minimize pollution of the Internet by various types of abuse, using the community's own measures in the absence of effective legal, regulatory and technical measures.

...the Slashdot article, that is. I've been watching this since I got up this morning (about five hours ago, local time). There's been plenty of discussions about this on various mailinglists, including NANOG and NordNOG, as well as several IRC channels I frequent. I'm surprised it took this long for Slashdot to post anything about it.

According to unconfirmed sources on NANOG, the worm seems to eat up bandwidth at line rate (even at GigE links), is rumored to amplify itself via Cisco routers, and is the creation of Saddam Hussein.

My journal on the worm.

the press release only scratches the surface. for more information, have a look at the NANOG presentation from October 2002

One thing you might try to do is find something that a lot of people need doing. I read NANOG fairly regularly; seems there are a lot of people who are looking for alternatives to the products that are made by big companies. They complain about a lack of desired features and security, among other things. More later ...

Multicast news services worked well during 9/11 and there is no reason to think that they won't the next time. Multicast is specifically designed not to "melt down" under extreme changes in audience.

The trouble is that not everyone is multicast enabled, but this shows real promise in handling news and emergency information over the Internet.

Probably not, but... search the last weeks' worth of the NANOG list archives for evidence that even highly trained network engineers with years of experience get sucked into phone tag hell with Qwest "support" services.

This NANOG presentation talks about Sweden's plans for high-speed access, using 10 Mbps Ethernet (Hint: it's optical to within distance for KAT5-/KAT-6 from the home). It will cost US$75/month, and people will choose between at least 5 operators. Since CAT5/CAT6 cable is run to every house, it will be scalable to 100 Mbps and higher (it's designed to support a yearly doubling of traffic).

K Claffy gave an interesting presentation at the last Nanog that illustrates the futility of the Record Companies Efforts. See, in particular, her graph on file sharing usage.

The result of years of litigation and bad law making :

Napster is shut down, its successors have over 5 times the file sharing volume, and are used perhaps 100 times as much as the "legitimate" pressplay and music net services.

And they call it a famous victory...

This comes up on NANOG's mailing list about once a week. Search the archives.

The most important thing it breaks is PMTU discovery, which may cause stalls in your IP transmissions through that router.

Next time you spout off, maybe you might think about actually researching the subject first. This whole story is based on a paper that was presented at the October NANOG conference.

You do a disservice to the memory of Abha Ahuja with your uninformed yelping. This had nothing to do with a cheap gimmick to get publicity.

--------

Among other software, there's FreeIPdb.

In the last month or two this subject has been discussed at least once on NANOG. You might also try searching the inet-access list archives at MARC

-Nathan

One of the people conducting the study, Abha Ahuja, has passed away.

* Which course will perpetuate a cycle of violence and be used to justify further attacks? (Clue: look at the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine.)

Well said. To quote Randy Bush without permission:

Resist the cycle of violence and hate.

I dunno, I guess people "in the know" tend to know about Zebra because we use it over our networks on a daily basis. I learned about it from NANOG.

It works great but it has some problems scaling over huge routing tables (75,000+) especially with Solaris. You should be fine doing RIP2 or OSPF in linux with it.

-davidu

... is of course the S l a s h d o t E f f e c t.

Sooo... congresscritters are thinking of passing a nasty ole law? Rob could just threaten to post a story like "An anonymous coward writes: Streaming video of Natalie Portmans hot grit's posted to the US Congress Web site. "([sic] - TacoLexicon in force. my real grammar is better.)

Congress would naturally cave in and meet all our demands. Well, maybe not RMS's...

The nanog list has had tons of posts from people willing to lend a hand in networking and communications. Check http://nanog.org/mailinglist.html for the list archive. Contact info for a lot of people that want to help out can be found there.

-WetDog

Now, now, don't get all worked up on me, here. For years I've been using the MBone tools, and I figure the pain involved in that experience earns me the right to be a little cranky. IP multicast just instinctively seems like such a good idea that it is always upsetting to discover that, in practice, it has been just about useless.

Part of this, I think, is because of the applications chosen. Many to many videoconferences are a bad demo app because the truth is that most people don't need many-to-many -- they need some-to-some, or more likely one-to-many, both of which can be done adequately (read: better, also known as "more predictably") with unicast technologies.

There was also a culture that grew up around the MBone that discouraged innovation, both in terms of the tools and the community using them (which, let's face it, was basically, "only those of us that were NANOG regulars. No one wanted to build or to use new tools, because we've got these free TCL tools that suck! And did we mention that they're free? Yep, vic, vat, and sdr -- that's all you need! Never mind that they were "technology demos" that were never actually supposed to be permanent parts of the infrastructure. Why take any effort to make better ones? Worse is better

And of course, unless you were part of NANOG or the nsfnet clique generally, just try to multicast something on the MBone that actually served another community. I remember getting a van-o-gram because I was multicasting WRCT on the MBone. Van didn't like that I was taking bandwidth away from his friends. The MBone crowd would rather stop people from using the network than, say, admit publically that pruning didn't work and that maybe they should stop recommending multicast as a solution to any problem, anywhere, until this was fixed (which I believe, thank god, it finally has been).

But this -- now this is a cool use for multicast. Watching Counterstrike games is amazingly cool, but there is such a penalty for the players of a game to allow unlimited spectating, since each additional unicast client would slow down the server and clog the network further. Kudos to these guys for going the extra mile (and coming up with an application compelling enough to convince a community with a natural urge to monkey with the network to get involved in multicast).

My only concern is: is multicast really deployed end-to-end? This is a trick question, because really I'm saying "No fucking way is multicast deployed end to end!" In fact, I'd be amazed if more than about half of the big national providers did multicast even in their backbone. Or am I being pessimistic? I'd be curious to know if anyone has real statistics on this issue.

This was posted on NANOG this morning and should be required reading. It is from Sean Doran who basically built Sprint's Network in the early/mid 90s and is probably *the* authority on this kind of stuff. Read it.

Anyway, to assess the icing conditions on the Internet, you should also look at the routing. One good starting point for locating so-called looking glasses is Nanog.

The evil backhoe is a common antagonist and joke among ISPs and backbone operators -- people 'in the business' (the internet business, that is).

I worked in a NOC and up into engineering at a minor internet backbone (for those of you up on your history, the first one to use ATM) and whenever something went down, we'd joke "Some drunk ran into a light pole," or "Some stupid backhoe operator took out MAE East again."

It's funny, but it does happen and causes a lot of people to pop Tums until it's over. Train wrecks can be devestating too, since fiber/copper are often run along train tracks for a lot of reasons.

After a brief search, I came up with the following interesting blurbs:

A fiber cut from 1999

One from 1998

An article about a fiber cut on Slashdot itself

Sprint has "fiber repair" rodeos, heh.

If you do a google search on "fiber cut" and "backhoe", you'll come up with tons of hits. So, you can see, backhoes being the bane of the service provider is a very true statement.

FYI, the NANOG mentioned in some of those articles is the "North American Network Operators' Group" and they have meetings where they discuss cool stuff related to the internet. I went to a meeting once.. boring as hell. But I got some t-shirts and the day off work to go. Wheeee!

It does raise the bar, so the next steps in the cat&mouse game include ever-more-diffuse distributed attacks to avoid more ever-more-watchful intrusion detection and traceback mechanisms. Is that a bad thing? No -- it is a good thing to make successull attacks more challenging.

A little more background reading:

Stefan Savage, Practical Network Support for IP Traceback a technique for tracing, but requires a little packet marking/mangling which makes it unlikely to be adopted. Clever, though, I'm sure some of the ideas will fold into itrace.

Robert Stone, CenterTrack: An IP Overlay Network for Tracking DoS Floods A tool for ISPs to build monitoring networks without making every component cooperate. Hmmm... I wonder if Carnivore has remote tunnels built in?

Other efforts in traceback involve perturbing the source of floods (e.g. by hop-by-hop reverse flooding) and watching the statistical properties of the flood at each step.