[106897] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Is it time to abandon bogon prefix filters?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven M. Bellovin)
Fri Aug 15 12:19:14 2008
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:17:36 -0400
From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
To: Randy Bush <randy@psg.com>
In-Reply-To: <48A5A72B.50305@psg.com>
Cc: "Robert E. Seastrom" <rs@seastrom.com>, NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:56:27 -0700
Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> wrote:
> > Not sure what you mean by this, but the painful reality is that most
> > stuff, once deployed, gets promptly forgotten about, much the same
> > as you might ignore a wall wart power supply under your desk until
> > it started smelling funny or stopped delivering electricity. Thus,
> > I contend that one's routers should be configured to avoid ticking
> > time bombs.
>
> and i am saying that you should use a router configuration *system*
> that avoids ticking time bombs. no router should be neglected and
> unloved.
>
That, I think, is why he distinguished between routers run by "highly
clueful people" and routers run by others. I think we all agree on
your basic point; it's just that too many people aren't clueful enough
to realize that they even have a problem, let alone know how to solve
it. (Of course, you and I both have a background in programming
languages and compilers, which is why we naturally think of router
configurations as a form of assembler language that only a compiler
should every emit.)
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
