[25754] in North American Network Operators' Group
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Tancsa)
Wed Nov 10 17:57:10 1999
Message-Id: <4.1.19991109222119.0441fc50@granite.sentex.ca>
Date: Tue, 09 Nov 1999 22:21:24 -0500
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: Mike Tancsa <mike@sentex.net>
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Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
Lately, we have been running into this problem more and more. One of our
upstreams AT&T buys transit from Teleglobe. Teleglobe it seems subscribes
to the maps.vix.com realtime blackhole list via BGP. Now, I am all for
limiting SPAM and such, but its starting to be an operational headache
having to deal with customers asking our support staff why they cannot get
to a certain web site. The one that hit our support lines the most was
24.0.0.200 which was members.home.com. It can be a challenge explaining
the simplest of issues to end users, let alone upstream transit providers
using bgp to blackhole a host. The customer just wants to get to the
granny's knitting guild! At least with SMTP blocking, one end gets a
message stating "their mail is unwelcome, see .... for details", where as
when an intermediary is dropping all data, the end user just gets a vague
error.
My questions is, if you were buying transit from an upstream, and that
upstream decided to partake in some sort of content filtering, how would
you feel ? Do you think its right for transit providers to do so ? Its one
thing if I choose to use this facility, but I feel a little helpless if two
ASs away from me uses it... i.e. upstream says, "this way to 24.0.0.0/12",
but then drops data going to 24.0.0.200/32. I dont want to have to fill me
router with a bunch of /32s so I can exit out UUnet to get around this.
Yes, sure I want a proactive upstream to stop network abuse... particularly
abuse issues, where I need their cooperation such as smurf attacks and
such. But on issues, where I have all the necessary tools and choice to
deal with said issue (in this case SPAM), I would prefer it be left up to
me on how I deal with foreign SPAM sites.
---Mike
**********************************************************************
Mike Tancsa, Network Admin * mike@sentex.net
Sentex Communications Corp, * http://www.sentex.net/mike
Cambridge, Ontario * 01.519.651.3400
Canada *
