[5693] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Inter-provider relations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alan Hannan)
Fri Oct 25 10:46:14 1996
To: peter@agis.net (Peter Kline)
Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 09:40:46 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: lart@cais.net, nanog@merit.edu, agislist@interstice.com, burleson@cais.net
In-Reply-To: <199610251416.KAA09073@agisgate.agis.net> from "Peter Kline" at Oct 25, 96 10:16:31 am
From: alan@mindvision.com (Alan Hannan)
Reply-To: alan@mindvision.com (Alan Hannan)
Hello,
Please take personal tirades and your vulgarities, originated or
not, to private email.
Thanks,
Alan
>
> At 03:25 PM 10/24/96 -0400, JDF wrote:
> >
> > Interesting speech from Peter Kline at NANOG today...it seems that
> >AGIS's peering requirements are now so strict that AGIS today would not
> >peer with AGIS of only a few months ago.
>
> Nope. AGIS has been at the specified exchange points for well over a year,
> long before the trickle of peering requests turned into an ugly, swirling,
> threat-filled flood.
>
> > Then there's Peter's comment to Ron Burleson, Cheif Operating
> >Officer of CAIS Internet (some of you know that CAIS had a very good
> >relationship with Net99, which continued for a while under AGIS.) "Ron,
> >we're going to squish you like a bug."
>
> 1. The author of this mail was not present at the conversation, which took
> place when this guy Burleson, who I've never heard of, cornered me in the
> empty lunch room outside of the NANOG meeting room.
>
> 2. This mail makes it obvious that Burleson deliberately set out to make me
> say something which could be reported out of context in an attempt to make
> AGIS look bad. It also explains why he made sure the room was empty.
>
> 3. The comment misquoted above is also horribly out of context. Let's
> review the actual conversation:
>
> RB: Do you know who I am?
>
> ME: No. Should I? Have we met before?
>
> RB: I'm Ron Burleson, self important president of CGX Telecom [who?], which
> owns CAIS [oh. I thought Cable and Wireless bought an interest in CAIS, but
> I guess I was wrong.].
>
> ME: OK.
>
> RB: You didn't [blah blah blah tirade tuned out about CAIS and AGIS].
>
> ME: OK.
>
> RB: Why don't you return my phone calls or answer my mail?
>
> ME: For some time now I have received much more mail and many more phone
> calls than I can personally answer.
>
> RB: I'm going to fuck the AGIS network any way I can.
>
> ME: So, you're going to fuck the AGIS network...
>
>
> Here I paused to consider my responses, which could have included:
>
> - Thank you.
> - Thank you very much.
> - Fuck you.
> - Fuck you very much.
> - I'd fuck your network back, but I don't want to catch whatever's given you
> those running sores.
> - Fuck your network and the horse it rode in on.
> - about a million other vulgar things I could think of.
>
> but instead, I said:
>
> "Then I'll squash you like a bug," which seemed to me to be a
> proportionate, non-vulgar, measured, I'm-the-bigger-person response to a
> pretty off-the-graph, vulgar, and irresponsible tirade.
>
> > Peter is doing wonders for inter-provider relations. What do
> >y'all say that the rest of us follow the older, more friendly model,
> >instead of trying to kill each other?
>
> I didn't start it, and I'm not the one who made the threat. It is big Ron
> who apparently wants to kill me/AGIS. And I just don't stand around and
> take crap from people.
>
> > Sure, a lot of us are in competition. From today's speech, it
> >seems that AGIS is is more competition than the rest of us.
>
> Competition is either good or bad, pick one. Based on the grip CAIS has on
> the DC market, I'd guess CAIS was founded based on the idea that competition
> is good. My relationship with Bob Gibson has always been cordial.
>
> > But personally, if I were a small or mid-size provider, I'd rather
> >buy service from somebody that I've seen to be in /friendly/ competition
> >with their peers -- that way, once I got big enough to strike out on my
> >own, I could stay friendly with my old provider on a peer instead of a
> >customer level. This was the intention with the Net99 deal, back when
> >Net99 was known as "the backbone that doesn't suck."
>
> It sucked pretty bad in the end. Joe didn't give Dave any of the tools
> needed to run a decent network, and I think Dave did an amazing job with
> what he had.
>
> > Back to the point -- like it or not, we all rely on each other and
> >each others' networks to make the Internet happen.
> > We can follow the AGIS model and cut each others' throats until we
> >really are just a bunch of autonomous systems with the occasional path
> >between, or we can interconnect -- network, to use a more laoded term.
>
> AGIS has cordial relationships with other majors like ANS, NETCOM, Sprint,
> MCI, and uu.net, as well as many others.
>
> > I think we should be a network.
> >
> > (Please note that while I am speaking only for myself, CAIS's
> >business plan is more on the friendly side.)
>
> Then get an email account at AOL. I consider you to be speaking for CAIS.
>
>
> There's a very serious issue here for CAIS, which is that a man purporting
> to be its president/owner/whatever acted quite irresponsibly. The way to
> get even with AGIS, if that's what he needs to do, is to build a bigger
> better network and win over our customers, not 'fuck' the AGIS network, with
> all the consequences that suggested action implies for our customers.
>
> In light of Ron's comment to me, I think it would be in the best interest of
> AGIS's customers to email or call Mr. Ron Burleson of CAIS/CGX (email
> address conveniently cc'd above by JDF) and ask him how he intends to fuck
> AGIS (by SYN flooding or other denial of service attack, physically damaging
> colocates, or what). When he doesn't respond, bury his office with calls
> and mail, or even better, track him down at IETF or the next NANOG, get him
> into a corner, and demand to know why he didn't return your calls and mail.
>
> Peter
>
>
--
Alan Hannan
Not Employed Networking, Ltd.
email: alan@mindvision.com.
phone: 402/488-0238
