[71983] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Teaching/developing troubleshooting skills
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric Brunner-Williams)
Mon Jun 28 11:29:16 2004
To: "John Neiberger" <John.Neiberger@efirstbank.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu, brunner@nic-naa.net
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 28 Jun 2004 08:18:02 CST."
<s0dfd444.024@fstest05.fb>
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 15:30:35 +0000
From: Eric Brunner-Williams <brunner@nic-naa.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
>* The faulty assumption there is but one problem
>* Incorrectly-formed causal relationships
Mythology.
Some may recall the adventures of the CTO who ran a sweep of an net 10.*
in a rather modest machine room somewhere in Maine, resulting in memory
exhaustion (arp table) in the router, which resulted in 1918 leakage into
public address space.
The operational mythology of the ever-so-security-minded-yolks was that
the initial and very poorly understood presenting problem was an external
act of malice, rather than self-inflicted DoS by the security-yolk itself.
I've seen many people struggle to fit what little they know into predefined
mythos of what could be happening, rather than starting like Sgt. Schultz,
who "knew nothing", at least until he really _knew_ it.
Eric
