RE: Fwd: Re: Digital Island sponsors DoS attempt

["Quibell, Marc" <mquibell () icn state ia us>]

You said, "If I feel like using..(someone's) performance improving gizmo,
it's my decision." The problem with this is, in the DI example, it is not
your choice. I suppose if you're confortable with the idea of rogue
companies trying to enhance internet traffic on their own, whether you agree
with the methodology or not and giving you no choice, then that is your
perogative. 


Marc 

-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick W. Gilmore [mailto:patrick () ianai net]
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 3:17 PM
To: nanog () merit edu; Quibell, Marc
Subject: RE: Fwd: Re: Digital Island sponsors DoS attempt


At 02:56 PM 10/26/2001 -0500, Quibell, Marc wrote:

[...]

> If a vendor uses ping times and hops to determine closest servers, where
> does it ping from? Each M$ server? And then how does it tell the client or
> server where to redirect the traffic? If I read the original post right,
the
> pings came from DI. How does this determine the location of off-site
> servers? Is this the best way to do it and what is the total bandwidth
> impact on the internet?

While I agree there may be unintended consequences, even to the point of 
poor performance or effectively DoS'ing a site, this is not really 
relevant, or the province of the IETF.  If I feel like using cisco's or 
DI's or Joe-The-Web-Guru's new wiz-bang load-balancer speeder-upper 
performance-improving reliability-enhancer on MY WEB PAGE, then that is MY 
decision.

Period.

And the IETF, IEEE, RFC-editor, NANOG, EFF, PTA, SPCA, or any other 
alphabet organization has nothing to say about it.  (Assuming, of course, I 
am not violating standards, attacking people, etc.)


> The original poster of this message stated afterwards, offline, he's now
up
> to over 2400 pings in three hours. Add this number of pings to the number
of
> servers and the number of clients being pinged. It grows exponentially. Do
> you not think that there should be some Official Standards developed to
> accomodate and support this?

Unfortunately, it *MAY* be that DI is violating that "assuming, of course" 
part above.  I honestly am not sure why they would need to send 2400 pings 
in 3 hours.  But I am also not 100% certain that sending 2400 pings is 
excessive or "wrong".  Suppose the end users on that network asked for 500 
GB of data from 100 DI customers?

Honest, I do not know the answer, and I doubt most people here do 
either.  Without knowing the circumstances on both sides of the connection, 
it is a bit difficult to say "You did a BAAAAAAD thing".  IMHO, of course.


> Marc

--
TTFN,
patrick