Re: Help with bad announcement from UUnet

[Anne Marcel Roorda <marcel () slowthinkers net>]

> >   Having a support model in which anyone can call any NOC about a
> > problem they're having does not scale very well.
>
> I felt justified in calling UUnet.  I know the conversation had
> morphed by the time you made the above comment.  However in my case
> UUnet was propagating an announcement that was stepping on one of
> ours; the owner of the netblock was there to say that he did not want
> that announcement being made; the UUnet customer making the
> announcement (who I would rather have dealt with) was apparently
> operating without a crew.  Here was a conversation between directly
> affected parties.  It came down to who was bothering who: was it UUnet
> bothering me by announcing my route, or was it me bothering them by
> asking them to stop?

  Let me begin by letting you know that my comments were not UUnet
specific.

  Getting the person announcing this block to open a ticket with the
NOC and including your contact details, as well as a clear description
of the prolem would have been my first suggestion.

  It saves you having to convince the NOC that their customer should
not be announcing this route, and that they should stop it. Instead it
turns into an issue where a customer is unable to change his configuration
reliably and needs help in doing so.

  A suitable sollution would have been to either talk the customer
through it, change the filters, or both.

> The model of "I won't talk to anybody who isn't my customer" is
> probably almost always right, but it does not work for every single
> situation.  With that stand, you wouldn't have an abuse@ contact.
> Sometimes your actions directly affect somebody and you should be
> willing to deal with the consequences of that.

  The comparison with an abuse department is not realistic. The primary
goal of those departments is drasticly different.

> While their initial reaction in my case was "I can't talk to you,"
> they did indeed reconsider and help out.  Thanks again.  It happened
> pretty much at the instant I asked for help here, which is the usual
> sort of kharma..

  Some things should not be to easy. Getting people to filter routes
without a clear understanding of why, and apropriate checks is one of
those things.

> BTW as I mentioned when I contacted Genuity, they advised me to contact
> UUnet directly.  So by inference at least one large carrier (Genuity)
> seems to feel that contacting them directly is appropriate.

  That is unfortunate.

- marcel