Level(3) filtering (was Yahoo outage summary)

Tue Jul 10 03:26:54 UTC 2007

On Jul 9, 2007, at 8:10 PM, Chris L. Morrow wrote:

> In the
> number of customer conversations I've had about this it's always  
> sort of
> surprising that people think it's 'ok' to not have a prefix-list : 
> ( cause,
> guess what: "if you don't have one and they don't have one... THEY  
> will
> get you eventually"

Many folks seem to think that they'll be OK because 'someone else'  
will be doing this for them, and so they're protected.  They also  
don't think about the fact that they themselves could accidentally  
cause a problem for others (and, in some cases, for themselves, by  
acting as an inadvertent sinkhole).  But when it's explained to them  
that a) if everyone thinks that 'someone else' will do the  
appropriate filtering, then nobody will do it, and b) that they can  
end up hosing themselves and also taking a big reputational hit, most  
people I talk to about this seem to understand.

The problem is that this is largely an ad-hoc, 1:1 type of  
educational effort, which doesn't scale well.  And in many cases,  
folks seem to find it difficult to go to their management and explain  
that they must invest the opex to implement and maintain these  
policies (along with BCP38, iACLs, et. al.); sort of an inversion of  
"The Emperor's New Clothes", heh.

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Roland Dobbins <rdobbins at cisco.com> // 408.527.6376 voice

        Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

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