NOC communications

Mon Jul 13 21:17:18 UTC 1998

On Mon, 13 Jul 1998, Sean Donelan wrote:

> The contact information which I only give out directly to other NOCs has
> NEVER been abused. 

Here is the key to this problem. How can you publish contact information
in such a way that it only goes to other NOCs. And conversely, how can you
ensure that you have access to the contact information of all other NOCs. 
I suspect that there may be a way for the IP registries (ARIN, RIPE and
APNIC) to facilitate this with some kind of replicated database in which
change notifications only go out to entities listed in the database. That
way every NOC could maintain their own complete copy of a global NOC
contacts database and the only need for queries would be to process update
notifications and do the occasional resync with the master copy.

> Yeah, right.  
> 
>    Dear Sprint, Vab is gone.  Since you have not updated your contact
>    information in a prompt fashion, your AS numbers will be withdrawn
>    at Midnight.  Have a nice day.

This *WILL* be happening in the near future. Not maintaining up to date
contact info is tantamount to aiding and abetting DoS attacks. It won't be
long now before there is some government scrutiny of operational practices
which are related to finding and fixing failures fast.

> That is until they read about themselves on the front-page
> of the New York Times.  Then the managers start yelling at the engineers
> "Why didn't you tell us it was a problem."

Smart engineers are proactive and warn their managers of the dangers of
not following prudent operational practices.

> Maybe we can have this discussion again in another six months. 

Please do. I know that your regular rehashing of these issues has had a
positive impact on a lot of providers.

--
Michael Dillon                 -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Communications Inc.      -               E-mail: michael at memra.com
Check the website for my Internet World articles -  http://www.memra.com        