Lazy Engineers and Viable Excuses

Wed Aug 27 04:15:18 UTC 2003

--On Tuesday, August 26, 2003 9:35 AM -0400 Leo Bicknell <bicknell at ufp.org> 
wrote:

> Almost everyone filters customers.  The large ISP's all have the
> same opinion, if small to medium sized players abuse the system
> they get depeered and become someone's customer aggressively filtered.
> The large ISP's then trust each other to do that aggressive filtering.
> So be careful if you advocate filtering.  The IRR, with everyone
> doing an update for every customer worldwide does not scale, but
> depeering all the smaller peers and letting a few big guys sort it
> out does.  I don't think that's the result most people pushing
> filtering want.

If this is true, then why do the european NAP mailing lists (which push IRR 
filtering) have an almost constant stream of "oops, our customer announced 
everything to us and we leaked it".

Filtering peers is not the way to go.  Filtering customers and "trusting" 
peers to do the same is.  (Whether that trust explictly mentioned in a 
peering agreement or whatever).

Just a shame that not everyone filters their customers.  And although it 
has been a while, I know I've seen a route-leak from 6461 at AMS-IX.
(Probably last year sometime)