Six PCs caused BigPond problems

Fri Apr 15 05:44:19 UTC 2005

On Apr 15, 2005, at 1:38 AM, Sean Donelan wrote:

> On Fri, 15 Apr 2005, Patrick W Gilmore wrote:
>> Well configured laptops will not put that much pressure on the roots.
>> A single misconfigured / broken recursive name server puts a lot more
>> pressure on the roots than lots of well-configured laptops.
>>
>> I guess one could argue that the chance of misconfiguration go up as
>> the number of systems goes up.
>
> http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/0,2000061744,39188319,00.htm
>
> Disconnecting six compromised personal computers on Tuesday evening 
> eased
> the difficulties caused by bogus requests which clogged BigPond's 
> domain
> name servers (DNS), slowing customer e-mail and Web site access, 
> Telstra
> said.

Precisely my point.  The problem is not number of well behaved systems, 
but the misbehaving ones.

Again, you could argue that the quantity / chance of misconfiguration 
goes up with the quantity of systems being configured, but the end 
result still depends a great deal more on how many are misbehaving than 
how many there are in total.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick