The Cidr Report

Sun Feb 13 19:43:22 UTC 2005

On Sun, 13 Feb 2005, Justin Ryburn wrote:

> I have recently heard companies saying their reasoning for de-aggregation was
> 1) to protect against outages to their customer base when a more specific of
> their aggregate was announced somewhere else and 2) if they are getting DDOS
> attacked on a given /24 they can just drop that advertisement and only affect
> part of their customer base.

1) this only provides partial protection, even if you announce a /24 i can still 
announce my own /24 and get some of your traffic

2) either they are operating networks that cant support their business and i
dont see why we should bale them out or in the cases where certain hosts are
accepted by us as targets (ircnets etc) you could argue to obtain a discrete /24
which is the better evil than taking a /16 and breaking it down to take out a
/24

i'm not keen on this latter idea, what if i operate an anti-ddos specialist isp,
hosting ircnets, gambling, security sites etc - do i put each host in a /24 and
waste a whole /16 with a couple hundred customers? 

i strongly believe if you want to be an autonomous internet provider then you 
should be able to run your network by accepted means not thro cheap hacks

> As technically savvy folks, we may not agree with this line of reasoning.  
> However, keep in mind that the technically savvy folks are not always the ones
> making the decisions within a company.  Just because someone has enable access
> and clue does not mean they have the authority to make certain decisions.  
> Most of those people probably spend a large amount of their time arguing with
> the decision makers to try and do the right thing but at some point they lose
> those arguments.

if their suppliers/peers disagree strongly they would not be able to present 
these options in the first place.. lack of regulation has its downsides it would 
seem..

Steve