Yahoo, Google, Microsoft contact?

Fri Feb 3 19:10:26 UTC 2006

On Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 04:36:56PM +0000, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
> 
> actually, working for a largish company, I'd say one aspect not recognized
> is the scale on their side of the problem... abuse at mci|uu|vzb gets (on a
> bad month) 800k messages, on a 'good' month only 400k ... how many do
> yahoo/google/msn get? How many do their role accounts get for
> hostmaster/postmaster/routing/peering ?? Expecting that you can send an
> email and get a response 'quickly' is just no reasonable unless you expect
> just an auto-ack from their ticketting system.

The heart of this problem, like so many other problems before it, is that 
most people are dumber than dirt itself. When people are posting to NANOG 
for a contact, they're saying "hey I'm a network engineer who knows what 
he's talking about, looking for a way to directly contact another network 
engineer to quickly resolve a problem without having to stay on hold and 
explain the situation to 20 people who wouldn't understand it anyways for 
the next 4 hours". Well at least thats how it started, then everyone who 
reads NANOG started using the same system for their "my traceroute is 
broken" complaints and now we're flooded with them.

The reality is that the vast vast majority of "issues" people take it upon 
themselves to contact a network over are non-existant, the people doing 
the contacting are remarkably stupid, and more often than not they're the 
kind of people who are going to be abusive(*) and threatening about it. I 
know from my own personal experience the ratio of bogus to legit calls 
regarding security/hacking is around 10:1 on a good day. If there was a 
number that anyone could call to speak to a clueful person at Yahoo, said 
clueful person would quit on the second day after the 500th call 
threatening to sue him because he's hacking a computer on port 80.

Until someone invents a universally recognized system where you can call 
and say "Hi I'm CCIE #12345, I'm certified to know what I'm talking about 
and I have an actual network issue, please transfer me to someone with 
clue", we're going to continue to see the problem of letting the legit 
calls through while seperating out the calls from J. Random Crackmonkey 
who is sniffing the ajax. And from the customer perspective, if you don't 
want to sit on the phone going through the "have you tried rebooting your 
router" script when you call to complain that BGP on an OC48 is down, try 
buying from a smaller company who focuses on providing service to clueful 
networks and who doesn't need call screeners for its customers.

(*) My all-time personal favorite (not at all work safe) is:
http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras/this-man-hates-spam

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)