Anyone notice strange announcements for 174.128.31.0/24

Tue Jan 13 19:06:10 UTC 2009

On Jan 13, 2009, at 1:27 PM, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 13, 2009, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
>
>> How can anyone seriously argue the ASN owner is somehow wrong and  
>> keep
>> a straight face?  How can anyone else who actually runs a network not
>> see that as ridiculous?
>
> Speaking purely as an outsider who hasn't had to pull such jack moves
> with his tiny corner of the world these days, I've frequently seen  
> people
> pull exactly these jack moves for Traffic Engineering.
>
> So either they're not talking and wish to remain nameless, or they're
> talking and being hypocritical. But they do exist, and I'm pretty sure
> they see it as another way of "hacking" the routing system to achieve
> goals the original implementors didn't explicitly define, but have
> operational relevance today.
>
> But they're out there, injecting routes to peers to control traffic.
> I remember the first time I saw it and said "uhm wtf?" followed by
> "evil but clever." Much like other BGP tricks. :)

The idea that you can do something and get away with it sometimes  
makes it OK all the time is erroneous.

Extreme example: Sprint probably wouldn't post to NANOG or even  
complain if a little network announced one of their prefixes.  Does  
that make it OK for any network to announce anyone else's prefix?   
Obviously not.

The fact is someone -did- notice, and instead of saying "I'm sorry, I  
won't do it again", Randy just said "I'm a good guy, doing an  
experiment" and implied it could not possibly be wrong.  Worse, others  
actually berated the ASN owner for spending time & effort on the issue.

If you use my ASN for an experiment or anything else without  
permission, do not act surprised when I notice.  And certainly do not  
try to act like it is just no big deal.  Use your own autonomous  
system numbers if you want it to be "no big deal".

-- 
TTFN,
patrick