[ale] Re: [OT] Bad ISP Experience (kinda long rant) - was "Inexpensive broadband recommendations"

[Robert Gash]

On 19 Feb 2003 22:42:43 -0500, Jonathan Glass (IBB) was overheard saying:
|  Geesh!  I hope to NEVER have to go through that again!  But, through it
|  all, I was able to point to the Linux firewall and let them know that IT
|  wasn't the problem!  Long live the penguin!

I'm sure you have already realized this, but I would think twice
before counting this as a "Linux win" when really it was a matter of
personal competence.  It is a relatively trivial matter to
misconfigure a Linux system acting as a firewall, and there are a
million things that you can forget to do that will give you the same
problems that their Netscreen and Cisco gear had.

You can have the best systems and software in the world, but without
competent individuals to back them up someone will find some way to
misconfigure it.  Even people who are in the know make mistakes.  You
may find the paper presented at SIGCOMM'02 entitled "Understanding BGP
Misconfiguration" helpful in illustrating this point.  The authors
studied BGP route announcements on the Internet and found that close
to 3 in 4 of new route announcements made every day are the result of
misconfigurations.  I won't go into detail, but most organizations who
need BGP peering are sophisticated enough to employ or contract
competent individuals.

That said, it sounds like people should steer clear of this provider.
It is normally easy to detect local/regional acts because they tend to
blame things on the customer first, where most larger backbones treat
customers with some level of respect and will verify configurations
and connectivity before blaming it on customer equipment.

-R

-- 
Robert Gash, gashalot at gashalot.com
(Web) http://gashalot.com/
(PGP) http://gashalot.com/pgpkeys.txt

_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale