[c-nsp] Something I was thinking about whilst idle the other day.

[Drew Weaver]

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Storey [mailto:tom at snnap.net]
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 10:01 PM
To: Phil Bedard
Cc: Drew Weaver; 'cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net'
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Something I was thinking about whilst idle the other day.

> It's only bad if the process using it is starving other processes from
> doing their job correctly (icmp echo is not an important job).

Try telling that to customers.

Get a router that is reasonably busy during peak times, and you'll get
your occasional "know it all wannabe network engineer" who will email in
and kindly "let you know" that a link is saturated, or there is packet
loss, or a router has a fault because it is too busy to respond to an ICMP
echo request.

-------------

        As someone who works for a company that has potential customers that use trace route to determine whether or not to use one company's service over another [yes, I realize that is a very poor metric but it is a very competitive market] I would like to interject here for a moment. If you sign someone up for a service (say internet transit) where does it say that you can choose which packets to pass and which packets to drop, and where does it say that you can (now a days) not block RFC 1918 [bogon] traffic and pass it along to your customers? I think people expect traceroutes to work because they use them for diagnostic tools, when they don't work they assume something is wrong with your network.

-Drew