nanog mailing list archives

Re: Worm Bandwidth [was Re: Santa Fe city government computers knocked out by worm]


From: "Stephen J. Wilcox" <steve () telecomplete co uk>
Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2003 02:18:56 +0000 (GMT)


On Fri, 28 Nov 2003, Daniel Senie wrote:

At 06:24 PM 11/28/2003, Sean Donelan wrote:

On Sat, 29 Nov 2003, Petri Helenius wrote:
If you are an access provider, specially in the consumer space, you can
do many things to help the "Greater Internet" by keeping your own back
yard in good shape.  In the transit business, you are expected to
deliver the bits regardless of the content so there the only viable
option is to drop packets where the source or  destination addresses
donĀ“t make sense.

What is the difference between a transit provider and an access provider,
specially in the consumer space?  Why is a transit provider expected to
deliver the bits, but the access provider isn't?  Since the bulk of
Internet access is actually provided by wholesale providers (e.g.
AOL/Earthlink buy wholesale modem access from UUNET/Level3), who is
the access provider and who is the transit provider?

And how do you handle the situation where a provider is both? UUNet, for 
example, sells LOTS of T-1 lines to non-ISP businesses, and sells retail 
dialup services to consumers. Sure they also sell wholesale bandwidth and 
wholesale dialup services to ISPs, but it's not their whole business.

The problem isn't "someone else's problem" for anyone. 

Clearly you can apply checks to parts of your network (stub bits) such as your 
dialup pool etc where can be sure about what src/dst addresses are fake, ie the 
access part of your business

Steve





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