On Mon, 04 Mar 2002 11:46:30 EST, Clarke <nclarke(_at_)mindspring(_dot_)com>
said:
You might try NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) for answers to
these questions. I'm sure those guys can point you to the documentation you
need.
Just be prepared to view any answers you get with some suspicion. Although
the great majority of the NANOG crew is at least semi-clued and willing to
be helpful, it is still possible to start quite the flame-fest just by
suggesting that an ISP shouldn't number its point-to-point links out of
RFC1918 space, because that breaks Path MTU Discovery for those sites that
do rational martian filtering at their ingress routers.
And I'll not go into the flamefests you can start with mentioning the blocking
or filtering of ports, except to say "Comcast". ;)
Bait&switch advertising (what bandwidth did you *really* buy with your money)
and the distinction between "residential" and "commercial" service (basically,
the latter seems to mean you have a snowball's chance of getting the bandwidth
they hinted you'd get, and possibly a tech support phone number that gets you
somebody clued rather than "try rebooting") are other good "hot buttons".
Regarding "regulated monopolies" - forget it, unless you have an enlightened
'Public Utilities Commision' that is actually something other than a rubber
stamp for the utility in question.
Bottom line - the NANOG crew is a great resource if you need to know how to
get a Cisco or Juniper to tap-dance "Singing in the Rain". It's also a good
place for a flame-fest on what the preferred Astaire dance for a Juniper is ;)
--
Valdis Kletnieks
Computer Systems Senior Engineer
Virginia Tech
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