Yeah it is. Wait till someone steals your network numbers by broadcasting
them and their ISP isn't filtering.
It's Happened Before.
This is one of the things we don't want the press writing about. How
darned easy it is for some person making a silly mistake to introduce a big
transient problem until it gets killed. Fortunately, people pay attention
and kill these things off reasonably quickly, but it makes managing the net
a much more "active" thing than one would think at first inspection. A lot
of management at a lot of companies (even ISPs), doesn't realize this.
The problem of course is that we can't scale the number of people who know
how to fix things like this nearly as fast as we can (and are) scaling the
network. The whole thing needs to be a lot more insensitive to minor
screwups. The fact that most of our protocols (like especially DNS and
even to an extent BGP) were designed when the universe of people who would
be managing them was much smaller. The problem gets worse when people use
old protocols (like DNS) that were intended for one thing (nameing) to
implement something different (like load balancing) "because it works".
Kind of. On the other hand, with the installed base, replacing old
protocols is getting really difficult.
As an industry, we need to move this process forward. The network grows
while you sleep...
-jcp-
PS:
Personal note: This is my last week at PointCast, hence the 'jcphome'
address. That's my permanent address.
-jcp-