IGC (Internet Gateway Connections, an ISP in Florida that was
multihomed between NET99 and MCI) just had an unexpected outage lasting in
excess of an hour. This outage was deliberately engineered by AGIS/NET99.
First, a little history:
IGC's first 'Net T1 was to NET99. Instead of connecting us
directly to their backbone (as we had expected) they connected us to
Netrunner (one of our competitors). Netrunner/NET99 only has a single T1
out of Miami (to Atlanta) and as a result, our throughput was awful and
we obtained an additional T1 to MCI.
A few days ago, someone at Netrunner got upset with someone at
NET99/AGIS and shut off _our_ service. For some reason (we strongly
suspect a configuration error at NET99) our traffic failed to reroute
over our MCI T1 for several hours. (They have a habit of broadcasting
static routes to route around outages, thus completely screwing their
multi-homed customers.)
We asked AGIS for a one month refund to compensate us for our
losses due to the sabotage. Instead, they issued us a _one_day_ credit.
We got upset, both with the ability of our T to pass traffic, with
NET99's continual routing problems, with NET99's backbone being
disassembled from under us, and with NET99/AGIS's continual delays in
migrating us to the AGIS network. We asked them to discontinue our service.
They did. They also deliberately and maliciously began
broadcasting more specific routes for the individual class C networks in
our CIDR block. (We confirmed this with MCI.)
When I spoke to AGIS about the outage, they told me I had to
speak with Randy Epstein. Randy Epstein is the person at IGC who made the
decision to discontinue our AGIS/NET99 service.
I contacted MCI again and they contacted AGIS/NET99 with the
ultimate threat being for MCI to stop carrying AGIS' traffic if they would
not cease broadcasting the bogus routes. Shortly after being contacted by
MCI, AGIS/NET99 stopped announcing the bogus routes to MCI, but continued
advertising these routes to their other peers at the NAPs.
Fortunately, MCI was able to reconfigure our access lists at their
router to allow us to broadcast competing more specific routes for each
individual class C in the CIDR block. Thus (more or less) restoring IGC's
net connectivity.
NET99's deliberate, malicious actions are contrary to the very
spirit of the Internet. They resulted in DALnet (the third largest IRC
network) being split to ribbons, depriving 2,500 people of the ability to
converse with each other and cutting off DALnet's security and access
control system which is hosted here.
Please excuse me if this is not the appropriate forum for discussing
this event.
David Schwartz
Director of Network Services
Internet Gateway Connections
(954)-430-3030