Also sprach jlewis@lewis.org
To me, that looks more like an outage (now fixed) on a customer
network. The 'loop' between 500.Serial2-11.GW4.BWI1.ALTER.NET and
core62007-gw.customer.alter.net, could likely be caused by UU's
customer advertising an aggregate route to UU, but not actually having
a route to the IP...so they default back to UU, and UU sends it back to
the customer.
That was my thought when I saw the (mangled) traceroute.
This was likely a problem on the customer's network, so why should
UUNet take a trouble report from you?
This is a really crappy attitude...but its one I hear from a lot of
Internet providers, and that I frequently hear from telco's too. I make
the argument that its *not* in the provider's best interest to take this
attitude.
Basically, what you are saying is that you really don't care of your
network actually *works* or not.
I'll take a credible trouble report about my network from anyone. (Note
the use of the term "credible" there) If my network is operating in
some sub-standard way, I want to know about it, and I don't care of I
find out about it from a customer or from some random person halfway
around the globe.
To be quite honest, the mindset of "You're not our customer, I won't
take your report about our network being screwed up," boggles my mind.
Like I said...I get the same attitude from telco's (particularly
BellSouth that I deal with a lot), and it blows my mind. BellSouth has
*NO* way for me, as someone that deals with the PSTN a *LOT*, and has
the ability to correlate reports of problems and determine where there
are likely significant problems, to report problems to them because "I'm
not the customer." They would rather calls not be completely than to be
pointed to where their network is broken by a non-customer. Where is
the logic in that? The most recent example of this was that we were
having customer from 2 CO's (actually, one CO and one remote node off
that CO) that were unable to complete ISDN data calls to us. It took
BellSouth over 3 days to fix this when they could've had it fixed in
less than 2 hours if they had just taken my trouble report.
I can even extend this to equipment vendors. I've had more than one
equipment vendor that refused to take a bug report from me (even a
blatent security vulnerability in one case!) because I didn't have a
support contract.
*blink*
I'm doing your work for you, and you refuse to accept my gift of my
troubleshooting time and effort.
So...in this case with uu.net. Take the report, it takes about 2
seconds to come to the conclusion that we have here. That being, this
is likely a customer with a default pointed back...nothing we can do
about. Then you dump the report in the circular file and go about your
merry way.