On Sun, Nov 12, 2000 at 20:41 +0000, Jeremy Clyma wrote:
By blocking outbound port 25 access to everywhere on the prepaid users profile, you'll be doing .nz and the world a nice favour.
I changed the subject slightly because there is an issue I've been meaning to raise in this forum, and this suggestion of blocking a port to ameliorate (and certainly not solve) a problem like spam is probably as good a hook as any to hang it on. I'm more and more concerned that the distributed diagnostic capability of the Internet, you know, the way anyone can, with a little study and a few tools, do quite a bit to discover faults and decide whether it is you, the ISP, the server at the far end, etc... I suspect it is this "self-diagnosis" and ad-hoc notification to operators that means such a large and diverse network can continue to operate with proportionally few staff (very very capable ones of course, but still I get the impression the per-user ratio would be much less than one of these lumbering, fascist internal networks that Corporates bind themselves to.) However, more and more, I find ICMP messages being blocked, screwing up MTU discovery, traceroute, sometimes even ping... While this might deal with some problems, I'm interested to hear the opinions of this list on the degree to which this drives Help Desk and support calls. If I can't tell if it's me, the ISP, or the server at the far end, I will have to call... wade through first level response (and the effectiveness of that has been mentioned here recently) and generally not be certain of what I'm talking about, or able to offer authoritative evidence of the diagnosis... My interest then is, does the removal of access to these diagnostic tools increase or decrease the reliability and usefulness of the Net? Hamish. PS. Not operationally aligned to any IP operation, but wildly interested in them all. -- Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog