Re: vger rejecting messages from mediaone

From: Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH (allbery@apk.net)
Date: Tue Jan 18 2000 - 17:46:07 EST


Henrik Olen <henrik@iaeste.de> wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Jan 2000, Walter Reed wrote:
> > ... And it's also what many admins would do when ORBS probes their machines for the
> > 50,000th time...
> Once you're confirmed non-relaying, you won't get probed for 5 months
> according to ORBS.

That doesn't matter when ORBS decided that you're just making excuses for
not closing all your open relays within 24 hours and starts probing your
netblock as often as possible --- which they did to CMU ECE, which is why
they got blocked and will stay blocked until they get their heads out of
their behinds.

(Clue: 600+ machines, 4 people, way too much politics within the department,
and *we do not have any real authority*. The entire facilities staff has
already been purged once for not doing what the faculty wants... if we don't
convince them beforehand but simply yank their precious open relays (yes,
too many of them think that's a *feature*) we get replaced by people who will
maintain their open relays.)

So, the end result of ORBS' "help" is:

* half the department is now convinced that the anti-spammers are *worse*
  than the spammers;
* those that know better are doubly p*ssed at ORBS having successfully hurt
  the reputation of anti-spam people;
* facilities' workload goes through the roof when ORBS changes addresses to
  evade the block (generally bringing the work of closing open relays to
  a complete halt -- hey, yeah, *that* improves things, doesn't it?)

If this is what happened to MediaOne and above.net, it's no wonder they
blocked ORBS as well.

Someone needs to teach the ORBS folks that not everyone is 3-4 machines that
can be trivially secured; the larger the organization, the more problems
there are --- and in academia, the more touchy egos that have to be handled
with kid gloves in order to get anything done. And if ORBS will get a clue
about this, we at least will drop our block. But if they insist on scanning
us every day or so they way they have been, they stay blocked because they
are *making it harder to close the goddamned relays*.

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