Subject: residential ISP "technical best practices" ?

From: "RL 'Bob' Morgan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2002 20:28:35 -0800 (PST)

Sorry for this somewhat off-topic question, but I think this issue is at
least vaguely related to Internet engineering.

I suspect that my colleagues and I are not the only ones viewing with
alarm various practices of ISPs serving residential users that generally
conflict with the traditional openness and neutrality of Internet
infrastructure.  We started to put together a list of
must/should/shouldn't/mustn't in terms of ISP technical practices, along
the lines of:

  principal purpose is transporting packets expeditiously

  should not constrain customer use of network, except to limit malicious
    or illegal use

  shouldn't block ports except with permission, or to stop imminent attack

  should support multicast and IPv6

  should not either require or prohibit NAT or VPN use

etc, for potential use as criteria against which local ISP behavior could
be judged (in the case of regulated monopolies in particular).  So the
questions are:

  *  does anyone know of such a set of recommendations already written
     down somewhere?

  *  are there discussion forums or other venues where people are working
     on this kind of thing?

Far be it from me to try to constrain the behavior of participants on this
list, but let me suggest that discussion of the technical merits of the
above points or the general wisdom of this effort is probably not
appropriate for the IETF list ...

Thanks,

 - RL "Bob"

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From: "Clarke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 11:46:30 -0500

Bob,

You might try NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) for answers to
these questions. I'm sure those guys can point you to the documentation you
need.

www.nanog.org

Clarke

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 04 Mar 2002 12:10:34 -0500

> these questions. I'm sure those guys can point you to the documentation you

Just be prepared to view any answers you get with some suspicion.  Although
the great majority of the NANOG crew is at least semi-clued and willing to
be helpful, it is still possible to start quite the flame-fest just by
suggesting that an ISP shouldn't number its point-to-point links out of
RFC1918 space, because that breaks Path MTU Discovery for those sites that
do rational martian filtering at their ingress routers.

And I'll not go into the flamefests you can start with mentioning the blocking
or filtering of ports, except to say "Comcast". ;)

Bait&switch advertising (what bandwidth did you *really* buy with your money)
and the distinction between "residential" and "commercial" service (basically,
the latter seems to mean you have a snowball's chance of getting the bandwidth
they hinted you'd get, and possibly a tech support phone number that gets you
somebody clued rather than "try rebooting") are other good "hot buttons".

Regarding "regulated monopolies" - forget it, unless you have an enlightened
'Public Utilities Commision' that is actually something other than a rubber
stamp for the utility in question.

Bottom line - the NANOG crew is a great resource if you need to know how to
get a Cisco or Juniper to tap-dance "Singing in the Rain".  It's also a good
place for a flame-fest on what the preferred Astaire dance for a Juniper is ;)
-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Computer Systems Senior Engineer
				Virginia Tech

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From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Mar 2002 09:33:49 -0800

re: nanog list

luckily, there are no clueless flames, stupidity, or knee-jerk reactions
on this list.

randy

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 04 Mar 2002 12:43:15 -0500

> luckily, there are no clueless flames, stupidity, or knee-jerk reactions

And yes, I knew who did "Singing in the Rain" when I hit send (although I've
already had at least one person point out it was a Gene Kelly number - which
was my point entirely (re-read, and think about it ;)

/Valdis