Subject: The bigoted ad hominem attacks are really annoying!

From: Chet Uber <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1998 13:13:50 -0500

From a Bob Allisat rant:

" if you would like to maintain the appropriate  topic, answer my
previous article addressing what myself and other citizens of the
Internet consider to be the over-centralized and IMHO highly vulnerable
to abuse root name server structure, including potentially harmful
interferances by persons like Vixie, Kashpureff, Postel or others. These
are very serious,
 on-topic issues worthy of consideration."

A few of you may now me, but I have been a lurker on IETF lists for a
while now; and have waiting as long as I could before making a couple of
comments.

It is not my idea to serve as a "defender" of Jon Postel or Paul Vixie.
I seriously doubt either of these two gentlemen need any help. So, would
someone please explain to me why a person like Jon Postel is continually
bashed, battered, slandered, etc. To my knowledge (and a lot of
research) Mr. Postel has been one of the greatest contributors to the
creation of the Internet that there is. Here is a man who has taken on
some of the most difficult and politically charged tasks around, and has
done a great job. He has authored and/or edited several of the core
RFCs, maintained the IANA, and just been an all around selfless guy. He
is one of a few people that I personally respect and look up to.

WHAT ARE THE SPECIFIC ALLEGATIONS AGAINST POSTEL THAT ARE RELEVANT TO
IETF THAT MR. ALLISAT HAS? His generalized hatred of anyone on the
inside of helping develop the greatest communication system undertaken
by mankind is appalling. The attacks on people in general remind me of
the same sick unfounded hatred I see of African Americans, immigrants,
Jews, and homosexuals. Let me say that this behavior does not appear
limited to Mr. Allisat alone, I have noticed a large number of people
that are just spewing garbage and hatred. Must of this seems to be NOT
for the betterment of the community, but done in a self serving manner.

I know I could send all of the offenders traffic to /dev/null; but I
instead sort it into a separate folder on the chance that they have
something valid to contribute. I have been sadly disappointed in my
assumption so far, but will hope for that kernel of wisdom coming from
the far out.

Please understand that I am not bashing Bob because he is Bob; rather, I
am upset by his specific words. They seem to be continually inflammatory
and self-serving in nature.

ADDITIONAL POINTS:

Did not Jon Postel make the Root Server changes in order to conduct an
experiment? If so, were the results favorable to his hypothesis?

Does Paul Vixie's Black Hole not make an excellent tool and political
lever in dealing with domains which allow allow rampant spam?

Does not Fred Bakers involvement at the highest levels with the IANA
serve as a positive benefit for the Internet Community in general, and
IETF in particular? What is so wrong with the fact that he seems to have
Ira's ear?

Did the U.S. Government not indeed provide the funding through the DOD
for the seminal research on the distributed computing model which
eventually became ARPANET, the NSF, and now the Internet? Why should
they give away control of something they have helped build, and continue
to subsidize research in? No, they do not currently own the majority (or
subsidize) of the backbone; but does this mean they lose the right to
protect their interests. The Internet does provide threats to national
and international security. It has indeed created an entirely new form
of warfare.

Why is it so hard for some people to grasp the idea that there is a
difference between a user of Internet and its protocols, and the
developers of those same protocols? Everyone that has a driver's license
is allowed access to the highway and road system infrastructure, but
only a small percentage of them were involved in the design of such
things as width, speed limits, baking angles in curves, etc. The same is
true of the power grids and the POTS. Why should every user of the
Internet have a say in the way that numbering and naming occurs? The
concept of all users having an equal vote on the Internet Infrastructure
and operating protocols is absurd. First of all, most of them don't have
a clue as to what is involved; and finally, most of them don't care. It
is a vocal minority that claims to speak for the masses.

I could go on, but I think you get my drift. I truly wish my first post
to the IETF mailing list could have been a contribution to an ID or
something meaningful, but alas my bullshit detector has been getting a
work out, and I am tired of the noise in my head :). I am sure I will
get flamed, but I really had to get this off my chest.

I TRULY HOPE that people will spend more time working towards a common
goal of having a phenomenal communications network with a wide variety
of tools; rather then the current trend of disinformation and self
concern.

I totally enjoyed the 42nd IETF meeting, and look forward to the 43rd in
Orlando. I hope to meet more interesting people, and to make my comments
in the WG meetings.

Regards,
Chet Uber, Chief Technology Officer
World Media Company
[email-masked] / vox: 402.444.1158 / fax 402.346.7158 / PageNet Digital
402.899.1854
"My Life is an MPEG"

---

From: "William Allen Simpson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 98 20:51:26 GMT

> From: Chet Uber <[email-masked]>
That's approximately what I do, also; I only look when someone makes a
quoted reply, and I need to look back for context.

But, I wish there were never quoted replies.  It would be preferable to
completely ignore the postings, and never reply to them.  Should Bob
Allisat and Jeff Williams attend an IETF meeting, turn your back upon
them, ignore them, forget them.  Shun them.  They are not part of the
community.

And in answer to a private query: traditional shunning is permanent.
Those "sent to Coventry" were never allowed back under any
circumstances.  In some traditions, under the threat of tarring and
feathering and being ridden out of town on a rail -- very painful, just
short of fatal.

[email-masked]
    Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1998 21:10:03 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)

I'm probably going to regret this, but...

On Sat, 10 Oct 1998 15:14:07 -0400 (EDT) Bob Allisat 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>  I have attacked no-one and amply
>  apologized for any past errors
>  on my part. Jon Postel redirected
>  network traffic from it's established
>  patterns 
>...

Bob, 

Especially if you are going to continue to post this sort of 
material to technical/engineering lists, try to get your facts 
straight and to understand the relevant technology (those are 
expectations most of us have of participants in the IETF).  
Jon Postel's experiment, however well-advised or not, didn't 
divert any traffic and no end-user or intermediate site saw data 
that was any different from what they would have seen had the 
switch not been made.  Indeed, the change was substantially 
undetectable except administratively and most of us who found 
out about it (before reading about it in the papers) did so from 
telephone or email messages from third parties expressing either 
delight or chagrin; we didn't detect network disruptions or the 
server changes themselves.

In layman's terms, the "normal" situation is that all of the 
root servers except one obtain update information directly from 
that one.  This is also the normal situation with almost all of 
the zones in the DNS: there is an origin server for the zone, 
and a number of secondaries that draw information off of it.  
But it is also feasible for one secondary to "pull" information 
from another.  That isn't done terribly often, but it is done 
on an everyday basis in a number of special circumstances, e.g., 
as a step in transparent transition of primaries (origin 
servers) or when two secondaries have good connectivity with 
each other but poor or per-bit-expensive connectivity with the 
primary.

In other words, if we have an origin server, A, and two 
secondaries, B and C, it really makes no difference (modulo some 
possible issues of latency) in the data given out to users of 
those servers whether C gets its data by copying them directly 
from A or whether it copies them from B which earlier copied 
them from A.

And _that_ was the relationship that the exercise to which you 
refer tested: whether the root servers could operate in that 
sort of "some copy from the origin, others copy from one of 
them" style, rather than in "everyone copies from the origin".  
Was it desirable or necessary to try it?  Different people have 
different opinions.  Whatever political implications one might 
try to read into it aside, one group might claim that it was 
obvious that it would work for the root given that it has been 
working for years in various subsidiary zones. Another group 
might claim that we have a long and painful history in software 
and database engineering of systems that work perfectly well as 
long as boundary conditions are avoided but which fail seriously 
when they hit those boundary conditions.  Since the root of a 
tree is often different from its branches in subtle ways, that 
group would argue that this needed to be tested.

>  list. Postel's actions were similar 
>  to Kashpureff's political protest re-
>  direction of Internic's traffic only

No.  Again, leaving whatever politics and conspiracy theories 
one might come up with aside, Postel's effort delivered data 
that were identical in every way to the data that would have 
been delivered had the change not been made.  Kashpureff's 
effort apparently (I have no first-hand information) delivered 
*different* data and resulted in some end-systems accessing 
different sites than those the users had a reasonable 
expectation of reaching.

>  The network was disrupted for no reason.

Except that, unless you count the rise in telephone and email 
traffic _discussing_ the incident, there was _no_ network 
disruption.  No data were different from what they would have 
been, no user saw a site different from what would normally have 
been expected, etc.  DNS queries were resolved, and, if there 
were marginal delays, they were too small for our network 
performance monitoring arrangements to detect. It is hard for me 
to find "network disruption" in that situation, even if it makes 
good rhetoric.

    john