Save me from teh Stupids...

[asbrand.livejournal.com]

Copy of the body of e-mail we got today (I am a Network Engineer for a large ISP here in Atlanta):

NOC,

Our Customer, *****, has called in stating we are not advertising the following route, 192.168.110.0/24.  I have verified we are receiving the route from the customer and are advertising this upstream to ROUTER01(x.x.x.17) and ROUTER02(x.x.x.21).  I have checked several looking glass servers and do not see a path thru this connection.  Can you please take a look?

....can anybody here see the flaw in what they are requesting?

*sigh*

Goobers...



-Az

Comments

[sethb.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to figure out the rudest way to explain it to the customer.

Maybe tell him that you won't advertise routes for him that ARIN didn't allocate to him, so as to avoid hijacking other people's IP space.

[jon787.livejournal.com]

Tell him a /24 is too small be advertised upstream. If he would like to upgrade to a /8 you have 10.x.y.z for him.

[jon787.livejournal.com]

If you think he'll recognize the 10 block try:

172.16.0.0/12 instead.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Your 10.x.y.z reminded me of the company we wrote some software for at one point... on a couple of occasions when I was on-site with others to install various versions, I noticed they were using 6.x.y.z for their internal network addresses.

I wonder what the US DoD would think of that. Or what would happen if someone tried, for some reason, to access a computer on MILNET.

[jon787.livejournal.com]

I discovered my desktop at work had a public IP and was wondering who's netblock we had swiped for a few moments. Then a bigger WTF hit me, we actually have a /24 that is used to give everything on our network public IPs!

Seriously, even the JTAG debugger on my desk has a public IP! I've considered seeing just how good the firewall is and try to sneak a telnet session past it onto the embedded system I'm working with.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Now that reminds me of the company I first worked at -- we had a real honest-to-goodness allocated net block (192.104.77.0/24 IIRC), from back when (as one sysadmin put it) you had to request it from the President of the USA himself. But we only used it for our internal network (back then our connection to the Internet was only a dial-up email checking thing to CompuServe), and for our IP connections to a couple of customers we used 192.104.78.x, 192.104.79.x etc, which *weren't* ours.

Ah, good times.

Fast forward many years, and at one point that address block became publicly routable when one of our internal boxes was made available from outside. I can image there was some annoyance since it's a real ARIN block rather than a RIPE one (we're in Germany), let alone a subnet of our upstream provider's space.

But all that is gone, since we were swallowed by first one company, then that company by another, and they imposed their address space on us.

Ah well, it was kind of neat to have a real allocated "public" netblock and then just use it on our internal LAN.

[pne.livejournal.com]

...looks as if that netblock belongs to someone else now.

Ah well.

[manuka.livejournal.com]

I worked at a large three-letter corporation once and the internal addresses were subnetted 9.x.x.x :)

You know your company's been in the internet business for a while when it owns a single-digit routable class A :)

[berkeleyfarm.livejournal.com]

Oh. My.

You got this from a "network admin"?

[asbrand.livejournal.com]

Yep.

Sad, 'eh?




-Az

[egearman.livejournal.com]

Oy vey. Sounds like someone, the supposed "network admin" needs some more training. And some wall to wall counseling.

[berkeleyfarm.livejournal.com]

I worked with some like that. "How do you spell ping?" Sympathies.

I was with $LOCALGOV in a decentralized environment. Got it from the internal people and the external $SMALLAGENCIES - we ended up diagnosing a lot of network problems for them.

"Sir, everyone on the planet but your site can get to $OURSITE. Have you tried a traceroute to see where it fails?"
"Traceroute? What's that?"

And I'm a server-only admin. Sheesh.

[jdotmi.livejournal.com]

I'm not a network admin and I know better than that.

[tregare.livejournal.com]

/me giggles

[brotherflounder]

Head, meet desk.

I think we need to call Webster's and make sure they didn't redefine "head admin" while we weren't looking.

[tragnon.livejournal.com]

OMG, I'm a freaking accountant and I recognize the flaw!

[brotherflounder]

I'm an accountant-in-training (hopefully soon to be an intern at Bosch). Glad to see I'm not the only tech-savvy one out there.

[manuka.livejournal.com]

... not to be confused with an intern-ette :)

[arashikurobara.livejournal.com]

I'm a freaking biochem major and I can see it.

... though I have been reading my boyfriend's networks textbook lately just for the hell of it. >_> In my defense, it's not like it said "hey, these subnets are for internal IPs!" More like it means I now know what the /24 part means.

[tadiera.livejournal.com]

At my job, that person would be laughed off the helpdesk.

[ptstech.livejournal.com]

Wow. Just wow.

[hikari-neko.livejournal.com]

"So, what you're telling me is: nothing is wrong. Did you really need to e-mail me about that?"

[jecook]

"Sir, we don't route martians because the rest of the internet would laugh their asses off at you.

[ravan.livejournal.com]

Bwahahahaha!! Oh, my!! That is too funny... and dumb.

[superbus.livejournal.com]

He has an MCSE, doesn't he?

[pne.livejournal.com]

He's a Minesweeper Consultant/Solitaire Expert?

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

"I suggest you call 555-5555. The response you'll get there is directly relevant to the problem you're having. Bye!"

[whitewolf3399.livejournal.com]

Ahhh so it's not just our customers that do that!

Nice to know we haven't cornered the market on idiots...

Sadly though most of our Tier1 folks wouldn't get that *Sigh*

[asbrand.livejournal.com]

One thing I've learned in my 8+ years in this industry...

...the supply of idiots never seems to run out...



-Az

[mogaribue.livejournal.com]

WTF that's Network Engineering 101. Throw a CCNA book at his head.

[kait-the-great.livejournal.com]

The institution whose help desk I worked at had IP addresses starting with 129. Talk about an annoying and common typo.

[jarad.livejournal.com]

Let him do it. Then you can get his ass fired when the network gets flooded out of existence by all the rogue packets headed there.