On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Len Budney wrote:
> Not to restart another perennial flame-war, but why then does he
> blacklist people who block his probes? Is it really his intention to
> provide the service of blacklisting both a) open relays and b) people
> who disagree with him?
As the mail admin for a sire that is in ORBS because my address provider
blocks them, I can speak to this a little bit.
It makes perfect sense, from a certain point of view. The ORBS guys want
to list relays. The run across an address block that has a number of open
relays, and the adminitrators of that block aren't responsive to requests
to arrange to have them closed. ORBS then lists those particular
addresses (their purpose in life.) In response the provider blocks the
ORBS machines. The ORBS guys can no longer test for relays, and
especially given what they had found before and the provider's lack of
response, they can only assume there are any number of open relays in the
address block.
Were they to do otherwise, they'd be fail-open instead of fail-closed.
Ryan
