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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!utah-cs!donn
From: donn@utah-cs.UUCP (Donn Seeley)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.sources.d
Subject: Network hospitality abuse
Message-ID: <3789@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 12-May-86 21:58:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: utah-cs.3789
Posted: Mon May 12 21:58:49 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 14-May-86 20:36:35 EDT
References: <2344@phri.UUCP>
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 46
Xref: linus net.news:3986 net.sources.d:185
Original-Subject: requests from people who missed sources
Original-Original-Subject: Re: Need hershy fonts

Roy Smith (phri!roy) says:

	...  [S]ombody decided to send about 10 Mbytes worth of stuff
	through here via a link we have with pesnta on the west coast.
	I would guess that we average about 5 minutes of phone time a
	week with pesnta.  Not that month!  ...  Our comptroller
	dialed the number on the bill and was quick enough to recognize
	that a modem answered and came to me to find out why I made a
	5-hour call to California.  I assured him it was a fluke, and
	we're still on the net.  ...

What a familiar story...

Our link to hplabs was funded by a grant to a faculty member with
research interests at Hewlett-Packard.  Last year in October and
November, some obnoxious person shipped tens of megabytes of data from
a uucp site on the east coast to one on the west coast, using
utah-cs!hplabs as one of their links (and the ARPAnet as another, I'm
sorry to say; but that's another story).  The professor who was the
principal investigator on the grant received a bill for hundreds of
dollars at the end of the month, instead of the usual tens of dollars.
This professor was willing to subsidize some small amount of traffic
across the hplabs link, the sort of goodwill gesture that keeps the
network as a whole running; but he balked at hundreds of dollars and he
insisted that we pull the plug, which we did.  Hplabs still polls us,
which is kind of them.

I didn't have a chance to intercept the excess traffic and examine its
contents.  In an earlier incident in which our (indirect) link to BYU
was overwhelmed (and the plug consequently pulled), the traffic was
composed of all the known sources to 'rogue' and its variants.  I would
not be surprised if exactly the same data was on its way across the USA
yet another time...  I did get the names of the machines and the names
of the accounts involved, and I tried to call the administrators at
these sites and didn't get anywhere.  I asked the professor and he
decided to let the matter slide since he wasn't paying for the
connection any more.

It's clear that this practice (making other people pay the cost of your
huge uucp transmissions) hasn't ceased on the network.  (If it was the
same person, Roy, I suggest we organize a lynching -- send me mail,
we'll exchange names.) Does anyone have a suggestion for handling these
awkward situations?

Donn Seeley    University of Utah CS Dept    donn@utah-cs.arpa
40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W    (801) 581-5668    decvax!utah-cs!donn