When I’ve stumbled across the headline Porn site feud spawns new DNS attack on NetworkWorld’s web site, the urge to read the article was simply irresistible. The article starts with the following paragraph (emphasis mine):

A scrap between two pornographic Web sites turned nasty when one figured out how to take down the other by exploiting a previously unknown quirk in the Internet's DNS.

The link in the paragraph points to another article documenting a completely different DNS attack. The next paragraph contradicts the first one (emphasis yet again mine):

The attack is known as DNS Amplification. It has been used sporadically since December, but it started getting talked about last month when ISPrime, a small New York ISP, started getting hit hard with what's known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Reading an interestingly-titled article on InformIT, I’ve stumbled across the following text:

The survival time is an estimate of how long an un-patched computer will remain uncompromised once it’s connected to the Internet. While the actual time varies, historically it tends to run between 4 and 20 minutes.

This is such an obvious nonsense that I had to check the source, which is also full of alarming messages, but admits at the end that the problems described largely disappeared with XP SP2. Just to put things in perspective: XP SP2 was released in August 2004 and the graph in the alarming blog post displays data from 2008.

What would you think if you’d receive three queries about the same (somewhat obscure) feature within six hours? It started with a nice e-mail from an engineer that I’ve corresponded with in the past. He wanted to send a Wake-on-LAN packet to a PC in a remote office. Usually you could use the ip directed-broadcast feature, but he wanted to use the remote office router to generate the packet.

Readers of my blog have probably noticed that I’m occasionally documenting the shortcomings of DNS and DHCP servers built into Cisco IOS (I will not even mention the HTTP server, this one gets constantly degraded). On the other hand, although you could centralize all these services, the centralization makes the branch offices completely dependent on the availability of WAN uplinks; without a working uplink, a branch office stops completely.

Another undocumented (and thus very probably unsupported) Tcl-on-IOS detail: numerous Tcl packages are bundled with IOS and available in the tmpsys:lib/tcl directory (the tmpsys: is a virtual file system mapped to a part of the IOS image).

I’ve just opened the January Technical Services News from Cisco. Nothing in there that would really interest me. Almost no routing protocols (one OSPF article), no BGP, no MPLS VPN. Based solely on this newsletter, one could get the feeling that I’m producing more documents covering core IP routing in a month than Cisco (I am positive that’s not the case).

One of my readers sent me an interesting question a while ago:

I reviewed one of your blog posts "Per-Destination or Per Packet CEF Load Sharing?" and wondered if you had investigated previously on how MQC QoS worked together with the CEF load-sharing algorithm (or does it interact at all)? For example, let's say I have two equal cost paths between two routers and the routing table (as well as CEF) sees both links as equal paths to the networks behind each router. On each link I have the same outbound service policy applied with a simple LLQ, BW, and a class-default queues. Does CEF check each IP flow and make sure both link's LLQ and BW queues are evenly used?

Unfortunately, packet forwarding and QoS are completely uncoupled in Cisco IOS. CEF performs its load balancing algorithm purely on source/destination information and does not take in account the actual utilization of outbound interfaces. If you have bad luck, most of the traffic ends on one of the links and the packets that would easily fit on the other link will be dropped by the QoS mechanisms.

Pete sent me an interesting question a while ago:

It might be interesting to write an article about ip dhcp database flash:dhcp-db command, documenting the pros of surviving a reboot versus cons of wear on the flash device.

I’ve already written about a few problems that can be solved with the DHCP database (but obviously a longer text is warranted … already stored in my to-do list) and it took me a while to find the time to dig out the relevant information on the flash device wear.