January 18, 2001

Morons with Access Lists
   by stacy <pfftnet@stacy.pfft.net>

Why is it that so many people out there have jobs that give them access to really dangerous things, when they obviously have no credentials for giving them such stuff? I mean dangerous in a network sense - blocking things they don't understand, allowing things they don't understand, generally not understanding anything, and making us suffer. I bet I haven't met more than 5 competent firewall administrators, ever. It's almost as hard to find competent system administrators.

My rant today involves a particularly clueless email admin somewhere who can't tell the difference between domain.com and domain.com.it. Notice the different TLD (top-level domain). One is .com. The other is .it. These are really totally different and have nothing to do with one another. Email admins in particular should know this. The domain of the company where I work is domain.com. There are also domain.com.it and domain.com.ua and domain.com.tw. All of these are the source of large amounts of spam. I hate spam as much as the next person, but blaming domain.com for this is really spectacularly ignorant.

Someone in my company needed to send email to a customer. When he tried, he got a bounced email that said "domain blocked due to spam." I receive abuse@domain.com and I can tell you the only spam complaints I have ever gotten were from the idiots out there who think like that email admin. I used to patiently tell them that it's not the same, and I can't help them, but I just got tired of it and stopped. I certainly never heard from anyone in authority anywhere. If I cared about the sales guy who's having the troubles, I'd call the admin and give him an earful about how clueless he is, but I really can't be bothered. I've got clueful things to do.

Published: January 18, 2001
Editor: stacy