Requests for tunnels

[Steve Bertrand]

I've run into an interesting situation...

By nature, I'm a friendly, give-everything-I-can type person, but I grew
up without much trust (ie. you build trust with me).

Therefore, if I've been helping someone with an issue on _insert mail
list at something-I-know.org_ and it turns out that they could benefit from
having a VM on a remote network, I give them one temporarily.

The VM is usually an FBSD jail on a box that is situated in my 'hosting'
arm that we have placed outside of our edge. If naughtiness happens, our
standard monitors will easily pick this up.

Over the years, I've had people that I have never met trust me with
routing tables, root/enable access to gear, "change what you need and
call this number if you fsck it up" etc.

This is all ok, because I have respect, loyalty, honour and the general
sense that `they would do it for me`.

As an aside before I go further, I just want to give a quick shout to
Kevin Day of your.org, he.net (particularly Mike who I've mostly dealt
with) and Ross West of connection.ca).

Lately, I've joined a couple of web forums. Although I hate using the
'web' for communication, I thought I'd do it for IPv6-sake. Since, I've
had at least three people asking for BGP tunnelling arrangements.

Even though I don't pay for a lick of my IPv6 transit, I have done this
in the past for specific individuals who were once just like me. These
individuals were people that I met on-list, and who were super-excited,
and the only reason I did this on a temporary basis is so that I could
give them one-to-one live support as they performed their testing
(yes... I stopped my day job to help them understand v6 and get it
working within their network. They just needed to be able to 'ping' from
a remote site to prove it working).

The people who are mailing me that I've `met` on the forums seem *very*
pushy. I offered a test tunnel into my network, and within a few
minutes, they had replied with specific details with the information
that _I_ should configure _my_ gear to comply with.

In essence, to make my long story short, my belief is that we
happy-go-lucky-push-v6 folk are about to run into a situation where
scammers will try to exploit our good nature.

Has this happened to you?

I remember when I originally went v6-live, I had no idea what to ask,
and it was Kevin Day from your.org who stepped up with the details for
me, including creating my route object.

With the experience and knowledge that I have garnered over the two
years since my initial setup, I can say authoritatively that when
someone I am trying to offer the same type of help to is telling me how
to configure *my* gear to suit *their* setup, its not help for v6
testing that they are after.

Thoughts?

Steve

ps. what really pisses me off is when they state that:

"
P.S.

I have marked all address on my router with blue alphabet and your
router with red alphabet.
"

...wtf... do you see red and blue in there? What's worse:

"
Senior Corporate Support Network Engineer
Internet Service & Support Division
Technical & Operation Department
"

..._network engineer_ *emailing* me with HTML and thinks I'll understand
colours? heh