>> i contend that all one's routers should be rigorously >> configured as programmatically as possible. > What sort of tools do you use to facilitate this?
ntt/verio, level(3), ... have sophisticated locally developed systems. they see these as competitive advantage, so sharing is extremely unlikely. and, as they are home grown, they likely do not have a portable layer of indirection to corporate back-end data. some large telcos seem proud that "the network is the database of record" and are proud of it. i wish all my competitors thought that. for my own use, i use m4, python and perl, and peval() randy