On Thu, 5 Sep 2002, Tony Tauber wrote:
At least as importantly, why do 254 addresses get provided where the actual need might not warrant that quantity?
Being out here on the edge, I ask that question a lot. Customer calls and says "I need a static IP". I (actually our front line people) ask "WHY?". If they mutter something like "VPN" or "Mail Server" or similar we give one to them without much discussion. If they say "We need a block of 4 or 8" (/30 or /29) and they mutter something along the lines of "We're running our own firewall and want to put a couple of servers on the outside", then we give them to them after some discusson of "are you sure you need to do it this way?" and explain the glories of PNAT to them. If they want a /28 or larger, they better be ready with a real netorking plan, really have a clue, and really understand why they don't want to use NAT or why they need more than the 8 addresses. IP Purists will probably be quick to jump all over me with the evils of NAT, but for the average small business it works perfectly well and solves a lot of security-related issues. (NOTE: I am not saying that NAT and a Stateful Inspection Firewall or similar is the same thing). The average office needs 1 probably-dynamic IP. Period. Back to the original poster's question. We charge a buck-a-month-per-ip more as a "conservation tax" than for anything else. Typically if we feel the customer has packed services as tightly as is reasonable in the address space we waive the fee (good use of NAT and/or other address conservation technologies and/or really valid technical reasons). Customers giving us reasons like "I can't make my server do name-based (non SSL) virtual hosting so I need an IP for each domain I host" or "I think it would be cool to have a real publically visible address on each of my 100 computers in my Beowulf cluster of 486's" are the types of things we don't waive the fees for even though they are valid enough reasons to hand out a block of address space for. - Forrest W. Christian (forrestc@imach.com) AC7DE ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Innovation Machine Ltd. P.O. Box 5749 http://www.imach.com/ Helena, MT 59604 Home of PacketFlux Technologies and BackupDNS.com (406)-442-6648 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Protect your personal freedoms - visit http://www.lp.org/