On Mon, 18 Nov 1996, Ehud Gavron wrote:
Now, don't get me wrong. I'd love to have the Internic pissed off at me just as much as the next guy. I just hate to see people (like Matthew, who's been around for a while) being told to "shut up or you'll _never_ get what you want."
You don't understand. The IP allocation people at the Internic get jerked around every day by sleazy people who lie about their IP allocations and do whatever they can to manipulate more IP addresses out of them. The Internic asks you to prove that you have responsibly allocated the IP addresses they gave you. This requires that they *TRUST* your evidence. Trust is the key here. The more you behave like the sleazy bastards with stories about the big investor with $7 billion ready to spend starting next month, the less they trust you. Build up a strong trust relationship with them and you will get much further than by whining. You can build that kind of relationship with honesty and integrity in your reporting of IP address usage. And knowing that you need this to grow, you should make sure that internal policies and customer contracts do not disallow you from releasing that information. If this puts you between a rock and a hard place, then give your customers an ultimatum. Either sign a release for the info, or find another provider. Every contract has an out in it somewhere and if a $10,000 per month customer is preventing you from becoming a multi-million dollar company, then dump them. That's business. I would guess that if you are up front with the customer about the reason you need to release the info to the Internic you are not likely to have a problem with them. And BTW, I don't know Matthew or anyone else at scruz.net. I have absolutely no knowledge of their operations or their history. My messages are directed to the list in general rather than Matthew and scruz.net in particular because I think there is an important lesson here for other ISP's to learn that will prevent them grief down the road. It will likely make the Internic IP allocation job easier too. Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com