On Sat, 13 Mar 2004, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
So DOCSIS has a technical limitation which may or may not apply. This is reasonable justification for limiting upstream bandwidth, not for specifying that users can't run servers. If users can run servers effectively in the limited available upstream bandwidth, then there is no _technical_ reason to prevent them.
I think people are being sloppy about saying no servers on certain types of networks. I think the actual requirement is for a long-term end-to-end identifier for systems, and maybe even network users, before they can do certain activities on the network so you can trace or block the system. Systems without long-term unique end-to-end identifiers would only be able to do a limited number of things because they are essentially fungible. Neither the location nor type of access media is important. A student in a college dorm room with an uncontrolled DHCP address may not be able to run a server, even though they have more than enough symetric Gig-ethernet bandwidth and you know what dorm it is physically located because all student servers look alike. On the other hand, a mobile server on a US Navy ship on a 1200 baud radio connection with a fixed address would be permitted to run a server even though you may have no idea where in the world the ship is physically located today because you could identify which server it was. (server clusters acting as a single system doesn't change this.) If you want to spend about $50/month for a static IP address for your DSL line, then the question becomes should you be able to send mail directly from your home server with a static IP address on a DSL line until abused? No need to buy another box, find a colo or figure out how to remotely administer another system or tunnel to it to send mail.