At 08:05 PM 11/9/98 -0500, Steven J. Sobol wrote:
On Mon, Nov 09, 1998 at 10:27:35AM -0800, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:
So it goes from a few hundred MB's to a few GBs? What's the big deal. Given a trivial CustomerDB, in an RDBMS, it's still under 100 GB for a few million IPs. 150 GB of RAID5 is still less than $30KUS and dropping daily, even on HP (High Priced <grin>) equipment.
It seemed to be a lot, to me. Of course, if you had every single IPv4 address SWIP'd, that'd be 4,294,967,296 records multiplied by the size of the record, but not every IP is going to be SWIP'd.
Please bear with me if this seems elementary to y'all. Lets look at this further. If we assume that only domain-name holders will manage their DNS entries and make them manage their individual users and hosts, the there'll be at least two hosts per domain (one server and one workstation). For a clean sub-net (/31), this burns four IP addresses (assuming a 1:1 domain/sub-net relation) for two hosts. That's also one busy server because there's no room for a router or anything else. It's not exactly efficient either. Let's skip the intermediate example and go straight to a /29, because a /30 isn't much better (6 ip addresses and four hosts, not much room there either). Now we have room for a router, file-server, print-server, web-server, and four workstations. This is a small office. I actually see the sense in ARIN not SWIPing smaller than a /29. This is the smallest unit that makes sense. Arranged differently, using NAT, one could have up to 7 workstations and one production server in the Internet and any number of servers/routers in the intra-net (I actually don't see need for more than 30 of these. That would be a very data-intensive company). This should cover most small businesses. The trick is in finding out how many servers and workstations have to have internet visibility and how many are only there for infrastructure (intra-net). At MHSC, we assume that all workstations need internet access (browsing and internet services), but only a small percentage of servers actually have to have it (serving internet services and corporate connectivity). What this means for DNS is that only such an office will need to manage their own DNS entries and that also happens to be the smallest unit that ARIN will SWIP (we also begin to understand why this is so, although ARIN should include some of this reasoning in thier web-site, or on the InterNIC, so that Joe User will understand this too). Now we get to virtual hosts. The ISP carries these on their DNS servers and on their web-sites. All of these resolve to the same apache server cluster. No addreses need be SWIPed unless the domain-name holder also has machines at their physical location (in which case, see above). These folks don't "manage" DNS at all because they have no real hosts, they are a virtual domain in every sense of th term. Their ISP does all the work for them. Their workstations are probably dynamicly assigned connections from their ISP as well. The point here is that, since they don't get SWIPed, they don't need a database entry. We've now cut down our worst-case scenario, by a factor of eight, to 536,870,912 sub-nets. Even if we assume 2048B per RDBMS entry that comes out to 1,099,511,627,776 (1.1TB). Hmmm, that's a bit out-there, but do-able for Oracle. The disk system (15 cascaded RAID5 sub-systems at 100GB each) should cost about $150KUS at today's prices. However, notice that this is a worst-case maximum use scenario. We are nowhere near there yet. Kim should have a better idea, but the real numbers should be one quarter of that, present utilization, allowing for pre-assigned ip-blocks, and the swamp. Notice something else, I just talked my-self out of SWIPing anything less than a /29 and backed into the probable reason ARIN doesn't SWIP anything less that a /29. Kim; this is NOT an obvious line of reasoning, but is probably what your analysts went through. You'd catch a LOT less flack if y'all published these things.
I don't know what it would require in terms of human processing time, if any.
No man-power required, it's all automatable. ___________________________________________________ Roeland M.J. Meyer, ISOC (InterNIC RM993) e-mail: <mailto:rmeyer@mhsc.com>rmeyer@mhsc.com Internet phone: hawk.mhsc.com Personal web pages: <http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer>www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer Company web-site: <http://www.mhsc.com/>www.mhsc.com/ ___________________________________________ I bet the human brain is a kludge. -- Marvin Minsky