On 20/06/11 6:18 AM, Leo Bicknell wrote:
Almost every customer I've dealt with who requested such a thing eventually ended up having their contract terminated for spamming.
I would use this answer in reply to the customer, and ask them to (specifically) justify their request for the discontiguous blocks.
Many of the RBL's chose to increase the size of their blocks to put more pressure on ISP's. So if you give them /29's in 10 different blocks they will block the /24 in each, then a /23 in each, and so on. Basically this becomes a quick way for you to get 100% of your address space blocked, and make the rest of your customers really unhappy. When the RBL's see you gave them a bunch of small blocks in different supernets they assume you are spammer friendly.
And mention all of this as well. If you don't have a special fee you charge when you have to deal with cleaning up or recovering contaminated IPs, include one with this next allocation. Theory: Since their current userbase is not currently creating a spam problem, they are doing one of two things: 1) They are going after a more risky new userbase (e.g. looking at providing services for more spammy customers). 2) They are *concerned* about the possibility of accidentally acquiring a more risky new userbase, and proactively designing their network to have the least collateral damage (to themselves) if such a customer should appear on their network. This would be prudent, good business even. Except for how it prepares for a business shift to #1. The big risk it that they are going to try to sell you on theory #2 when their real business plan is theory #1. I would charge a significant extra fee for discontiguous address space, enough that you can afford to carefully assign the rest of the block to non-web-non-mail-server uses, to not put other customers at risk. jc