Correcting the mistake

[Dave Stewart]

At 09:27 AM 9/14/00 -0500, J Bacher wrote:

> > 1) Retract the policy regarding justification based on IP-based virtual
> > hosts.  Re-announce the policy, with an effective date 90 or 120 days
> > later.   Personally, I'd be ok with 90 days, but some may not be, they may
> > need a little more time to convert.
>
>With our without effective solutions to implement?

I don't think it's ARIN's mission to be sure that effective solutions are 
implemented.  If you insist that ARIN, or any oversight group, wait to make 
changes in any policy until someone else does something or another, it 
becomes a simple matter to stop the policy change - just don't create a 
solution.

C'mon... we're all pretty bright folks.  We can find an effective, 
efficient solution to these problems - if we're willing to try.

Part of the solution, in my opinion, is to continue to allow justification 
based on IP-based virtual hosts.  If that's your business model, how you've 
built an entire company or even part of a company, then in my mind, that 
justifies the allocation.

Or, we can just let our fear of change rule our lives and our businesses.

> > 3) A summary of reasons for the policy change - in other words, have ARIN
> > justify its policies to the membership, just as we must justify our
> > requests for address space.
>
>What justification process do you see being implemented that prioritizes
>one type of allocation [dial-up, dedicated] over another
>[webservers]?  Non-bias and consistency in the application of IP address
>provisioning should be part of policy.

I don't mean to propose changes to justification for address space.  I 
simply mean for ARIN to disclose to the membership, in a concise summary, 
the reasons behind a policy change.

By this I don't mean something like "We're going to disallow justification 
based on  IP-based virtual hosts because we need to conserve address space."

I'm fairly sure most of you will agree that we'd like to see more of the 
thought process behind policy changes.

Should web hosting take precedence over dialup users?  Frankly, no.  No one 
application should take priority over another.  Basically, the policy 
should be that if you aren't wasting space - such as static IPs for every 
dialup customer - then  you should get an allocation sufficient to cover 
your projected needs for the next year or so.

> >From the arguments that I've seen, pro and con this change, this appears
>to be no more than a band-aid to the real problem.  Unless major web
>hosting companies migrate a large percentage of their respective IP
>addressed based webservers to virtuals, I can't see that, overall, we've
>saved much IP address space.

ARIN doesn't have the authority to put more than a band-aid on it.