[arin-ppml] Fairness of banning IPv4 allocations to somecategoryof organization

[William Herrin]

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:
>> I would call your attention to the allocation policy change years ago
>> in which virtual IP addresses for web servers no longer qualified as
>> need.
>
> because http 1.1 passes the hostname in a use fashion, so the mass of
> addresses is not needed.

Randy,

As much as you may wish to dress it up that way, that simply isn't true.

Https, for example, does not function properly without a different IP
address for each hostname because the SSL certificate for the server
name must be offered to the browser before the HTTP 1.1 server name is
transmitted by the browser.

Even excluding the https issues, there were still a not-insignificant
number of folks at the time using http 1.0 browsers (like NCSA Mosaic)
that didn't supply the Host: request parameter. The policy change
resulted in a forced upgrade for those stragglers.

No, the historical fact is that we became alarmed by the address
consumption for http servers and made a value judgment as a community
that the address pool shouldn't support web server names in a 1:1
ratio to IP addresses. The technology would simply have to accommodate
that judgment rather than the address pool accommodating the
technology. The technical nature of the address' use would no longer
qualify as "need."

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
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