Search Engines/IP restrictions/policy changes

[Brandon Ross]

On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Ted Pavlic wrote:

> The reason why I said webhosting companies were hit first is because the
> conversion for webhosting companies is a LOT more complex than the
> conversion for ISPs in the situation you state.

I don't agree...

> I've only worked for ISPs for five years, but we've ALWAYS distributed
> dynamic IP addresses to our customers unless they specifically wanted static
> IP addresses. Using dynamic IP configurations allows for a great deal of
> flexibility on the ISP end, and I'm sure even before ARIN made that mandate
> plenty of ISPs were using dynamic IP addresses. Perhaps it was more than
> five years ago when that policy was made, but I don't ever remember a
> painful conversion to dynamic IP addresses. About the only thing painful
> about dynamic IP addresses that I've ever worked with involved using RIP to
> advertise on which new terminal server an IP address popped up on, and that
> wasn't a very big issue.
> 
> Sure -- in the conversion from a static scheme to a dynamic scheme it
> becomes complicated at the support level getting your customers to change...

Like I said.  In that case it wasn't so much the technology that was the
problem, it was the support.

> But converting to name-based webhosting is much more complicated in that
> certain technologies do not currently exist in web clients as well as
> servers to support the type of name-based hosting ARIN suggests.

This is no different than the conversion to dynamic dialup IPs.  There
were several older clients in the market that didn't support dynamic IPs,
they were instantly obsoleted by the change and technical support had to
handle the load.  The server support exists for plan old HTTP, the set of
server software that doesn't support it will be obsoleted by the change.
That's a normal effect of working in technology, if you don't continue to
improve and adapt, you won't be around long.

> Alright -- so FTP isn't a good complaint...
> 
> * How about FrontPage Server Extensions?
> * How about SSL?

Those sound like perfectly reasonable and acceptable exceptions to the
policy.  (Actually if I had my way, and if what I understand about
FrontPage is accurate, I have little sympathy, when a protocol is designed
outside of the standards process it deserves to be broken.  Of course, I 
fully understand the business constraints behind it and know that that's 
not a reasonable course of action).

> * What about the damage this does to load balance infrastructures already in
> place?

They can adapt.  There are many load balancing devices on the market that
can look deeper into a TCP session and load balance, traffic shape, or
traffic redirect based on this sort of information.  Again, progress can't
be made without breaking a few things at some point.

> * What about non-HTTP/1.1 compliant browsers?

They just need an upgrade.  It should be easy enough to identify a
non-compliant browser and send an informational page sending the user to
an upgrade site.

> And, as you said, ARIN has been pretty vague about what "exceptions" are.

Yes, but I think they have to be.  As soon as exceptions are documented,
all of a sudden everyone needs the exception.

> It's the principle of the thing -- ARIN has bit off more than they should be
> allowed to chew. They're being influenced by the cable companies (which you
> yourself speak of later on in your message) and other IP hogs that do not
> deserve so much credit. Granted, webhosting providers need to have a bigger
> voice in ARIN and it's their own fault for not having enough of a voice
> already, but ARIN should not become an organization which greatly favors one
> organization or another. ARIN should be an organization which supports the
> better oganization of the Internet. The policy change that ARIN has made
> hardly makes the Internet better for anyone except for those cable
> companies.

You've already mentioned the participation issue so I won't bring that up
again.  I do want to make it clear that I don't believe it's the cable
company's fault particularly, just that I agree there are other places
effort to conserve address space should be focused there first.

> > The only area that I see that is consuming addresses at an alarming rate
> > without a good reason that should get attention first is cable modems.
> > There still seems to be a perception that cable modem users need static
> > addressing for some reason that escapes me.  I have to say that I would
> > much rather see ARIN require dynamic addressing (whether that's
> > dynamically assigned through a PPP or DHCP like mechanism, or a NAT
> > solution doesn't matter to me) than pursue the web hosting consumption.
> 
> Every cable provider I have used and evaluated has used DHCP, but they are
> giving out real Internet addresses which makes no sense to me.

I should be a bit more clear.  Yes, they use DHCP, but as of the last time
I checked (and it was admittedly a while ago) they assigned the same
address to a customer all the time.

To pick on the largest, @Home, according to whois, is allocated
35 /16's.  According to their web page they just passed 2 million
subscribers in August.  If my math is correct, that's almost 2.3 million
addresses in all.  To your point, the largest of the web hosting
companies, Verio, has about half a million web sites.  Assuming they are
all hosted on individual IPs, if some sort of dynamic addressing at @Home
saved only half of their allocation, that's twice as good as requiring
Verio to put ALL of their web sites behind a single IP, which seems quite
unlikely because of the exceptions you've mentioned. 

Brandon Ross                                                 404-522-5400
EVP Engineering, NetRail                           http://www.netrail.net
AIM:  BrandonNR                                             ICQ:  2269442
Read RFC 2644!