Address Assignment Question

JC Dill jcdill.lists at gmail.com
Mon Jun 20 15:01:24 UTC 2011


  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





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