Static IP addresses for Dial-up

Robert Elz kre at munnari.OZ.AU
Mon Jan 29 10:36:33 UTC 1996


    Date:        Mon, 29 Jan 1996 11:15:32 +0100 (MET)
    From:        "Brian Carpenter   CERN-CN" <brian at dxcoms.cern.ch>
    Message-ID:  <9601291015.AA08851 at dxcoms.cern.ch>


    1. [..] I must state that the IAB has absolutely no role [..]

Absolutely.
    
    2. [..] I can tell you that we are in favour of technology 
    that conserves address space and facilitates renumbering.

Again, absolutely.

I should say here though that that technology doesn't exist
yet.   My brother happens to be a customer of Demon's.  He
has one of those statically assigned IP addresses for a dial
up customer (he's just a PC at home and typically a few minutes
a day).

That sounds like a perfect place for a dynamic address, however,
if he had that, it would make life harder for me.   With his
static address I can instal filters to give him more access to
my system at home (which is basically permanently connected, and
not a PC) than I allow all the rest of you.   (For Tony's
benefit - no, this is not relying on source address filtering,
I actually filter the packets that my system sends out, I will
let it send packets to him that I won't let it send elsewhere,
which has basically the same effect).

While I have no doubt that not all of Demon's customers have
requirements or uses anything like this, simply outlawing
static addresses for dial up uses seems to me to be going a
little too far.   At least until we have the mechanisms that
would make this need redundant (like dynamic DNS updates, and
IP security widely deployed), plus good renumbering.

Incidentally, absolutely no-one seems to doubt that if I have
two systems at home, on a baby-lan, I can have a /29 or /30
statically assigned to me (at 50% or less address effeciency),
but that if I have just one it seems I'm not supposed to have
a /32 (100% address effeciency).   Weird...

kre



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