Spam Control Considered Harmful

Fri Oct 31 15:35:54 UTC 1997

On Fri, 31 Oct 1997, Peter Galbavy wrote:

> I is *not* a waste. It is a very good use of IP address space. We
> have usage density of about 99% of our allocated blocks. Meanwhile
> the customers love it bcause they can do things that not having an
> IP address would stop. Their own domain name for a start -
> "snark.demon.co.uk" for my dial-up. Security based on IP address.
> We have many many busines users who use the fact that they know
> what IP address a dial-up user will have to authenticate access to
> their corporate networks.

We originally used static addresses for dialup customers.  We requested
more address space, and as part of the justification procedure I was told
by Kim Hubbard that we had to use dynamic address assignments for anyone
that was not connected 24/7.  I used the same arguments, including that
you can't get any more efficient that assigning a single /32 to a single
host, but was told that in the days of address scarcity we couldn't afford
such a use of address space.  We changed everything to dynamic, and after
now having 12x the number of customers, we are still using less space than
we were.

Until IPv6 is widely used and address space is not so critical, we have to
conserve address space and using it wisely.

Perhaps in the UK there are different requirements for allocation of address
space than InterNIC/ARIN.

John Tamplin					Traveller Information Services
jat at Traveller.COM				2104 West Ferry Way
205/883-4233x7007				Huntsville, AL 35801