Broken Internet?

Thu Mar 15 23:09:14 UTC 2001

Thus spake "Peter Francis" <peter at softaware.com>
> >Any business needs:
> >1. to be able to change upstream providers without having to
> >renumber.
>
> Why? Intelligent use of DNS and dhcp make renumbering only a
> minor inconvenience.

Renumbering PCs is a trivial task.  Reconfiguring hundreds (or
thousands) of routers, firewalls, etc. to account for the moved PCs is
not trivial.  Renumbering servers is not trivial.

> >2. to be able to change access providers without having to
> >suffer multi-month down-times.
>
> Mission/business critical services should be in a co-lo anyway
> and not off a DSL line.

Keep in mind that Fortune 100 companies with multiple DS3s in several US
locations are in the same boat wrt renumbering.  Most don't qualify for
portable addresses by ARIN's rules.

Also, try convincing someone like AmEx or Citibank that they should put
their servers under someone else's physical control -- that'll be good
for a laugh.  Sure, that's extreme, but where exactly do you draw the
line on who's "important" enough to host their own servers?

> >3. to be able to have its net-block(s) visible regardless of which
> >ISPs they are currently using.
>
> How do you propose doing this without growing the routing table
> 1-2 orders of magnitude?

If they're only announcing one or two routes (reasonable if RIR policy
were more sane), it would *decrease* the routing tables by an order of
magnitude.

> >Currently the only ones that can do that are those that;
> >1. Are large enough to justify a /20 (begging the question of how
> >they got that large).
> >2. Can afford their own datacenter.
> >
> >It looks like our technical solutions are raising unreasonable
> >barriers to entry for small businesses.
>
> No.  Co-lo your website and "intranet".  Get two T1's that same
> provider via two different entry points/carriers to your office (if
> possible) and you should be about as rock solid you could expect
> for $2-3000/month or there abouts.

Trust all of your server availability and corporate connectivity to a
single ISP?  The only point of failure you've (hopefully) eliminated is
the local loop.  And, if you depend on back-end servers to feed your
coloed web servers (likely), that local loop is still essential.  And
now you're paying for rack space and it's a pain to do maintenance.
Wonderful.

> Peter

S