IP address fee??

Fri Sep 6 06:43:17 UTC 2002

On Thu, 5 Sep 2002, Tony Tauber wrote:

> At least as importantly, why do 254 addresses get provided where the
> actual need might not warrant that quantity?

Being out here on the edge, I ask that question a lot.

Customer calls and says "I need a static IP".  I (actually our front line
people) ask "WHY?".  If they mutter something like "VPN" or "Mail Server"
or similar we give one to them without much discussion.

If they say "We need a block of 4 or 8" (/30 or /29) and they mutter
something along the lines of "We're running our own firewall and want to
put a couple of servers on the outside", then we give them to them after
some discusson of "are you sure you need to do it this way?" and explain
the glories of PNAT to them.

If they want a /28 or larger, they better be ready with a real netorking
plan, really have a clue, and really understand why they don't want to use
NAT or why they need more than the 8 addresses.

IP Purists will probably be quick to jump all over me with the evils of
NAT, but for the average small business it works perfectly well and solves
a lot of security-related issues.  (NOTE: I am not saying that NAT and a
Stateful Inspection Firewall or similar is the same thing).  The average
office needs 1 probably-dynamic IP.  Period.

Back to the original poster's question.  We charge a buck-a-month-per-ip
more as a "conservation tax" than for anything else.  Typically if we feel
the customer has packed services as tightly as is reasonable in the
address space we waive the fee (good use of NAT and/or other address
conservation technologies and/or really valid technical reasons).

Customers giving us reasons like "I can't make my server do name-based
(non SSL) virtual hosting so I need an IP for each domain I host" or
"I think it would be cool to have a real publically visible address on
each of my 100 computers in my Beowulf cluster of 486's" are the types of
things we don't waive the fees for even though they are valid enough
reasons to hand out a block of address space for.

- Forrest W. Christian (forrestc at imach.com) AC7DE
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