Interesting new spam technique - getting a lot more popular.

Wed Jun 14 07:18:04 UTC 2006

On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 04:46:31AM +0000, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
> 
> is it really that hard to make your foudry/extreme/cisco l3 switch vlan
> and subnet??? Is this a education thing or a laziness thing? Is this
> perhaps covered in a 'bcp' (not even an official IETF thing, just a
> hosters bible sort of thing) ?

Simple: Subnets are hard, customers are stupid, and ARIN is not exactly a 
hosters best friend.

When a hosting customer asks for 5 IPs today and 25 IPs tomorrow, it is 
infinitely easier for the hosting folks to just slap them into /24s and 
say "ok uhm you are now .69-.94" than to try and explain subnets, cidr, 
reserving IP space in cidr sized blocks etc to the customer. Hosters are 
also generally under-equipped in the paperwork and detailed documentation 
department, so they tend to run their IP allocations into the ground while 
attempting to explain their need for more space. CIDR allocations are 
"wasteful" to them, especially when a customer needs to expand from 30 IPs 
to 35 IPs and crosses a new boundry.

Incase you've never seen hoster configs, they generally look a little 
something like this:

ip address 1.1.1.1 255.255.255.0
ip address 1.1.2.1 255.255.255.0 secondary
ip address 1.1.3.1 255.255.255.0 secondary
ip address 1.1.4.1 255.255.255.0 secondary
ip address 1.1.5.1 255.255.255.0 secondary
...

Anything else is quite honestly beyond 99% of hosters out there, they're 
still blissfully calling these things "class c's". I've seen some truly 
godawful thins configured by hosters, like chains of 3548s all linking 
back to a single router interface in ways you can't even imagine.

If you made it dirt simple for them they would probably be doing something 
better (I usually point folks who ask to pvlans, then take the opportunity 
to make a hasty retreat while they are distracted), but otherwise they 
don't see the benefit in it. Why bother configuring your router better 
when you can just send your $5/hr monkey over with a redhat cd and have 
them reinstall, right? :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)