Important New Requirement for IPv4 Requests

Wed Apr 22 00:57:31 UTC 2009

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 08:24:38PM -0400, Ricky Beam wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:40:30 -0400, Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
>> SSL and FTP are techincal justifications for an IP per site.
>
> No they aren't.  SSL will work just fine as a name-based virtual host 
> with any modern webserver / browser. (Server Name Indication (SNI) 
> [RFC3546, sec 3.1])

"I encourage my competitors to do this."  You only have to get one noisy
curmudgeon who can't get to your customer's SSL website because IE 5.0 has
worked fine for them for years to make it a completely losing strategy to
try deploying this everywhere.  Since you can't predict in advance which
sites are going to be accessed by said noisy curmudgeon, you don't bother
deploying it anywhere, to be on the safe side.

> FTP?  Who uses FTP these days?  Certainly not consumers.  Even Cisco  
> pushes almost everything via a webserver. (they still have ftp servers,  
> they just don't put much on them these days.)

A depressingly large number of people use FTP.  Attempts to move them onto
something less insane are fruitless.  Even when the tools support it (and
plenty of "web design" tools don't appear to do anything other than FTP),
"we've always done it that way and it works fine and if we have to change
something we'll move to another hosting company rather than click a
different button in our program".

Business imperatives trump technical considerations, once again.  And, for
the record, we're moving toward IPv6, so we're *trying* to be part of the
solution, in our own small way.

- Matt