Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 19:48:51 -0800 (PST) From: michael@blueneptune.com To: slaterm@excel.tnet.com.au (Michael Slater) Cc: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Apache Virtual Servers (single IP) Message-ID: <199702190348.TAA16406@rainey.sj-coop.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.91.970219102934.2286D-100000@excel.tnet.com.au> from "Michael Slater" at Feb 19, 97 10:46:33 am
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > I spend my money -- and recommend to my clients they spend their money -- > > with an ISP who will deliver the service _I_ want and _I_ expect. To whit: > > > > If I need a static IP address > > for a good and legitimate reason -- I _will_ > > If any of my customers have a reason for needing a static I.P address, > then they get one. Exactly. As an ISP, I think it is reasonable to ask and make sure that a given request is really what the customer needs. I would never give out a class C network to a customer without checking things out first. However, I -would- ask them why they needed it, and if they had a reasonable need, I'd say sure. But if they said "I have five machines at my home office, and want to be ready to expand in the future", I would work with them to find out what their real anticipated needs were for the next year or so, and assign them a subnet with enough room, plus some growth. Determining "reasonable need" can sometimes be tricky, but it's not that hard. I find that once people are told that there really is a need to conserve IP addresses at the moment, and assure them that their needs will be met, and that the purpose for being "stingy" is to make sure addresses are not grossly wasted, they are really quite reasonable to work with. Meeting customer needs is important. But part of that job means knowing what the needs really are. Somebody who just wants to hog addresses on the slight chance of needing them five years from now isn't doing -anybody- any good. Regarding the use of static and distinct IP addresses for virtual domains, as somebody else pointed out, you -need- to do that for virtual FTP servers, since FTP does not provide for any other way to tell the server what host is being requested. And the argument that many browsers still do not support the "shared IP address" mechanism is also valid. Fortunately, you can get by with a single IP address for all the desired services on that virtual domain, provided you serve them from the same physical machine. (For instance, ftp.some.domain would have the same address as www.some.domain.) At least you can get by with only one address for everything on a virtual domain. That's a -huge- improvement over one alternative --- if the company in question were to get it's own network, with a router, and possibly multiple machines, they could eat up quite a bit more than just a single address. -- Michael Bryan michael@blueneptune.com
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199702190348.TAA16406>