Re: [PLUG] linux question... (apache) (virtual hosts)

gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net> · Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:16:56 -0400

At 2007-09-27 17:11 -0400, Sean C. Sheridan <scs@CampusClients.com> wrote:
> > Could you pretty-please give those back?
> Sure, just as soon as you convince your isp "NTT America, Inc." to give
> back their 65536 addresses and start using just one... then I'll be happy
> to give back my measly 140 ip addresses which I fought hard and paid
> through the nose to get.  I guess their need is more important than mine
> ;-)

First, you seem to have me confused with someone else. No address
space I use comes through that netblock.

Second, I think you're purposely misunderstanding what I wrote in
order to prove a point, but your example contains a logical fallacy.
The netblock where my systems live (71.240.0.0/12) belongs to a very
large ISP, who subdivides that netblock within their own routing in
variously-sized blocks (in my case, 5 IPs, each of which is used by
a different server, to say nothing of the several servers that have
no publicly-routable IP address because they have no need for one).

The IPv4 system has long been suballocated, that's a functional use
of the address space. You're right that there are huge tracts of
numberspace that ISPs (including both Speakeasy, my former ISP, and
Verizon, my current ISP, the latter to a greater degree than the
former) should give back, because they have no justifiable need for
them, but that doesn't make it okay to use an order of magnitude
more addresses than are needed technologically at any scale, for
whatever order of magnitude. This is the "everyone else is doing it"
fallacy: just because a pluarlity of the population spits on the
street and uses vulgarity in front of other people's children doesn't
mean it's socially okay for me to do so.

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net