Hosting provider allocation advice

[Wouter de Jong]

Hi Ted,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ted Mittelstaedt [mailto:tedm at ipinc.net]
> Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2009 17:16
> To: Wouter de Jong
> Cc: ipv6-ops at lists.cluenet.de
> Subject: Re: Hosting provider allocation advice

Thanks for explaning :)

> What I was meaning is don't be too hung up about making the
> wrong decision about allocating subnets right now.  If you force
> reliance on DNS from the absolute beginning then if you need to
> renumber later to reallocate your subnets, it's no big deal.

(most) Firewalls, ACL's, RBL's ... like IP's instead of hostnames.
So that could be a bummer.
Especially if a customer would manage a lot of remote networks 
from his server in our DC.

> Buried in the fine print of our own shared web hosting contracts
> is language that states the customer's server is never guaranteed
> to keep a specific IP address.

While this makes perfectly sense from 'our' side of the view,
a lot of our customers would leave us instantly.
They'd have to change IP's their anyway, but that won't stop them.
We've done it in the past, and they we're not amused.
I'd never get approval for it from $management, 
in these times they want to keep every client at all (reasonable) cost.
 
> Granted, few customers READ the fine print, but we make every
> effort when setting them up to not mention IP addresses
> 
> >>> Also, since we do IP based billing here,
> >>> we'd never know if one has 'hijacked' some IP space.
> >>>
> >> "IP based billing" will be the first casualty of IPv6.
> >>
> >> There's a shortage of IPv4 which is why you can bill for
> >> each IPv4 number.
> >>
> >> There's no shortage of IPv6.  Your competitors won't hesitate
> >> to spread around IPv6 numbers like peanut butter.
> >
> > I meant traffic billing based on IP number :)
> >
> 
> Doctor it hurts when I do this!
> 
> Then don't do that!
> 
> Seriously, you need to rethink your billing data collection.  How
> difficult is it to go to your router that's feeding your network and
> setup a permit access list and count packets that pass through it?
> Construct the list with whatever granularity you want.

It can be hard, cause your device must support it :))

We've put a fiber-tap between our fibers to our 
border routers, and run an accounting program that fills a database with

src dst traffic insert-date. So internal traffic from vlan <-> vlan is
for free, 
but traffic that goes to our Peerings/Transit, get's billed.

Though  with IPv6, it'll get a lot more records :)
But I'm least worried about that.
I'd rather implement a good policy, and solve my billing later on.

The thing that frustrates me is that I just don't know how to give our 
our 3rd product group (the ones with shared vlan/subnet) IPv6 in a sane
way.

> Ted

Regards,

Wouter