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Court Says Customers May Take IPs Away From ISP
Jeremy Kister writes "According to a post on the North American Network Operators Group mailing-list, The State of New Jersey has issued a temporary restraining order, allowing a former customer of Net Access Corporation (NAC) to take non-portable IP Address space (issued from ARIN), away from NAC." The post argues: "This is a matter is of great importance to the entire Internet community. This type of precedent is very dangerous. If this ruling is upheld it has
the potential to disrupt routing throughout the Internet, and change practices of business for any Internet Service Provider."
Now I can be banned from Slashdot wherever I go!
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Judges are ignorant.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
This is like taking your home address with you, when you move.
"But I want to live on 115 Baker Street". How can a judge get that dumb.
nosig today
Unlike the whole "keep your cell-phone number" jiberjoo, this is unneeded and will do nothing but break the internet, will it not?
Isn't the whole DNS system set up to avoid the need to keep your numeric address? I mean, it's irrelevant if it only takes 5 minutes for my new IP to propogate.
Oh well, I hope this breaks the internet. I'm sick of the internet.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Reminds me of "average" people voting regarding nuclear power...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I don't understand why this was in a court. What use is this to the person that filed the suit. It can't work. Is this just an asshole with a axe to grind who found a stupid/ignorant judge?
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
... but you don't want to pay for it. Take my word for it.
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
In other news, the U.S. Post Office is letting users keep their zip codes when they move.
Hands up who understands the legal concept of a temporary restraining order?
Answer : It's temporary, to make sure neither party suffers to greatly until the Actual Judgement gets made.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I haven't RTFA yet, but is there any proposal in how this is supposed to happen?
~S
I can see how this is good from both sides. Obviously existing IP practice and whatnot makes this very bad, But its also a little bit of consumer freedom, akin to telephone number portability.
Maybe someone forgot to explain to the judge how the system works? or maybe he just didn't care based on this case?
Full article text - minus karma whoring.
There has been a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) issued by state court
that customers may take non-portable IP space with them when they leave
their provider. Important to realize: THIS TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER HAS
BEEN GRANTED, AND IS CURRENTLY IN EFFECT. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING THAT COULD
HAPPEN, THIS IS SOMETHING THAT HAS HAPPENED. THERE IS AN ABILITY TO
DISSOLVE IT, AND THAT IS WHAT WE ARE TRYING TO DO.
This is a matter is of great importance to the entire Internet community.
This type of precedent is very dangerous. If this ruling is upheld it has
the potential to disrupt routing throughout the Internet, and change
practices of business for any Internet Service Provider.
In the TRO, the specific language that is enforced is as follows:
"NAC shall permit CUSTOMER to continue utilization through any
carrier or carriers of CUSTOMER's choice of any IP addresses that were
utilized by, through or on behalf of CUSTOMER under the April 2003
Agreement during the term thereof (the "Prior CUSTOMER Addresses") and
shall not interfere in any way with the use of the Prior CUSTOMER
Addresses, including, but not limited to:
(i) by reassignment of IP address space to any customer;
aggregation and/or BGP announcement modifications,
(ii) by directly or indirectly causing the occurrence of
superseding or conflicting BGP Global Routing Table entries; filters
and/or access lists, and/or
(iii) by directly or indirectly causing reduced prioritization or
access to and/or from the Prior CUSTOMER Addresses, (c) provide CUSTOMER
with a Letter of Authorization (LOA) within seven (7) days of CUSTOMER's
written request for same to the email address/ticket system
(network@nac.net), and (d) permit announcement of the Prior CUSTOMER
Addresses to any carrier, IP transit or IP peering network."
We believe this order to be in direct violation of ARIN policy and the
standard contract that is signed by every entity that is given an
allocation of IP space. The ARIN contract strictly states that the IP
space is NOT property of the ISP and can not be sold or transferred. The
IP blocks in question in this case are very clearly defined as
non-portable space by ARIN.
Section 9 of ARIN's standard Service Agreement clearly states:
"9. NO PROPERTY RIGHTS. Applicant acknowledges and agrees that the
numbering resources are not property (real, personal or intellectual) and
that Applicant shall not acquire any property rights in or to any
numbering resources by virtue of this Agreement or otherwise. Applicant
further agrees that it will not attempt, directly or indirectly, to obtain
or assert any trademark, service mark, copyright or any other form of
property rights in any numbering resources in the United States or any
other country."
[ Full ARIN agreement http://www.arin.net/library/agreements/rsa.pdf ]
Further, it is important to realize that this CUSTOMER has already gotten
allocations from ARIN over 15 months ago, and has chosen not to renumber
out of NAC IP space. They have asserted that ARIN did not supply them with
IP space fast enough to allow them to renumber. Since they have gotten
allocations from ARIN, we are confident they have signed ARIN's RSA as
well, and are aware of the above point (9).
If this ruling stands and a new precedent is set, any customer of any
carrier would be allowed to take their IP space with them when they leave
just because it is not convenient for them to renumber. That could be a
single static IP address for a dial-up customer or many thousands of
addresses for a web hosting company. This could mean that if you want to
revoke the address space of a spammer customer, that the court could allow
the customer to simply take the space with them and deny you as the
carrier (and ARIN) their rights to control the space as you (and ARIN)
i.e. a not-so-net-savvy person, could any explain to me what advantages/disadvantages this could have?
This really shows the need for more technology savvy judges.
I imagine the thought process was something like: "Hey, if we can have cell number portability, why can't we have IP address portability? Same thing, right?"
Some people are like slinkies--basically useless but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
This will surely be compared to WLNP, but its different in one key way. The internet has a built in system that alleviates the need for IP Portability, that system is called DNS. Regardless of how many times you change IPs, your domain name can remain constant.
Lets pray the courts don't start setting technical policy more than they already are. How long before I have to enter my MAC address at every console just to make sure any random ARP packets intended for a machine I was just at still get to me here?
Josh
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
Matters relating to the internet should be outside the jurisdiction of such judges. The internet isn't a local thing, it crosses national borders. Allowing any non-global entity to pass judgement on a portion of the internet is one step towards fragmentation.
And talk about turn the DNS system into a tangled weave of crap. This type of thing will completely nullify the idea of ip-address ranges.
If this kind of ruling is upheld, look for public IP's to disappear and for ISP's to provide private IP's or at a bare minimum to do away with statics.
Wes.tEn.d.Car.Sales
To be honest, I was half-way afraid the Slashdot crowd would hail this ruling as a strike for the "little guy", but of course most of us are at least a little more technically savvy than the average judge... I think that it is probable (and clearly this is the case with the Judge) that most people think of IP addresses like phone numbers, which of course is not the case.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Anybody in that judge's hometown that can give him a cluestick for the 4th of July? It's almost like he thought:
"Huh. IP Address. 172.24.50.24. Huh. Looks like a phone number! Aha! IP Number thingies make people able to call this guy's computer. Hot diggity, it's a phone number, I'm going to get my name in some law books! HEeeeeeyawwww!"
(Ok, so I don't really know if the judge grew up in [redacted], but still.. geeez)
Next thing you know we'll be taking our postal mailboxes with us.
How stupid can these courts get? Why on earth would someone need to take their IPs with them? If they've configured things such that they're dependent on a certain IP, they obviously have very incompetent system s staff.
This is what DNS is for, so you can plunk any IP in and have it resolve properly.
FYI - I have a pantent on "portable IP addresses". I'm going to be rich!
This won't make it too far due to the technical implications it would have. That was obviously not considered or understood in this decision.
Kudos to whoever that guy is that tried to take an IP address with him. Clever thinking!
Better than Flickr - Manage, Share, Archive
http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras/nac-case/
Some information for you!
Some idiot probably hired a bunch of idiots to migrate their web site to a new provider, they probably fucked DNS to hell, the idiot probably demanded that the ISP just allow them to take the IP address and be done with it. In the meantime, the idiot went out of business because his site was down, and the ISP that said "you're crazy we can't do any of this!!" gets blamed.
Surely the brain-dead judge should have stopped and thought for a second if someone had said that sentence to him...
...But only if the customer is forced to pay for it. This is one situation where the companies involved shouldn't be responsible for the financial outlay, as they system was never designed with "IP portability" in mind in the first place.
If the ISP is in another state they would be attempting to regulate interstate commerce, and even within their own state they are not the governing body assigning IP addresses.
It would be like the state government voiding FCC rules and telling a radio station they could keep their "WKRP" station title even if the federal government was doing the licensing.
they and everyone else just refuse to recognise the movement of the IP addresses. This order will not affect anyone else in another country.
Pretty useless to have an IP range if no one will route to it.* About the only result will be witless wonders walking away with various ranges, resulting in a (further) shortage of addresses.
* Yes I know a NAT device could be used in conjunction with another IP address, however there are already three ranges assigned for use in a private intranets.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
Well if you consider that recently cell phone numbers have become portable between different cellular carriers, then it seems this judge is just thinking "Hmm, IP addresses are a bunch of numbers... must be like cell phone numbers except for computers..."
Check it out here.
There is no mention of the size of the customers IP range. For all we know it could be a /16, which while in itself would be strange (non portable /16, unheard of), it wouldn't be a techinical problem.
Anything down to about a /23 wouldn't be a major issue. 55% of routes in the globabl BGP table are /24s, an extra /23 would barely register.
If its a /24 or less, then the judge needs to be hit with a clue stick.
Whatever happens, its going to change the definition of "public share resource" forever. Honestly, the someone needs to explain to the judge that IP space is not owned, it is (for lack of a better word) leased to the user.
I'm getting off my high horse now before....
This is NOT like moving the physical address of a house, its like transfering your cell-phone number from one supplier to another, the phone numbers is actually a virtual address there are network specific addresses that DON'T get transfered. Now part of the issue here is that DNS resolves as a hierachy based on the "."s in the addresses. This means that really the domain name is equivalent to the phone number. But the connection address is actually a MAC Address so maybe we should consider the IP address to be the virtual address that can be changed.
Transfering IP addresses is a matter of DNS configuration, what this would require is old ISPs to contain references to the new ISP for the old IDs. Is that really so technically difficult ? There are many unanswered questions here but I'm not sure there is anything that is as significant an impact as is claimed.
It is NOT like moving a house address, because that is a physical address in a physical network, like MAC. IP and DNS are VIRTUAL addresses on a virtual network.
If phone companies do it, why shouldn't ISPs ?
And think about this when the world goes IPv6, no worry about running out of numbers, but do you want to re-programme your internal house network when you move ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Assuming this doesn't happen to whole IP ranges, won't IPV6 lessen the potential impact of this?
One or two small subnets off the huge amount that will be available doesn't seem so bad, and could spur some interesting development/business plans.
Just a thought.
~G
...when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears. Dr. Matson in Tunnel in the Sky
> if this ruling stands and a new precedent is set, any customer of any
> carrier would be allowed to take their IP space with them when they leave
> just because it is not convenient for them to renumber.
Umm... isn't this alarmist? If this were established as a precedent (which it's not) it is a state court ruling... aren't state courts reluctant to accept other states' courts rulings as precedent?
This is just another example of attorney's taking advantage of Judge's being malinformed on current technologies. I'd like to see them start advertising /30's on the backbone. Since they don't, should be interesting to see how this customer can take an IP with him, considering that the IP addresses aren't owned, they are assigned. Therefore there can never be a conveyance of ownership.
It isn't really that crazy.
:-)
:-)
IP addresses are like phone numbers. Except on the other end, there can be anything. In fact the Internet used to run by dialing the exact computer you wanted to talk to didn't it? Or was that pre-Internet? I am too young to remember
I say we hope he is a bit slow, and let him keep 1 class B and on class D address, two for the price of one.
May I recommend 192.168.*.* and 127.0.0.1
He can have them!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
However, when an ISP goes under and you need to switch upstream providers, it's a pain in the neck to switch hundreds of domains over to new IPs, especially when they use several different registrars.
But, nevertheless, I agree, this is a stupid ruling and if enforced, will probably mess up the Internet.
All the work to organize, cut short by THE LAW.
I don't get it either. The article didn't mention anything about why the customer wanted to keep the IP block. My only guess is that he/she/it configured something and used IP addresses instead of names, and he/she/it doesn't have access to a box to reconfigure it. However, NAT should be able to solve that problem, since that's kinda one of the things it was designed to do.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
You people who demanded cell phone number portability started this precedent. This is exactly what I was alluding to when I posted this and this. The second post better explains my point.
Ok, he takes a block of IP addresses, and connects to his new ISP. Surprise, nothing works!He calls the ISP and they laugh. He sues, and a different judge rules he can't force the new ISP to use his old IP addresses.
So a block of IP addresses is gone permanently from the internet. Well, at least until overturned on appeal. At the moment, it's not much different from companies sitting on large blocks of addresses and refusing to give them up.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
192.168.1.1.
Take that, routers!
I can just imagine what the routing [IPv4] tables would look like. It's bad enough _now_ as it is. Time for everybody to upgrade their memory otherwise...
:). Sure, some DNS servers won't honor my short timeout setup, but usually within 24 hours the new information has propagated the Internet as needed.
... can you imagine what the telco's are going through in figuring out routing tables now? Something like this could finally melt the Internet. And ironically my phone line. :)
Is IPv6 routing at the core level any more efficient? Or would this just aggravate this problem?
This is ridiculous -- I've switched core ISP's multiple times for various reasons. The sad thing is reverse lookup on a few very old IP's are still unchanged (and I've even sent them reminders over the years [!]). I've been through controlled migrations where nobody notices anything to cut and switch botch jobs and have had little issue flipping DNS servers over to new IP's (I've always served myself at work, home, other offices I've set up, etc
I've never been willing to pay what it costs to own my IP block or even [!] a single address. I'm not Motorola or Apple and what's the problem with "renting" my IP much like I've only been able to do in the past with my [US] phone number? I love the fact that I was able to port my 20 year home phone line to VoIP -- and because of it dialing in the future will become very interesting. Am I in LA? Chicago? New York? For the poor sap -- is my next call local, long distance, band-b, band-c and what will it cost? Now off-topic and I digress...
Hopefully the courts don't see phone number portability as precedence
The only place where I could see this helping is being able to take the IP address assigned to a nameserver someplace else. Nameservers moving across IP space sucks. However, it's still a stupid idea.
It is not impossible, few things are, but it would require a significant investment in time, money, and new software for every backbone provider.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Pretty useless to have an IP range if no one will route to it.* About the only result will be witless wonders walking away with various ranges, resulting in a (further) shortage of addresses.
That would actually not be a bad punishment. DNS servers could stop resolving to that particular block of IP's. If enough did it (and assuming they are not subject to New Jersey regulation) it would make the address the digital equivalent of swampland.
This seems to be a first step towards people having their own personal IP's. I can see a future where babies are born, given a name, citizenship, and IP. It does make sense when you think about it. Why should blocks of IP's remain one company's property?
If average people cannot vote and decide about nuclear power, however uneducated they may be, who should decide?
If the average person has the power to vote for a leader, and that leader has the power to implement nuclear power, then there isn't much difference in putting anything to the vote.
The reality is, we have to respect everyones opinions for what they are, no matter how irrelevant they may be.
I agree with you though about the judge, in terms of law, this is about right and wrong, and in terms of is someone entitled to keep an IP address, isn't it simply a case that it never belonged to his ISP in the first place? only through licensing?
I thought ICANN had the final word?
Seems strange to me!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
As long a the plaintif coughs up the dough for additional routers to handle this idiocy, that's fine.
The sad thing is that they already _had_ their own IP space assigned to them, but (according to NAC, at least) were too lazy to migrate to it.
Why bother doing all that hard technical work when you can call your lawyers and force someone else to do it for you? All the cool kids are doing it.
However, this became a big problem as the Internet grew and grew, and the BGP tables grew and grew, so finally companies stopped doing this, and now IP ranges are considered to be not portable unless they're a certain size. `CIDRize or die' was the saying ... and people chose not to die.
The court needs a clue though. As does the customer who asked for the TRO -- they'll find that many (most?) ISPs will not route to their IP range at their new ISP, in spite of what the court said. I guess their old ISP could set up a VPN for them, but I'm guessing they won't.
Not.this falls right into line with the new "take your number with you" initiative. think about it... it can be argued that some folks are associated with their ip address (i know it's a bad argument but it can be argued just the same) and as such it stands to reason that the individual should be allowed to carry that ip with him. is it relevant that the net's infrastructure is not designed for this...yes. but my thinking is that this judge is just agreeing with the plaintiff in order to let an appeals court (and higher minds) take a stab at this because the plaintiff may not have the means to file and pursue an appeal however an isp is more likely to have the resources and eventually the backing (from other isps and the net community) to challenge this ruling.
Is it 5:30 yet?
If the customer wants to keep using the same IP addresses, they need a NAT router which translates them to their assigned external addresses when the IP packets leave their network.
-BB
I can see it now... anyone wanting to run BGP (ie pretty much any internet peering link nowadays) is going to need to download millions of routes because idiots are advertising /32s across the internet.
:/
Next time one of your ISPs core routers is reloaded and you get a full 2 day outage waiting on the BGP table to repopulate youll know who to thank..
This is not an issue, this is simply wrong. As many posters have already said, that's what DNS (not WWW address) is for.
There are already enough issues with the scalability of BGP due to IP address space fragmentation. What if everybody starts moving around ? What will routers do if they cannot aggregate IP addresses ?
This is insane.
I'm so going to take advantage of this.
Next time I switch ISPs, I'm keeping 127.0.0.1!
-JDF
This is horribly retarded, and another example of why I am attending law school. We already have myriad name resolution services for the Internet. I don't get it. Bringing the legal system kicking and screaming into technology awareness is akin to Peter the Great dragging Russia into the modern world. Some day unfounded patent infringement claims and misguided computer technology legal decisions will be a thing of the past (or at least that is what I hope). At least this is only temporary; hopefully a more informed permanent decision will be made. Meh.
Phone numbers are only portable to geographic areas if you move to another state you can't change to another provider and take your number with you. Obviously the people involved in the portability of phone numbers realized that area codes would be destroyed if they allowed transfer of the number anywhere. It seems like taking your IP with you would also be limited by the fact that IP's aren't portable by design and to move IP's would damage the integrity of the internet. I am not a lawyer but it seems the best way for the provider to fight this would be address the issue of IP addresses not being portable in design and would require restructuring the entire internet.
is there a line in the contract that they broke? would a small claims court threat change their behavior?
When asked what exactly it was then, he said it was 'an exit circular with many lanes' (exact quote - we're talking about the exit of J29 M1 for any UK readers). When asked to point out where, in the Highway Code, 'an exit circular with many lanes' was defined he refused to comment and suggested we move on. Since the entire case was that someone had incorrectly changed lanes on a roundabout without indicating in time, thus smashing into the rear left-hand side of me, 'moving on' was rather difficult as everything was based around the fact it took place on a roundabout.
The guy in question fulfilled all the cliches - an impossibly Oxford Don-type accent which was obviously put on (I know some Oxford dons, and besides this guy came from Mansfield which has a totally different accent), absolutely smug in his self-delusion of superiority...the works.
When my solicitor apologised for losing the case afterwards, my comment to him was "Don't worry. My no claims bonus is unaffected, it's a nice sunny day, and I've managed to see purest legal farce in action. I'm still happy".
I learned to never underestimate legal stupidity that day.
Cheers,
Ian
This kind of crap happens all the time in other industries. When businesses complain, well, that's just too bad, right?
Then some stupid rule ends up making life in your industry difficult and suddenly the cries go out: "Unfair! Unworkable! Stupid Judge! Stupid consumer! Dumb regulation!"
Next time someone in some business complains about over-regulation or government interference, don't be so quick to dismiss it.
And for extra credit, try to follow, absolutely, all the rules of the road. Drive 15 mph around curves as required by that little yellow sign, or 35 on the off-ramp as you exit a 70 mph interstate.
Those are all regulations drivers are supposed to follow.
I wonder how this would affect IPv6 deployment since address space in IPv6 is subnetted to customers from a cider block given to Tier 1 and 2 ISP's...
...On the one hand I absolutely understand the problem and fully support the ISP's position. However on the other, there is HUGE oportunity here if the order stands to use it as a precedent to get the goddamned cable/dsl providers to stop changing IPs.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
This is absurd. It undermines the basic principles that led the internet grow up to the currect scale. Those who understand BGP and AS-es as well as Provider Independent and Provider Aggregatable Ip space, know this is the end. And the BGP tables are growing faster than most routers can hold anyway. No more soft inbound I quess... ;-)
So whats next? I would like to have the .com domain structure... or what the heck, give me the root (.)
-- for undocumented cisco commands, take a peek @ dotu
If I read the judgement correctly, the TRO orders NAC to allow IP access. Is it not the case that the TRO would have to order ARIN to move the IPs? Does NAC have, in a technical (not legal) sense the ability to assign IP addresses to another ISP?
The power never left the hands of the consumer. Ignorance is not repression.
I'm glad you realize that you are speaking out of your element. Read up on DNS and you will be a lot better informed. This is nothing like number portability. They are both sequences of numbers that uniquely identify you at a given time (important!) but that's where the similarity ends.
As covered by NPR
Probably, that kind of crap happened all the time at the provider I used to work at. People who had domain names weren't aware of the workings of it and screwed things up when they were temped by fancy web admin DNS sites or whatnot.
Walking down a "street" and seeing one house at 1152 Sombeody Street, 1145 Nowhere Lane and 6588 Someplace Dr all next to each other some day. Gives you a feel for this kind of stupidity by the court. The USPS could have a field day with this just as any Network administrator.
...in bed
...they're not wrong...
Portable blocks start at /19. Often you can get smaller one routed, but no transit ISP will guarantee to carry routing entries for blocks smaller than /19.
Once again, the American legal system shows it's colors. I mean, do they think making it possible to just up and take ip's with people is EASY? As of now, this is practically infeasible, and would require a total overhaul of internet routing as we know it. Just who the hell does this judge think he is? (keeping in mind that the internet is global, not just America's toy).
Only the purest of souls seek enlightenment. Everyone else just wants power.
Much different from cell phone number portability. When you want to call mom you key in a 7-10 digit address to ring mom's phone. Most users won't key in "mom". If mom changes her phone number she has to tell everyone her new number, so even if you set up a voice dialing entry, you're not isolated from having to know her number at least once so you can update your phone book entry.
However, when you want to do a keyword search do you type in 216.239.57.99 or do you type in google.com?
When you check your email do you type in 64.4.32.7 or do you type in hotmail.com?
When you want to look at porn do you type in 64.71.165.211 or do you type in thehun.com?
Have you *ever* seen those IP addresses before today? Probably not. You don't need to know them to reach them.
Do you have any idea that when you type in thehun.com, sometimes you see 216.218.206.40 and sometimes you see 64.71.165.211 and sometimes it's 216.218.255.232? Would you know if they changed? Would you know if there were a hundred of them? This stuff is kept hidden from you by DNS for a reason.
If a user ever needs to see an IP address, someone has done something wrong. The purpose of DNS is to make physical IP address assignments irrelevant.
And not only is it dumb, but it's extremely hard to do. IP address networks are segmented, and routers need to be able to rely on cases where it can say "Well, I don't know what's on the other end of this network, BUT I DO KNOW FOR A FACT THAT *THIS* END *ALWAYS* HAS ADDRESSES IN THE 216.139.128.x RANGE!"
Doing this will cause routing tables to grow exponentially if it continues unchecked, as it greatly reduces the hierarchical, logical nature of IP addresses and how they correspond to geographic providers of bandwidth.
This is bad, this is VERY BAD for the internet. I appreciate the person's concerns, but there is already a solution out there for portable addressing. It is known as DNS. They need to update their DNS records to point to new IPs from their new ISP, not strong arm their old ISP through the legal system into breaking the internet.
This is a failure of the legal system which will cause lasting damage to the internet, in my humble opinion.
"Give away the stone, let the oceans take and transmutate this cold and faded anchor." - Maynard James Keenan
I think this is a wonderful decision. I really regretted losing my phone number when I moved to my current residence; now, even if I'm in a completely different area code, I can sue to take my phone number with me! Thank you, New Jersey!
Who says the phone system was designed to allow for number portability. I work in the industry and can tell you first hand that number portability is about as difficult in the telephone world as IP portability will be in the internet world. The only reason Slashdot is agaist this judges ruling is because they have some clue about what it will take to implement it. Most people here have no idea what kind of kludge is behind LNP. Those that did have a clue protested at the top of their lungs. It didn't stop the technically clueless from mandating the change.
Have you ever noticed how the hive mentality on Slashdot says that the cell phone companies are evil for adding the cost of supporting local number portability as a line item on each bill? Maybe this example will make the situation seem a little clearer. When a very expensive and kludgy mandate is placed on a service provider it makes sense to alert consumers to the fact that they are paying a significant amount of money to support it.
...but Snopes to the rescue as usual.
If this matter actually ends up in a permanent order requiring the IP space to be released, no prizes for guessing how long it will take for that block to be null routed by angry administrators everywhere.
Your argument doesn't make sense. The web address is completely different from the IP address.
The problem is that IP addresses need to be assigned in blocks to keep the size of a full routing table down. Basically this ruling is nothing more than an indirect Internet Tax. The result of this ruling will be that backbone providers have to raise service rates to support the increased memory and processor requirements of their routers.
The size of a BGP routing table was skyrocketing until about 5-7 years ago. That's when groups like ARIN started saying, "we have to fix this".
The way to fix it is a logical method of subnetting. Big Blocks assigned to backbone providers...Smaller blocks within those assigned to the ISPs that connect to them...a few subnets givent to the customers that connect to them. If you move, you get new addresses. DNS solves all the problem of moving except the internal cost to readdress your machines. If your intelligent, you use DHCP for everything but servers so most of the work is easy. If your even more intelligent you run 95+% of your devices on internal addresses and NAT at your gateway so the work is even easier.
The problem is that users and some stupid programmers don't want to do what makes sense (utilizing DNS and NAT properly).
Plain and simple this ruling is ridiculous. Someone should buy this Judge, and more importantly, the fool that filed the complaint and his lawyer a copy of DNS for dummies.
Look, it's not as stupid as it sounds when people tell the story like that. Some guy was claiming that he had a copyright or patent on Pi and trying to get people to pay him to use it, so they were going to code it into law so he couldn't do so.
It's funny that what gets thrown around as an example of legislatures being stupid is actually an example of legislatures trying to protect their constituents from stupid patents or con men.
No different then cell phone number portability
It's very different - think of a DNS record being like a cellphone number, and the IP address is like your SIM card.
If I want to port my phone number to a different network I don't take my SIM card with me, I get a new SIM from my new telco and they transfer my phone number to the new SIM.
In the same way, if I want to move ISP, I keep my DNS record and just point it at the new IP - why would I need to keep the IP? afterall, noone should be referencing my machine by IP because unless I'm really stupid, I've set up everything to use DNS (do you give people your phone number or your SIM card ID?)
http://blog.nexusuk.org
...it looks like they may have actually tried. D'oh! Didn't see that little paragraph in there.
Though the claim about the Alabama state legislature is pure nonsense, it is similar to an event that happened more than a century ago. In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi. (House Bill no. 246, introduced by Rep. Taylor I. Record.) The bill died in the state Senate.
Call me flaimbait, I don't care. That judge is beyond ignorant. The fact that this case even made it to court is disheartening. As stated previously, this is akin to demanding to have the same street address that you had at your last residence. I really don't understand the reasoning behind this. I hope this dies a quick death.
Listen to my experimental-industrial-techno!
I don't know what all the fuss is about, I've taken 127.0.0.1 with me wherever I go for years ;)
Philip
Signatures are broken
This is a bad precedent. However, couldn't an ISP just require the customer to forfeit this new "right" by means of their service contracts?
or not and the fucktards can clam any IP address they want, nobody says everyone else has to update their routing tables
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Comparing IP address portability to "driving a remote control car on mars" is like comparing apples to the 1969 Shelby Mustang series of cars.
It seems that this very issue is one of the reasons that we have DNS in the first place.
I don't get it. I can't think of a reason why you would want to keep your IP address after switching ISP's, except maybe you're too lazy to change firewall rules for your WAN.
What were this person's reasons for keeping the IP address? I didn't see it when I skimmed through linked article.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Even if it's ruled that you must be able to move your IP away from your current ISP, I can't imagine any ISP wanting to go through the hastle of incorporating the IP into their network and accepting you as a customer.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
*** In the not to distant future.... ***
Old ISP - Yes, Mr. Dumbass Customer, you can keep the IP address we gave you.
** Mr. Customer at new ISP 2 weeks later **
Dumbass - Hey! Can I use an IP address that already I own?
New ISP - Sure! We can do that for you, what is the address block?
Dumbass - Well...not an address block or whatever you call it, just one IP address. 192.168.0.12...
I can take my cell phone number, so why not my IP address? For that matter, I want to take my street address with me when I move, too!
Talk about an ignorant judge. IP addresses are not cell phones. This needs to be appealed and overturned IMMEDIATELY - I can't even begin to imagine all the technical difficulties that are going to surface. Routing is going to break, or at least be made nearly impossible.. can you say static routing tables for everyone? That'd suck...
Now we will all have to pay the $1.99 Universal IP Portability Fee in our monthly ISP bills.
This account has been seized by the GNAA. That is all.
It worked, but as the Internet grew, it broke down, and was finally abandoned in favor of the current system where all but the largest players borrow IP addresses from their ISP rather than owning their own.
We did not drive a remote control car on Mars. The time lag alone would make that maddening. (And we have not overcome the speed of light limitations quite yet.) We controlled a mostly autonomous robot on Mars.And we did overcome this issue, long ago. The solution is DNS. slashdot.org is Slashdot, no matter what the underlying IP address is.
With IPv6, an IP address will be 16 bytes long ... do you really expect people to memorize something that long? Even a 4 byte IPv4 address is hard enough to memorize. Quick! What's the IP address for www.slashdot.org! No cheating and looking it up!
Well, at least you realize that you don't understand the issue. The judge didn't understand the issue, yet he made a ruling anyways. Well, if he thinks that, he thinks wrong. There's no need to break the Internet just to make his misconception relevant.I spent half my day yesterday reading the NANOG thread related to this. Knew I should have submitted it. =)
Anyways, the customer wanted to avoid renumbering their network computers. Their argument was that there is a significant amount of inconvenience involved in renumbering their network. (Yes, we all know how easy it would be to use a NAT. The judge obviously does not.) The original NANOG discussion started here.
I think they were also leveraging a supposed anti-competitiveness nature to non-portable IP space. Yes, that's right. One of a bajillion ISP's is hurting competition by following the globally accepted rules of the Internet that is the foundation of CIDR.
--LordPixie
How dare that jackass follow the traffic advisory signs!
Its a bit more complicated people then saying "Well why not, we can keep our phone numbers now".
The FCC passed the resolution for number portability almost 2 years ago, Its taken that long for the phone companys to set this up and You still can't take your number outside the geographical area.
If you move yes you can keep your number but in reality when you make local calls they will be counted as long distance..
Why? Why can't they move your number from California to New York? Routing, when you dial a number its know that area code XXX goes to this area..
IP's work in the same way except down to a more exact scale. a IP block is routed to a specific network, Just like you can't take a single number and move it to another state, You can't take a small portion of a block and just move it without disrupting routing and causing problems.
Even if you allow companys to keep ip blocks ONLY if they are using a full block of ips the constant breaking up of larger blocks would quickly increase our already troubled routing system.
I do hope the judge does some more research and realizes the flaw in his choice.
Personal Website
Until the early 1990s, anyone could get a block of IP addresses, and it was up to them how they got packets routed to them. This didn't scale well, and it's now virtually impossible. But that's just a result of technical decisions made over the last 10 or 15 years - and they could have been made differently - so there's no reason to expect a judge to be familiar with that. It's certainly
not as obvious or clear-cut as a physical address or even a post code.
Presumably as the case proceeds good technical arguments will be made and the temporary order lifted.
I now know why they are doing this. If you look at the affidavit that was posted, notice that the plaintiff is Pegasus Web Technologies(shared/dedicated hosting). Pegasus either has co-lo and/or dedicated servers at NAC and they are most likely moving to a different datacenter. I work for a datacenter which had to go through a major datacenter change. We had to issue all of our shared and dedicated hosting customers new IP addresses. So basically, this comes down to the staff at Pegasus being incredibly fucking lazy, or lacking the knowledge to handle a switch like this.
This sounds just about the right way to do it. Allow local judges to try to make such legislation. There's nothing that says it has to be supported elsewhere. So then, when a given state has their internet completely f***ed up because some asshat(s) tried to retain an IP across providers, and the internet either doesn't function or slows to a deathly crawl, they know who to blame.
"Our internet isn't working, how come it works in Seattle fine but not in Atlanta."
Sure, the ISPs would be blamed to start with, but eventually when it comes to realization that the entire state is f***ed, one might be able to pin the blame properly on stupid judges and their even stupider plaintiffs. After all, one state (or even one country) does not the internet make, and if it's causing problems to the internet at large they could be segregated.
Nothing like a publicly visible/effectual phenomenon to make people finally get off their collective asses, see a broken system, and go for the tar and feathers.
BTW, I believe you *could* accomplish IP portablilty with some fancy NAT from "oldIP" to "newIP", but it's still eternally stupid.
The Plaintiff isn't trying to get class Cs from the ISP. The ISP allegedly imposed unreasonable payment terms and is threatening to cut off the plaintiff's access to the IPs. The plaintiff is fighting for the right to have uninterrupted access to that IP range while he moves his servers from said ISP to a new physical location and new IP range.
If everyone already had their own block of ipv6 addresses this wouldn't matter would it?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
IANAL, but I'm curious if there is room in NJ law for friend of the court briefs, or whatever, to try to educate the judge about the real effects of this?
Can someone explain how the IP addresses are still routable if they've been "moved" to a new ISP? My brain tells me this would only work under rare circumstances.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
President Clinton has sued the Federal Government to retain "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC" after leaviing the White House.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
The new ISP *will* refuse to use it, since that's not how things are done. Suppose the customer gets a court order forcing the new ISP to use it ... fine. So the new ISP announces BGP routes for this address space, and all the other ISPs in the world will filter out this allocation because it's too small.
Note that the court order here only affects one ISP -- it can't affect every single ISP in the country.
Unless this customer can get court orders forcing every ISP in the whole world to respect their address space, it's just not going to work. They've won nothing.
See, it makes sense to be able to take your cell phone number with you, because people actually use that number. But with internet addresses, it's usually by DNS entry, and your IP address can even be completely dynamic. Therefore, there's no reason to take your IP address with you, especially since it'll screw up internet routing.
So how long before joeblow@aol.com can become and MSN subscriber and keep his joeblow@aol.com email address without being an aol subscriber?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Really, I should be able to get one assigned. It sucks that these things are only assigned to major corporations ... if we're going to have to wear the mark of the best, I want mine to at least be a dotted quad. (or two ...)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I'm thinking of moving from New York to California, and I'd like to take ALL my information with me, including:
my home IP address
my telephone numbers, including area code
my full mailing address
my global coordinates (latitude and longitude)
and my land (physical property). What's the address of this judge? I need to go talk to him.
Amazingly enough, the Indiana House Of Representatives voted pi=3... but it died in the Senate.
There's some software out there that doesn't use DNS. Mostly it's things like VPNs that authenticate on an IP address basis because they need to accept incoming packets that don't have friendly user information with them (or couldn't trust it if they did.) I don't know if that's why this miscreant wants their IP address to stay the same, but they've had an ARIN-allocated IP address space for over a year and not renumbered.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The company in question is Pegasus Web Technology run by a Mr. Jason Silvergate.
-davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
I'll just keep statically routing it over my network, effectively black-holing them.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
If you want to compare it to having a phone, it's like moving from the southern US with a landline phone number of (233) 123-2321, and wanting to keep it in an area that is not serviced by 233.
Actually, moreso it's like moving to China, but still wanting to have your number be the exact same (country code and all).... after all, it too can be routed, nevermind that doing so for too many people will be incredibly slow/stupid/etc
Let him take his ip addresses with him, but I would say don't change any routing for him. Then maybe he will realize that the ip address portablity is not going to work and he should rely on DNS like the rest of the internet community.
Not really. The order only forces NAC to continue providing the IPs to the client or a service hired by the client, and forbids them from changing router entries to block access. The order is only meant to prevent any possible further damage from taking place until the judge can fully look at the merits of the case, it is not meant to setup a portability system for IPs. The order is in no way a precedent.
Any equipment that's too much trouble to renumber is too old to keep using - they'd have been better off paying a network administrator for a day rather than a lawyer. They've had their own ARIN allocation for over a year and haven't used it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It seems the problem is that judges hate to admit that they could be wrong or that they aren't knowledgeable in a particular area.
Many judges have difficulties understanding even the simplest of DNA evidence. Are we to expect that they can understand something as complex as Internet routing or other technology issues?
Granted this is a temporary restraing order and not a full blown trial. I would respect the judge if he/she would take the time to read up on this issue. Heck, even read Slashdot!!
OK, the court sez that he can take the IP address with him. BUT it does not state that it has to work. So he moves to a new ISP and manually assigns his IP address. At best it doesn't work. At worse, it duplicates someone elses IP address and they get warning messages. Then the guy who moved sues the other person and ISP for the duplicate IP address. But it turns out that the other guy had it for a much longer time. Then it becomes a class action suit that involves everyone on private subnets that have the same address space. Pretty soon the courts become overwhelmed and civilization as we know it ceases to exist.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
Hopefully the courts don't see phone number portability as precedence
Why is everyone so thrilled with DNS? I would think this being
I used to work for a Fortune 500 company that
claimed 2 class B address ranges. They moved
them from ISP to ISP.
And lest we forget, as the tables grew, more memory was required, and lookups slowed down.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
What's really scary about IP allocation is how many individual corporations have so many IPs.
It might seem reasonable for IBM and Apple to have an entire Class A, but why do Ford, Eli Lily, Halliburton, Prudential, GE, and Merck have entire Class A IP blocks when they're not using a fraction of them??? The IP allocation list reads like a who's who of political favors.
All I've seen is a message NAC posted to a message board and very little else. Chances are NAC submitted it to Slashdot as well.
Unless there's a gag order (not mentioned, and if there was they probably couldn't publicize it as much as they have) there's no reason not to link to the actual court order and other details.
For all we know someone set us up the bomb by giving very specific, but obviously lacking breadth, information and letting us come to the obvious conclusion.
This is basic marketting (astroturfing) to try and get the outcome changed by technical people (who think they know what's going on) who the court might listen to.
It's in our best interest to completely vet out the case before running off half cocked. I wish I knew enough to find the TRO or the customer's side of the story.
The facts seem clear enough, but the presentation is muddy at best.
-Adam
Never mind... that's what happened in the telephone world and it didn't work.
More discussion from the ISP can be found here
The most obvious question is who is the cybersquating moron who thinks he can (apparently for the moment) get the legal system to aid and abet in his absconding with a level of control he is contractually--and perhaps legally, depending on how specific ARIN's legal basis for controlling the distribution of IP blocks is--supposed to be prohibited from doing in the first place? Does anyone have access to the actual court documents, either on-line (Lexus anyone?) or in person?
Shirley we have at least one slashdotter in that neck of the woods in Jersey, yes?
The entire Internet is based on hierarchical IP space. Portable IP's aren't a huge issue when the internet is small. When the total number of used networks can fit in a routing table, it's survivable. But since the Internet exploded in the 90's, it's basically impossible for a router to keep track of every single valid IP addresses. (4 Billion possibilities)
The solution was CIDR, in which IP address were grouped in big clumps, and rented out to different companies. Those companies broke it into smaller chunks, and rented them out again. Thus, if you need to send a message to 1.2.3.4, all you really need to know who controls the 1.0.0.0, and send it that way. 1.0.0.0 can send it on to the 1.2.0.0 guys, so on, and so forth. Yes, this is drastic oversimplification and thus prone to error, but I think it helps with comprehension.
As you've seen other people mention, this is analagous to porting zip codes.
--LordPixie
That was the first thing I thought of. Is the judge going to force the original ISP to stop advertising the summary of its net block and force it to advertise "around" the block being forced portable, even if it leaves the people on new, stubbier blocks with possibly less advantageous routing paths?
Is it going to force a new ISP to advertise the chunk being made portable?
It just strikes me as one of those things that makes no sense and requires some blank court order that applies to anyone running a backbone agree to.
It seems most similar to an electricity customer demanding that it gets its electricity from a specific plant, even though they are moving to a region that cannot be served from that plant.
Individual, end users should not have this ability I believe. It would create all sort of havoc and craziness.
HOWEVER, seeing as I am the systems administrator of a decent sized ISP I would say that in some respects this 'number portability' should be considered. I know that my company right now is purchasing bandwidth from a certain provider for far too much $...and we are stuck with them unless we want to create weeks of craziness trying to get all of our customers to switch over to new ip address space, more than likely losing a good bit of business in the process.
So I somewhat believe IP portability should be enforced, but only within the same locale. IE: if I am tired of provider A, I should be able to switch to provider B without having to disrupt my entire business.
Sounds similar to the cell phone portability a while back eh? Well....it is.
/* sig */
Isn't it useless?
I have a domain pointing to my computer on the web. When I will switch internet providers in a few months, I'll just update the domain and everybody surfing to the domain will still end up at my computer.
If someone manages to become so dependent on their IP address that's just plain stupid. All you need is a domain which points to the right place.
I don't know that one but if it's anything like the Hemel Hempstead "Magic Roundabout", then it's actually not a roundabout, but a circular road with X small 3-way roundabouts on it.
http://www.2pass.co.uk/magicroundabout.gif
I'm not from UK, but I've driven through this insane monster of traffic design... for someone used to driving in the right side it's intense psychological terror. *shudder*
Nobody has to do anything to implement this - in particular, NAC, who own the address space, probably has to do precisely nothing, as opposed to recycling the space which they would normally do. (The main exception is that if they run spoof-proofing filters to reject outsiders claiming to own their address space, they'll have to make a table entry to permit this one.)
The BGP routing protocol always uses the longest available prefix unless you tell it not to, so if NAC has the IP address space x.y.*.* and the miscreant plaintiff was using x.y.z.*, the miscreant's new ISP will need to advertise that they've got a route to x.y.z/24 - and the rest of the Internet will generally accept it and send packets to new-isp.net instead of old-isp.net, running a bit slower because there's more crap cluttering up their routing tables. Some ISPs will filter out the announcement because it's too short, so they'll still send any packets for x.y.z.w to the ISP handling x.y.*.* (that's old-isp.net) who will forward it to new-isp.net.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I want to take my coordinates with me when I move! Everyone else will just have to deal with it, from topozone to GPS manufacturers!.
(Please take the above as a healthy dose of sarcasm)
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
The answer here is for the ISP (NAC) to respond to the TRO by stating that the renumber currently isn't possible for technical and legal reasons, and that the TRO is wrongly served: it should be served against ARIN who is the owner of the numbering space. Of course, once it is bounced back, then the applicant needs to have a new TRO issued.
In two months when he comes back to the judge to complain that he can't get internet access with his address.
Just say, "We gave him his address, he can take it to any ISP with the same network address as his.... except for us that is."
Next thing will be mandatory email portability.
Has anybody a link for the other side of the story? So far, only the ISP has published his version.
There probably is some kind of contract dispute (or dispute over the way the contract was terminated). The court probably wants to ensure that the customer that used the IP addresses does not lose them while this dispute is being resolved. If the addresses are taken away immediately, this will result in irreparable harm to the customer.
In fact, the ISP is not ordered to provide service to the customer, it's only prevent from inject certain routes into its IGP, or announce them over BGP. This can be an astonishingly clueful decision bythe court ifthe affected prefixes are large enough and can be routed indepedently of the short prefix that is allocated to NAC.
It might not be an idiot. There are plenty of people who have next to impossible problems with various registars. Bacy in the Day, when Network Solutions was the only option, my ISP had to change IP blocks for some reason. Well, we all know how Network Solutions makes it next to impossible to actually access a human being in the company when their seamless process doesn't go quite as smoothly as it should have (back in the day when you had to authenticate email addresses, fax over letterhead, etc for a simple DNS change). My website literally vanished for several years because I couldn't change either my IP or my DNS listings. A portable IP back in the day would've helped tremendously.
True, but not as a direct consequence of the larger address blocks. Generally the routing prefixes for the global addresses of each host on the network are not statically configured into each block of addresses used by the customer. Rather, they are discovered from a router when the node first starts. The host part of the address is normally auto-derived from the MAC address of the node. (Large organizations with complex internal networks might have a "infix" portion of the address used to route within the internal topology, but these are also configured at the router and auto-discovered.)
Renumbering your global routing prefix (and the full, routable, address of each node) is merely a matter of changing the config on one or more of your routers.
I've done this a number of times on my home V6 test network (changing my v6 provider) and it works fine.
There is still the issue of DNS remapping, but that is trivial. Any migration of a major customer data center would involve dual ISP connectivity for at least some time, and the DNS caches could flush during that time.
There are two proactical points to make one this.
First, just because a customer could "take away" the IP range doesn't mean they'll have anywhere to put them. This isn't like WNP where Verizon utilizes AT&T's allocated phone number. The next ISP won't be able to implement the IP space without an ARIN reallocation, and even then it can't be for a single IP address.
Second, this will not destroy the Internet... it may just destroy New Jersey as a state that ISPs can have a base in. They will just have to get mailing addresses outside of NJ that ARIN grants the range to. Problem solved because it's out of NJ state court jurisdiction.
IPv6, your time has come.
I'm taking my GPS coordinates with me!
I recommend anyone commenting on this story to go read the PDFs of the planiff's brief that led up to this decision. Links to the PDF can be found in the message thread provided by the link in the story. If NAC is guilty of half of what they are accused of, it looks like they were using the non-transferable nature of IP addresses as blackmail to force this guy to sell his business to them.
Before you flame the guy for bringing the suit, remember, there are two sides to every story. I believe the courts will work this out, but shame on NAC for backing this kid into a corner. It seems to me that it didn't have to get this far. I think we may be getting a glimpse into the slimier side of the ISP business.
Later,
tims
"Ahhhh, best laid plans of mice and men... and Cookie Monster." -- Cookie Monster, Sesame Street
Now, as to the technical merits: yes, allowing IP portability is a major issue. More importantly, how would you protect yourself in this situation?
Your upstream starts jacking up the fees and threatens to cut you off. You can't move easily without disrupting your customers. What I would do is colo and start quietly moving my customers over. Once I was up in the new facility, then I tell my old upstream to jack off and then I pull the plug.
Yeah, right.
And how would the above post be redundant? It was a non-technical reply to a question from a non-technical person...
The analogy was sound enough for the original poster.
Doesn't seem redundant to me.
No, it won't help. With either IPv6 or IPv4, you still need the global routing table entries. That's where the problem is. The global routers will say something like 1.2.3.0/24 are routed to some network equipment in New Jersey. With this ruling, those same global tables in all those routers need to add another entry for a particular IP address in that range to instead go to some other providor. Now imagine if everyone kept their own personal IP address. Those tables wouldn't be able to cleanly route chunks of the IP address space to the ISPs using them, but instead must be filled with tons and tons of rules for individual addresses.
IPv6 works in a very similar fashion. The only difference between IPv6 and IPv4 in terms of the routing is that the address ranges/chunks are much more abundant and much larger. If anything, IPv6 will make it flat out impossible for the Internet to work if people keep personal IP addresses, because there is no possible way the routers could handle the mapping tables.
Ranges need to be kept to individual ISPs as they are now. AT&T leases a big chunk of several billion IPv6 addresses and then assigns those as they see fit to their customers and internal network equipment. All the global routers need to know then is that any address in that chunk AT&T leases just gets routed along to AT&T's network. If a customer leaves AT&T, they need to get an IP address in the range of their new ISP. Otherwise, the new ISP needs to add tons of special routing rules to their equipment, AT&T needs to add tons of special routing rules to their equipment, the backbones and global routers need special rules, anyone that has any rules regarding AT&T and/or the new ISP would need special rules added, etc.
I have read through the affidavit and I think a lot of people are blowing this out of proportion. This order is only temporary, as Pegasus can only get a certain number of IP addresses through ARIN(true). They need these IP's to provide a seamless move for their customers. After reading the affidavit, it doesn't paint a pretty picture of NAC's business practices.
Heh.. Go read the PDFs for a better idea of what is going on. Honestly, it really doesnt look like an issue of IP portability so much as continued access to a particular netblock.
." much doom ensues for UCI.
From the plantiff's affidavit part 1:
"If UCI were to leave NAC on short notice (e.g. the 45-day period provided for in the contract in the event NAC raises rates) and NAC refused access to the existing IP addresses supplied by NAC until new addresses were secured. .
But the point is, he is not asking to take the IPs to another company... he is asking for use of the IPs until he has time to aquire IP space from a different host.
Basically, he is suing to keep his IP space from being shut off during the move.
I still dont agree with it personally, but it makes a little more sense after reading the papers relating to the case.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
After reading the comments on how this is technically unsound, I have a qyuestion for the IP savy /.'ers:
What IS the maximum granularity we can support now? It seems the limit is routers and routing table size, so I'm wondering, how far down the hierarchy can the IPv4 internet be IP portable? I assume from my limited knowledge, that there is some of that al ready in place (for the highest level of IP blocks....Those change when physical machines move or fail, right?) We can't give everyone a personal IP, but the high levels can be moved. Where is the mark where it's still possible to move thigns about, but no further? (given current tech) And, I assume the mark would be higher up the tree for IPv6 due to the larger addreses/routing info?
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
I do know this is a matter of great importance at the moment. I do however, do not believe it will be in the near future, when IPv6 becomes much more of a standard. IPv4 is running out of addresses very quickly, when an average person with a cellphone, home internet, wireless interent, all reduce the number of IPv4 addresses available. Yes, this is a problem right now! I wonder if this ruling may help in the spread of IPv6!
There are reasons for the current InterNet architecture, if the ISPs customer can't understand them, they should immediately be forced to renumber to the 10.x.x.x address space. :-)
--Mike--
The internet is supposed to be self-repairing. All that needs to be done is route round the problem.
Let these idiots have the IP addresses, but blackhole them, and the idiotic state that tried to break the net.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I question if the simple act of changing the IP address of a device is the hard part. It wouldn't surprise me if their internal network has proprietary software that uses hardcoded IP addresses. Yes, that sounds amazingly stupid. But even my inexperienced butt has seen that before. A NAT would at least allow their internal workings to stay the same, while not breaking the entire Internet.
--LordPixie
They drive like that, too.
--
make install -not war
A la address translation. Would break a few apps but at least basics like web would function.
But I agree there must be some real idiots running the customer's servers unless they have some groovy IP address like 69.69.69.69 and which they would really like to keep..?
Here's the affidavits stating the plaintif's claims in the case. Clearly this story involves more than just "some idiot wanting to keep his IP addresses".
UCI (the plaintiff) is a web-hosting company that has resold IP-space to its customeres. They don't seem to be looking to take the addresses permanently. They want to continue use of the address space at their new provider until they've finished migrating all of thier customers.
The plaintiff claims that once they rebuffed suggestions of a takeover from NAC (the ISP), the ISP started applying pressure on the plaintiff. Examples include claims that prices were raised (e.g., electricity charges are 60% higher than what the new ISP will charge), and payment terms were unilaterally changed.
This doesn't seem to be the slippery-slope case that will result in home users taking their IP addresses with them as they change ISPs.
as long as dynamic name service works. :D
so far it's great, I've changed ISP, moved, and after hooked up to new ISP, I still only need to use my dysdns name to easy connect myself back home from where ever.
imagine, if the ip addresses are being broadcast and withdrawn as a user logs in (for example a broadband or narrowband connection) - all the routers in the world will go crazy and overloaded. i don't think even the new cisco crs will be able to handle the load.
but at the end, i'll say, if the network is below
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
A better idea: Require the former ISP to forward the traffic to a new address for a month.
So the person can take their IP address with them. Good for them. Hopefully when they go to a new network, they'll tell the admins that they want all the routing tables changed just for them, and get laughed out of business....
We already have IP portability. Geez, where have you been? My machine was 127.0.0.1 before I moved into this house, and it still is now. You know, that's funny that my other computer has that number too...
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
Also you can't take your phone number with you. Just try it. It can only be done within your own area since obviously moving outside your area would chance the area code and someone in the new area might have your number. Mobile phones work very differently as mobile phones by their very nature already move around.
IP is more like a zip code. It is tied closely to where the computer is. For instance you can tell from my IP exactly who my ISP is wich is a good thing. Since that is the way traffic routed around the net. Imagine if street address could be taken with you when you move. Bakerstreet 1 might be in america but Bakerstreet 1a might be in france. Idiocy.
Someone please shoot this judge and the guy who filed. In fact just nuke the whole damn state. Safest thing. Can't risk this kind of idiocy to spread.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
from the internet. Its getting to the point where dumbasses who know just enough to be dangerous are really screwing it up for the rest of us. I dont think the judicial branch has the knowledge to make rulings in regards to the Internet and IP. I dont understand why these smack tards just dont perform a seemless swap if they wanna chnage their DNS server IP's...stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid
See Sig! See Sig Zig! Zig Sig Zig!!!!!
So what's the big deal? Sure, the customer in question has a severe case of recto-cranial inversion. But why is everybody saying that this TRO heralds the doom of the route tables?
The judge doesn't know the technical issues, so he's issued the TRO to keep things static until he can examine everything and issue a ruling.
Note that the judge isn't insisting that the customer be able to take his numbers, just that the ISP can't prevent it. In other words, they can't BGP-advertise those numbers, or sell them to another customer, etc. The judge is just asking (okay, ordering) the ISP to set those IPs aside for the time being. If the customer can find somebody who'll advertise 'em, then that's fine too.
In a little while, the judge will have studied the situation, and gotten amicus curiae briefs, and probably expert testimony, and will issue a fair ruling (which, I expect, will tell the customer to go away and quit whining about his IPs). But for him to be fair in his ruling, he has to make sure that those IPs aren't recycled first, and that's why he issued the TRO.
The article makes it sound like the judge ruled that the IPs are portable; even the subject says it: "Can a Customer take their IP's with them? (Court says yes!)". The article talks about this as a ruling that may set a precident. It's just a TRO; the judge is putting the brakes on things until he can figure out what's what. There's no ruling, there's no precident, and I expect everything will go back to normal soon.
Your honor,
I am moving, please tell the govt to let me take my GPS co-ordinates with me!
doh...
Abide by the original agreement is simple. He keeps his original ISP and continues to pay them for services until this is resolved. The physical location has changed? Sorry bud, but your connectivity is still available whenever you want us to make the physical connection. Oh, by the way, you are required to pay for the past three months services we are now required to provide to you. See you in court. And if the company's a dick then apply the TOS and disable their access per their original agreement. Seems simple to me (maybe too simple :-)
Shit better not happen!
to an ISP I was working for several years ago. The upstream provider had not (unbeknownst to us) paid his bills to *his* backbone provider. The typical "we are contesting some of the bills" trick. When the backbone provider finally had enough (3 or 4 months down the road) they jerked the IP space. We received a telephone call saying that the IP space would be null-routed at 5pm that day!!! By this time our little uplink provider had secured bandwidth on another link but told us he had no IP address space (long story and it's still in court I think).
The net result was that we had to hire a lawyer to threaten the backbone provider if they jerked the IP space (all routed via BGP) until we could secure new addresses. It took about a week to find another system with enough IP space and then get our system rerouted and readdressed. Lots of long nights.
So if this is a similar case - and it appears that it is - my sympathies lay with the ISP that is trying to stay in business. They don't want the IP space permanently; just long enough to secure new addresses and re-route. I can't see how this will break the Internet as long as the temporary injunction is not permanent. We certainly would have done the same thing.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Still, 127.0.0.1 is a great warez/porn/mp3 site. Too bad I've already got everything it does -- I get great transfer rates to it!
I'm an innocent bystander don't black hole the state, just the state government ;-)
IPV6 is going to be internal-only for a while, so each organization will still need a few external IPV4 addresses. If the resistence to "address portability" is broken, you will be able to get just 10 instead of hording the whole block.
As for routing, well more difficult problems have been solved before. I am sure cell phone companies also didn't have a ready solution for number portability or for nationwide roaming.
Think about it: We all fought for cell phone number portability, but we hate IP number portability.
To the average non-technical person, wouldn't they seem to be a similar right? More importantly, shouldn't we be able to keep IPs? So lazy ISPs have to rewrite software due to lazy Admins... It's a similar right, so if I pay for a static IP, I pay for a static IP.
Perhaps the current economic model and technology behind IP routing is flawed in this respect, but does that really mean that they should be, in fact, locked in? It's a pain to change DNS info. What if you are a site owner but not the admin? What if it's some long gone web design firm? Can the average user really change an IP address, even using most registrar's friendly web interfaces?
This is amazing. We're shouting the same problems that cell phone companies did - too great an expense, need time, not set up for it, unnecessary - but only because it is convenient.
Why even bother arguing a point when you contradict yourself on a mostly parallel point?
I imagine this will start drawing flames, but it's an important point at how hypocritical we, in the technical community, have become when we go from end-user asking for a service to admin denying a similar service. It's just my two cents, so if you don't like it, give me a refund. I'll be waiting.
If you take IP's from ISP's, all you get is S, not $.
well, he can have the IP if he really wants it, it won't do him a damn bit of good if no one routes packets to him
I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you
Haven't seen this mentioned here already, but a small update is that according to a later NANOG post, ARIN's legal eagles will be taking up this case.
This is good news.
they won't work, traffic won't route to 'em.. but they can have 'em.
Before everyone goes nuts, could someone identify what the court is and who the plaintiffs are.
To start a panic because someone said that some New Jersey court said is NUTS.
If this ruling stands then script-kiddies and spammers will have a field day. Eventually the politicians will run a news story and write a number of bills in which the government will demand oversight of all DNS servers and routers.
Ooooooh boy. Fun fun fun.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Taking your home address is vastly different then taking someting more abstract as a 'id number' with you.
In a way its not much different then taking a block of cell phone numbers with you when you change services..
Sure, i understand the techincal ramifications of this, but it needs to be put into proper perspective as it is just a block of Id's, not something physical like your street address.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You know phone numbers are now computer-switched network addresses. They're essentially the same thing as IP addresses, just on different hardware and a different protocol. Even the IP address blocks are analogous to area codes and exchanges.
They were recently made portable by FCC decree, with great inconvenience and expense to the telephone companies.
IP addresses can be made portable. It's only a question of how long it would take, how much it would cost, how many people have to cooperate, and how much it would degrade switching performance.
The judge here is saying, "Whether you can do it or not, the way the law works, you are obligated to." So they'll come back and say something like, "We've looked into it thoroughly. We just can't do it. It's theoretically possible, but practically infeasible at this time." and the judge will say, "Well, then, you should have avoided the obligation. Damages in the amount of $X rewarded to the plaintiff."
Phone numbers are now portable (mostly) because of changes in the architecture of how phone switches work. Long ago this was not the case. Today, there are physical routing codes that are different from the number itself; looking up a portable cell number in a database gets the code that identifies where it goes (and tracks where the cell phone has roamed to). Todays phone numbers are more like domain names on the internet.
Comparing phone numbers to IP addresses is wrong. Just because both are numbers is apparently what misleads you. A phone number is analogous to a domain name (the internet can use letters more than phones can because of the keyboards involved ... but many companies do use letters are part of their phone number promotions ... for example 1-800-HOSTING). The IP address is analogous to the switch routing codes used to connect a call to the proper switch where it is located. Portable phone numbers are looked up in a database to get those location codes just like domain names are looked up in the DNS system to get IP addresses. The internet, and the domain name system, just wasn't limited by the legacy of the past like the PSTN is.
Fast forward 20 years ...
IPv6 is deployed everywhere. The old PSTN is dead. All voice communication is by direct end-to-end VoIP. You speak the identity of the party to "call" and it first looks up your private name list, and then the public name list (a form of DNS probably expanded to identify every individual). It's translated internally in the software to an IPv6 address, and a connection attempt is made. Over that connection you communicate. Behind the scenes routers will dyanamically route as needed. And IPv6 is even easier to renumber; just unplug from one network and plug in to another. The phone will (using a securely authenticated means) communicate its new location to the place where your identity maps to your IPv6 address.
IPv4 isn't as good as IPv6 in this regard, but it is by no means the identity you should use. If you were to promote your IP address as the way to reach you, you would be stupid (but I'm not saying you're doing that).
And check out my sig (as of when this is posted) for an example of how bad an IP address could be. But actually, you can do that in DNS.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This Just In:
The court has just declared that customers may also take their postal addresses with them when they move.
So now if your customers, friends, and relatives have come to know your address as "1010 Elwood Drive" and you move across town or to a new city, you can bring the address with you to avoid confusion! Isn't that great!?
Soon each building, or even each office or apartment within a building will have it's own completely unique address without regard to where it is physically located.
We should make judges and lawyers in charge of more things so we can get great conveniences like this in all our life!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
From the wording of the article, while not explicitly stated, I'm guessing that the plaintif was a spammer or some other equally hated member of the internet community. I'm guessing he's wanting to take his IP block with him so he can set up a peering network and not be limited by the acceptable use policy. The article made reference to several complaints about this block holder.
I think they should let him take his block, but every other ISP should refuse to route his traffic. That would solve the problem.
Use the first top-level link, and navigate to the appropriate PDFs from there.
Moving single IP adresses or small address blocks will break classless routing. Suddenly it is not not enough anymore to look at a prefix to determine the "rough" direction where to route a packet. These special IPs need their own entry in the routing table.
Now if a big corporation like IBM switches ISP that may not be a big deal, the new ISP would just add IBM's prefix to its routing tables.
Individual IPs, however, will literally make the routing algorithms non-scalable.
I'm not singling you out in particular, but it seems like nobody has actually read the lawsuit[temporary mirror]. The defendant claims that NAC has been bullying him into selling them his web hosting business, and has been unilaterally messing with his contract, copying his services, using his customer list to advertise the copied services, and engaging in a laundry list of other misdeeds.
So he found a new facility, but appears to be having difficulty migrating between IP addresses while still providing "uninterrupted service" for his customers. He claims--of course I have no way of verifying this--that the costs to NAC of allowing him to use the old IPs at the new location will amount to $500/month, and he's eager to reimburse them for that.
I don't think it's time to panic yet. If the plaintiff's claims are correct, then the technical issues of migrating 3000 customers to a new IP space are greater than we think, and the technical issues of rerouting this block of address space are lower than we think. So long as this doesn't lead to an actual judgment claiming that IP addresses need to be portable, I don't think it would have a major impact.
Still, I wish the guy had just sued for a truckload of damages and more time to make the migration a reality. But like the rest of us, I'm not familiar enough with the case to know what's going on.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
4. Because the IP space is still assigned to the carrier, the carrier would potentially be responsible to continue to respond to all SPAM and hacking complaints, DMCA violations, and all other forms of abuse.
While its 'potential' I just don't buy this. If it does turn out that a netblock does get ripped out of the hands of an ISP and grafted on elsewhere and traffic no longer goes thru the ISP, although the netblock ay be listed under the original ISP, there is nothing they can do as its not part of their network anymore. For instance if there was a DMCA complaint all they'd have to really do is hold up this decision and the fact atht the block took a walk and say "this effectively isnt ours anymore, we legally dont control it anymore, we cannot be held responsible."
If your say ex-wife gets your cell phone in a divorce and then makes a bomb threat, but your name is still on the contract at the end of the day you arent responsible for it as you legally have no control over it.
Of course the downside to this is repeatedly having to tell people this over and over may cost big bucks in legal fcosts, and could be justifiably be an undue burden.
http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras/nac-case/
Its merely a TRO so they can transition to a
new provider. Obviosuly I don't have all the
facts but its certainly not clear that the judge
made a bad call. I mean not ISP would ever use
non portable address space as a club over their
customers head right?!
Since no one in their right mind would care this much about their IP changing, if they haven't written some code with the IP hard-coded in there and distributed it to their customers?
--- This
Actually, I've had a client with old software that was developed by an assinine developer that instead of putting a domain name in a url, hard coded an ip into a product, so they're stuck with the same hosting company until they discontinue support of the old product (actually, I've seen it done twice, for two different clients, and it turned out to be the same developer both times). I'm not trying to justify ip portability, but rather an example of why a company might want to retain the ip. It's obviously the developers fault, as well as the client's for not checking that the developer was competent to complete the job.
this is a big deal about nothing. someone needs to tell the judge that it is simply impossible to do this. end of story.
We're reading Slashdot!!
The scrubs in #nanog@EFNet have liberated some legal documents about this case. Do have a nice read and stop by then channel and thank humble for his hosting the stolen filez!
If only more people thought this way when watching Michael Moore documentaries...
Your Honor,
It is inconvenient for me to change my street address. I demand that I be allowed to use my current street address. The U.S. Postal service must now route all mail sent to 123 Plum Street, Springfield, IL, to 10036 N 43rd street, Las Cacas, New Mexico.
(My GOD, the judiciary is so STUPID in this country!)
Proverbs 21:19
There's something deeper going on here. Check out #24 on Page 11 of the restraining order (http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras/nac-case/restraining- order.pdf)
And I quote:
21. At the foregoing meeting, UCI also advised NAC that it needed more space. NAC was not in a position to provide space sufficient to meet all UCI's anticipated needs. During the meeting, Mr. Rubenstein, the Chief Operating Officer of NAC, stated in words or substance to Silverglate and Barna, "When are you going to shut the f*** up already, sell your business to us (NAC) and come work for me?" Upon information and belief, the comment reflected NAC's goal to acquire UCI, instead of servicing plaintiff company as part of a customer/provider relationship in the future.
Bold mine, spelling mistakes probably mine.
Read the case documents before getting worried about this. It's not a general IP portability case. It's an emergency court order to prevent an outage.
This is about a dispute between a 1500 server co-located hosting provider and their colo site operator. The colo site operator is competing with the hosting provider, and is making life miserable for the hosting provider. The hosting provider has built a new facility and is moving out. The temporary restraining order simply prevents their colo site operator from interfering with the transition, which is currently scheduled to occur on July 1.
Once they finish the move, the hosting provider will get rid of all connections with their (hated) former co-location provider. They're not taking the IP address space with them permanently. They're just using it during the transition to avoid downtime. So this is a temporary situation.
Technically, stuff like this happens all the time during moves. Usually, both parties cooperate to provide a seamless transition. The unusual thing here is that the losing co-location provider is being so obnoxious that a court had to intervene. It's New Jersey, remember.
IPv4 has seen its time and now we are about to see the same thing we always see whenever stupid people chafe against the technical limitations of a closed system. Hell stupid people get into cars all the time, so why shouldn't they get to take their IP networks with them? I mean what could it hurt? If I was the judge I'd let them do it on the condition that they pay for the RAM and switch fabric cards that will be required for anyone to peer with them or listen to their measely route. Even if they win there will be a technical hurdle. Remember .. most providers don't even listen to anything below a /22 anymore.
"Someone please shoot this judge and the guy who filed. In fact just nuke the whole damn state. Safest thing. Can't risk this kind of idiocy to spread."
Oops... too late. Seems it already has spread.
.45ACP because bigger holes are better
http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras/nac-case actually read the documents filed in the case.
It would appear that this judgement is somewhat reasonable considering that NAC (the ISP) dicked the customer around, although if I were they judge I would have just made NAC continue to provide service to the customer for a while longer instead of messing with re-assigning ip addresses between isp's.
So, besides County judges (does this exist in US?), State judges and Federal judges you propose the creation of Virtual Judges, to oversee the applicaiton of law in the Internet?
Read the case documents. This is temporary, until the customer moves their 1500 servers to a new data center next weekend. Their colo site is being uncooperative, and a court had to intervene. By next week, this whole thing should be over.
The problem is the ISPs want to own your IP address and they use the shortage in IPV4 to retain control.
Why does this seem like the charge of the tinfoil hat brigade?
What a nefarious plot! The techies who route Internet data want to be able to assign the numbers they need to route it!
Saying that the ISPs want to own my IP address is like saying the phone company wants to own my port number on their switches. Duh! An IP address isn't a phone number, or anything close to it. This is a very bad analogy, but a domain name is more like a phone number. A phone number can be associated with any one of many different actual phone connections. Likewise, a domain name can be associated with any one of many different IP addresses. The whole point of the DNS system is to have portable addresses (domain names) which are independant of IP addresses. What this lazy, litigious oxygen-thief wants to do is basically break the entire routing system, and he's got some damnfool judge who thinks the Internet is something to catch Interfish with to agree with him. Letting an ignorant fool like that make decisions about how the Internet should be managed is like having some random net user making legal rulings. If you don't know wtf the situation involves, as it is clear that this judge didn't, then find someone who does.
Someone needs to whack the bloody fool of a judge with a clue-by-four. Maybe with a copy of The Internet for Dummies. For the love of Kibo, at least send him a link to How Stuff Works.
No ISP worth using will touch that.
Or maybe you'll be able to spend that time doing something more interesting, entertaining, or rewarding....
The comment has been made in several posts that "this is what you get when non-technical people try to deal with technical issues."
Actually there are far more non-techies than techies. So naturally it will happen that yes *they* do get involved. In fact, since the Internet went commercial Way Back When this day has been coming.
Face it, so long as networking was a tech toy, nobody cared how we managed it or optimized it. So long as email got where it needed to go the PHB was happy even if he did wonder what we did for our wages.
Then people starting running businesses on the Internnet. And anywhere there there is money flowing there is also random larceny savored with relentless stupidity. Remember the whole sex.com thing? How long did that take to resolve? And what about domain squatting? That was interesting. And all that woo-haa about similar sounding domains infringing copyrights and trademarks? And Google bombing? And phishing? And domain typo-hijacking? And spamspamspamspam? And the RIAA? And SCO?
I don't know about money being the root of all evil, but I'll submit it is the root of all malcontentment. Don't *ever* get in the way of a fool and his money.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Well, if you read the court documents, you'll see that the guy suing the ISP is in a bad position; he's selling webhosting to people who sell webhosting to others on servers coloed at the ISP. He's a useless middleman in the deal & has refused attempts at being bought out by the ISP already.
The basis of his case is that he is completely dependant upon the ISP to do his business & they're rasing his rates to a point where he can't keep his business going, possibly in order to force him to sell. I'm not going to say that the ISP is being nice, but they're not entirely out of line.
Even with the network being temporarily re-routed, this guy is fucked; he has a single supplier for what he's selling & his supplier wants to start selling directly to his customers. If he was smart, he'd have set up his own datacenter by now.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
The case documents are entertaining reading. See especially paragraph 11 of this filing, the "offer you can't refuse": "In fact Alex Rubenstein essentially asked me when I was going to give up, sell the business to him, and come to work for NAC".
This is all so New Jersey.
As a few people have noted: this is only a TEMPORARY restrainging order. After looking at PDF's of the clients claims they are basically saying that they used colocation service from this company. The business grew and has 15-20 people on staff. As the business grew, the defendent expressed interest in purchasing the company and hiring the owner. The owner didn't want this. The defendent went on to strong arm the client, charge fees above and beyond what their contract stipulated. They changed the agreement multiple times in an effort to cause trouble for the business owner. The owner has built a data facility to host his 1500 (if I recall correctly) servers himself. He has tried to work out a deal where he leases a minimum amount of service from the colocation facility and retains all the IP addresses while all of his servers are moved. Due to the possibility of losing business if there is extended down time, he has tried REPEATEDLY to structure an equitable deal. He isn't trying to take the IP addresses. He is trying to make sure the IP addresses aren't taken away so that services can be redirected to the new facility. He is and has been willing to pay for all services, moving fees, bandwidth, electrical usage, storage space, and so on THE ENTIRE TIME. Let me be clear about this: the client isn't trying to steal IP addresses. He has his own million+ dollar facility with addresses given to him by ARIN. He is simply trying to ensure a smooth transition which will not cause a loss of business -- something which he claims that the defendent has done the entire time. People need to stop freaking out. Mucho thanks to the person who posted the actual affadavits so we can see what is being blown out of proportion.
If you want to use the phone anology the IP == the phone number
IP is more like the circuit ID that the phone company uses to route your calls. IPs are inherently local, whereas you can mostly hang a phone number anywhere.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
This is not a case of the plaintiff or judge not understanding IP addresses and Internet routing.
;-)
Pegasus Web Technologies hosts about 3000 sites in Net Access Corporation's co-location facility. Pegasus used NAC's IP addresses instead of acquiring their own. They even re-sold NAC's IP addresses to Pegasus customers. Now Pegasus wants to move to a different co-location facility.
Moving all those sites (with many using third party DNS providers) to new address space is going to be painful and disruptive. Rather than explain to their customers how they mucked up, Pegasus is suing NAC.
Read the case yourself: NAC-Case
And make sure Pegasus isn't your hosting company...
you'd discover the contract that they sign specifically prohibits even attempting to take possesion of your I.P. So in the end, this TRO won't make a damn bit of difference since it seems to be a simple matter of enforcing the terms of the existing contract.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
NAC is brutally trying to shut this guy down, at least according to his side of the story, so they can take over his business. He's trying to move to his own facility, but they are being complete dicks about facilitating the move, so a lawsuit was his only recourse. This is being discussed as if the internet routing structure was being attacked, or that he's trying to steal their old IP range. This is not the case. Read the court filings people.
when listening to the White House.
Zing!
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Probably some hacker IP. The guy doesn't want to break all his clients. :o)
Well, I started to read through the court documents, and it looks so far like the ISP who gets to keep the addresses (courtesy of the order) actually has some really serious complaints against its upstream provider, which is why the court had to take some sort of immediate action.
Technically, I understand the knee-jerk response that's all /. seems to cover so far.
But seriously -- what's the judge to do, when
the upstream ISP is doing stuff like that? They've
broken the contract so many times it's not funny,
and it seems like this is a pretty minimal step
towards letting the victim (== ISP that gets
to keep the address, per the order) get
disentangled from an especially crapulent
upstream provider.
Seems most of the /. crowd would
prefer that ISPs be given the kind of powers
that God-Emperor Bush seems to want,
to abuse anyone they see fit and never be
brought to account.
Come on people. Look at the facts.
As if the telephone number portability wasn't stupid enough, now this? Those numbers have heirarchical meaning for a reason - to make the system work - in both cases. I don't know how the telcos let them get away with this, but the ISPs had better not.
"Is this just an asshole with a axe to grind who found a stupid/ignorant judge?"
Someone who can't be bothered to renumber? Someone who wondered "what if..."? Someone who's pissed at phone companies and is taking it out on their ISP?
Of all the posts in this thread, only about 5 have a clue what's going on here, the rest have been hysterical rants about how this is going to break the internet, screw over the defendant and other such nonsense.
The defendant was agressively trying to steal this guys business which he's actively trying to relocate, but the defendant is jerking him around and generally acting like an ass.
The TRO was both justified and reasonable. Temporary routings are typical when a large netblock user moves to a new provider.
This guy was more then willing to continue paying them for the redirect service and had negotiated several times with them on contract terms which the defendant agreed to, then completely rewrote when they penned the agreement.
Complete jerk is what I'd call the defendant.
This is slightly off-topic, I imagine, but brings up an issue I and others experience, or ponder regularly.
I think that once a person or a company comes up with and registers a distinct, never-before-used domain name, that name should forever belong to the person or company.
I am so sick of seeing domain names transferred to registrars who then assume ownership and the ability to charge ("what the market will bear") for something they DID NOT CREATE.
It does not cost that much at all to keep a "last-known/owned-by" database that enables the creator or owner of a domain name to get it back without re-registration and extortion hassles.
One reason for suggesting this is that a person or a company may simply go out of business. It's one thing to have the ISP drop their site, but if the domain name itself is not in use past it's last paid-for timeframe, it should just be made "dormant". Once the domain is dormant, it should be marked as unavailable. We're not talking about vehicle vanity (license) plates, where there is a fixed amount of space on the plate, usually seven letters in most states (here in the US, at least).
Doing this would allow resumption of service/continuity for a person who had the misfortune of going out of business, but who sometime later can return to business or activity.
I probably am overlooking some important facts or distinctions, so I welcome critique or additions to this, other than "well how are domain name acquirers supposed to make a living?".
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
(Ignoring the fact that routing tables are propogated automatically)
Yes, the issues of porting a handful of small addresses can be handled from a financial standpoint. However, if this sort of thing is done regularly, we're going to surpass the technical limits of the Internet infrastructure. It's analagous to paying taxes. Sure, a decent number can get by without paying, and the system can take the strain. But if everyone stopped paying their taxes, the government would literally collapse. Likewise, if it's ruled that everyone has the right to keep their IP's when they move, then it will reach a point where the Internet simply cannot work.
--LordPixie
From what I've read of the affidavits so far (and IANAL) it looks like this move was made to prevent NAC from totally screwing over a customer.
If the claims of the customer are true (and that's what the court is to decide) NAC basically raised the rates for both bandwidth and power (so presumably this is a co-lo situation) well beyond the market rates, then started unilaterally changing terms in their contract as a method of forcing the customer out of business so that NAC could take over their apparently pretty profitable web-hosting business.
So the ruling sounds more like a requirement to forward traffic and prevent NAC from shutting them down while they relocate to a new facility. From the affidavit it appears that the customer continued to pay the unilaterally inflated rates in order to keep themselves in business while they relocated -- and when the rate increase didn't put them under, NAC started changing terms like requiring payments within five days and requiring payment in a NAC-specified form (it appears the customer was paying with a credit card, perhaps for protection, hard to say, but the bills are $93K a month).
I don't think the judge acted inappropriately given the stakes of the case and the level of bad faith the customer is claiming NAC has.
After reading the documents supplied, this whole issue is not simply about "I want to take these address with me" More of an agreement made between the 2 companies. I don't think the CUSTOMER is trying to take anything here.
They are just asking for assistance in the move to a new DC. I do understand that it's not easy for the provider (NAC) to be cooperate with the CUSTOMER.
The IP's have been assigned to NAC, if NAC decides to terminate the aggreement immediately then the entire CUSTOMER business would be out of BUSINESS.
And why on earth does someone need to take their IPs with them?
Because they have waste amounts of code running on over 500 production systems that was written by contractors that got paid to "let it work".
The above code has IP addresses hardcoded in it all over the place and the source code was not delivered with the system or it is simply to expensive to have it re-done.
Here comes the "American solution" (Lawsuits)
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
With any of the webmail based services, you can't keep those email addresses if you aren't a subscriber to that service...
I can't have people send mail to: joeblow@hotmail.com if I only subscribe to gmail, etc.
What a mess it would be if the judge had said that the user owns his email address regardless of the provider.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Someone might need to take the stupid pills away from that judge.
Wait until Joe Schmoe wants to take a single IP address from Joe ISP's class B subnet. Imagine the route staments in the core routers? No more summarization. What a mess!
Maybe it's just the way they do things in New Jersey?
-- No sig for you!
So most everyone here is up in arms about how stupid this is from the technical point. I've no argument about that. However most everyone here didn't bother to read anything abou the case, and in fairness Slashdot itself contributed to that by not linking to the plantiffs case:
Read the Plantiff's case!
There's more to it then some bum customer thinking their IP's are like phone numbers. It's about the colocation provider trying to drive a web hosting provider out of business before they can move to a different facility.
READ THE AFFIDAVIT!!! This is a contract dispute and some pretty ugly (and shady) business practices by the colo provider.
The restraining order just means the colo provider can't cut the service off before the customer can move. Yes it does also provide for the IP's to be moved with the customer, however I think that's a side effect. (And I agree that's bad.) However read the whole case and you will see that the customer just wants to get out and keep his business alive, while the colo provider is trying to put him into bankruptcy.
If you want to knee-jerk at something, knee-jerk about the colo squeezing the life out of their customer. I pity anyone here who is using that colo.
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
gee, what a shame it would be for 'the little guy' to be able to have more control over the internet! why, the at&t's are doing such a wonderful job of keeping prices down, service high to EVERYONE, and de-centralizing the net-- so that more and more individuals can make the net more like it was meant to be (break-proof). yea, well, i hope this case turns federal, and big changes (no matter how much it hurts initially) are made so 'the little guy' can not only keep whatever addresses/numbers that the corporations now own and control, but the direction of the net can be aimed at making the net 'corp-proof' and 'goverment' proof so EVERYONE can control it... in other words, THE WAY IT HAS TO BE-- IN ORDER FOR IT TO SURVIVE 'THE BEAST' ie.(big isp's, corps. gov. and backers of the current 'world system')
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
IP addresses are just like phone numbers. I work in the telecom industry and can tell you that there is a gross misunderstanding here on Slashdot about how telephone numbers work. You have two problems:a misunderstanding the difference between an IP address and a MAC address, and misunderstanding about the horrible hack that is Local Number Portablility (LNP). Phone numbers are tied to a specific switch by design. When you "port" a number you add an entry in an exception table on that switch that says "oh, when you get a call for this number forward it to here." You could do this on the internet routers too. It would work fine as long as not too many people actually use it (just like LNP).
I'd be crying right now.
Beware the cluestick...
Phone companies buy their blocks of telephone numbers from NeuStar. They have the government contract to manage the North American Numbering Plan. Just like Verisign, but in the telephone world.
I work in the telecom industry. This is just like Local Number Portability (LNP). The problem is that Slashdotters don't understand the first thing about LNP. I've posted probably a dozen comments explaining how it works, do a search at "Score:0" and you will find them if you really want to know.
Seeing as he tried to pull a "fast one" in a business dealing with me several years ago, I'm kind of inclined to side with the plaintiff right now (you reallu should read the plaintiff's filings).
;-)
There is this little thing called karma...and I don't just mean the Slashdot kind
-psy
If you actually go and read the filed papers:
plaintiff is an ISP, and defendant is also an ISP, and was providing facilities and IP addresses to plaintiff, but did try some intimidation manoeuvers or else to gain some of plaintiff's business (well in any case relationship degraded)
plaintiff is moving out and wants to avoid defendant breaking down its business while the move is happening. (because relationships are sour and defendant would wreck the plaintiff's hosting business if it claimed back all IP addresses at once)
Also plaintiff is currently requesting IP addresses from ARIN, but the process is not immediate.
As duly noted in a former thread, it is a temporary restraining order.
To allow plaintiff to move its business and migrate, defendant is barred from withdrawing addresses at once (it is a matter of rerouting whole blocks of IP, not just one IP address).
Then again I just read plaintiff's case, but it shows the issue is more complex.
And it is not a story of "Poor John Doe wants to keep his 145.250.1.25 address, judge gives him the right to do so"
Xrissley
=====
I lie all the time, including now
Actually, that reference matched what I thought was true which - not too surprisingly - matched exactly what the poster said. (I think my original source was something like http://db.uwaterloo.ca/~alopez-o/math-faq/mathtext /node18.html)
The poster never claimed that Indiana legislated the value of pi - they claimed that a bill to do so passed the state house but died in the state senate. This is in fact what the reference you point to says.
As a slashdot reader, I find this fucking hilarious. Somebody angrily refutes a post with a reference that agrees with exactly what the post said.
(ii) by directly or indirectly causing the occurrence of ...
superseding or conflicting BGP Global Routing Table entries; filters
and/or access lists, and/or
I'm not a lawyer, but it sounds like this part of the ruling SPECIFICALLY says they cannot do the things to the global routing tables that all the slashdotters are afraid this ruling will cause to happen to the global routing tables.
In other words: The judge apparently is just as smart as all you folks and realizes that fucking with BGP stuff will ruin the internet.
I mean, really - can anyone who speaks lawyerese tell me I read that wrong?
the blox of #'s in question are mostly taken up by a small group of greedy corps and government entities...sooo, if that wasn't the case, many people, like myself would indeed 'get large blox'! If the feds don't step in soon AND help, anarcy will, and things 'will get done' one way or another when 'The People' step into the picture :)
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
Unlimited deaggregation would indeed make a lot of routers fall over. But that ruling is temporary and for a single instance - i.e. one prefix. No big deal. Pegasus claimed NAC wasn't playing fair and wanted time to renumber.
Has anyone ever told this company (or the upstream for that matter) that when you get to a certian, justifiable size, you should be turning enough $$ to go get your own delegation from ARIN? I know when i worked in the ISP industry, if a customer could justify more than 4 /24's we'd help them apply to ARIN for their own PORTABLE delegation of IP's....
Judge, I'd like to take the computer, vacuum, and my virginity with me...
to post pictures of his children and their fears
Then I'll guarantee they won't want to take the IP block.
This issue surfaced on Nanog last week, and was discussed in some depth (53 replies). ARIN or ICANN needs to be made 'friend of the court' so the Judge can get some realistic advise on the issues involved
Nothing. The judicial system is already equipped to deal with this case. Courts deal with technical issues all the time. It just takes time.
This thread suggests that they're the same company, or at least that they share phone numbers. And that Pegasus is involved in alot of spamming.
Today whois shows two different towns, but the phone number is still in the same town many miles away.
Weird, whacky stuff.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
UCI is trying to protect their customers. There is nothing in the affidavit to suggest that they don't understand networking, or that they are incompetent.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
This is going to get modded down as flamebait, but it has to be said.
To all the whiners saying it can't be done:
We already have something called DNS. What exactly do you think DNS does? It translates from a portable network address to a hierarchically structured IP address.
To the guys who want to own their IP address:
Suck on it. Get a domain name, that's what DNS was invented for.
I don't know the background to this, but the idea that this may change ISP's is a positive thing. ISP , as I know them, many of who are responsible for a lot of security issues on the network. Trying to run their competitors out, in various ways all of them have dealt in deveaous acts that have been direct harassment to many of the customers of their competitors.
I'm no expert, but actually reading a good deal of documentation about the case, it seems to me that the person making the original claim that this is against Internet policy (Alex Rubenstein from the company having the TRO made against them -NAC), is making a bigger deal out of what is really meant by the TRO.
To me it seems that the TRO (temporally restraining order) is saying that NAC, shouldn't 'maliciously' affect the IP's of the plaintiff, just like it wouldn't with normal customers. I agree it might be a bit heavy handed in its wording, and saying it cant be done.
I think that its just saying that NAC shouldn't treat the plaintiff any different to other customers: they are still a client while they want to move their services to the new provider, the plaintiff has said that it is still willing to pay for services until all services are successfully moved over to the new provider.
The TRO is Temporally (its in the name) and hence CANT be used to enforce a permantant movement of IP's to somewhere else. All the court wants to ensure that NAC still provide Internet access while the plaintiff is still a (paying) Customer.
I don't actually see where the plaintiff is trying to actually move IP's away from NAC, they just want to ensure the ones they currently have aren't disrupted, until the plaintiff has moved to the new provider.
I'm sorry if this message repeats itself a bit but i want to make my point clear.
DISCLAIMER: this is what I imply from the stuff I've read (at This page), I might well have missed something .
Could someone with some legal training please explain how a state court can even have jurisdiction here, when a IP address is clearly an interstate, or even an international, asset? Why isn't this being taken up at the federal level in the first place?
And the brethren went away edified.
There are two sides to every story. Let's /. another site: nac-case
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
This is redundant. I have been saying it for many years.
Federal, State, and Local law makers, special interest, delusional moralist/clergy, and now judges determine how to control the evils of technology. IP number for the judge was maybe an 'Intellectual Property' number and DNS a Darn Nuisance Something; Therefor, if a phone-number is portable and personal property then an IP address must be personal property.
I have not noticed, over the past twenty years, any better logic used by others in US legislatures. I am sure that some have been good laws, and I have just been looking for and reading about the stupid laws that breed failure for the USA remaining the leader in the Sciences and Technology.
USA management fails US again
OldHawk777
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
When 5+4 ZIP code extensions came out way back when, somebody in the national media suggested ditching the entire ZIP system and using the other 9-digit number you already had - your Social Security number - as your mailing address.
Fortunately for the 3 tons of bulk mail everybody receives each year, nobody took him seriously.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
IP addresses are not like phone numbers and this is a very incompetant analogy to make. Phone numbers are numbers because the phone dialing system only allows numbers to be dialled because of historical reasons. Phone numbers in modern telephone exchanges are more equivalent to DNS entries. You dial a number, this number gets converted into a physical address and this physical address is orgarnised in a way that is convenient for routing from source to destination.
To have IP number compatibility you need either an incredibly complex routing system or you need a way to convert an address that is "owned" to an address that is convenient for routing. IP over IP will probably do it. Are we in for a TCP/IP/IP future?
Yet another ironic recursive statement.
This is what happens when managers and lawmakers try to mess with technical matters beyond their comprehension.
Forgive them Lord, they know not what they do...
-nt-
They presumably took that into account in their cost-benefit analysis when the decision was made. Now they want others to pay for their corner-cutting?
We are now seeing the death throws of IPv4. IPv4 is beyond use by date, just that we have not woken up yet. IPv6 will hit in a big bang for the following reasons: 1. Asian address demand, particularly China (population) who are REALLY pissed that they don't have a Class A address 2. G3 Mobile devices Once the need for REAL IP addresses (not NATed) for home use and G3 devices then *everyone* will be screaming for IPv6.
You want a signature? You can't handle a signature!!
definitely insightful
IPv6 was designed with the intent of supporting a variety of types of addressing and route summarization so they could avoid the rapid growth in number of routes on the net, using tricks like geographically meaningful routing, but for the most part it hasn't happened.
It's fairly common for ISPs to let ex-customers use their non-portable address space for a month or so for a transition period, but that's not what this miscreant wants - they want to keep the space permanently, because for some reason they think it's cheaper and easier to hire an aggressive lawyer than a competent sysadmin.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
this is not an emergency, read the NANOG postings
the customer had ARIN allocations of its very own with which it was supposed to renumber 15 months ago.
the affadavit keeps talking about 45 days' notice to make people believe it's an emergency when in reality it's more like 450 days' notice.
mod it up people!
This case is obviously not about IP addresses, it is about one business trying by whatever means to put another out of business.
That said, most people here wonder why would someone feel there is "value" associated with a certain IP block.
I know people who were totally screwed because they were "assigned" a tainted IP block. So to all those who are yappin' about how no one needs anything other than DNS names - try associating a value to all the time you would have to spend if you DS3 is assigned a block of IPs previously used by spammers and on a bunch of BLs who require various forms of begging, "donations" and worship in order to take the damn IPs that are "new to you" off their bad people live on that IP block lists.
Please read my other post where I state that ip = trunk exchange id (more like a physical line address, which, like ip's, can be dynamically assigned) and dns is like a phone number.
:-)
so 555-your-mum (sorry!) is the marketting way of saying www.your-mum.com but the same as www.555-1234-3456.com (or whatever it should have been!)
dns = phone number.
ip = line id (address)
IP is not like a zip code at all! Phone numbers can be placed anywhere on a phone network, technically you could take your number with you, moving house and keeping provider.
I also never condoned the removal of ip's, I infact stated that they shoudl be transparent, and we should try and ignore them! (except when we are administrating our own 'trunk exchanges' ie networks (LANS, WANS) and we give out 192.168's and also join networks together, although the joining can be done with a dns lookup.
Now apart form those corrections, I agree entirely with your post, whatever is left of it !
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Very informative, and yes, I agree that DNS is for soft routing.
:-)
IP should really stay quiet and transparent, but the way DNS is administrated, it is a PITA, thanks to no-ip.com and others though.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
> you know nothing about telephone routing.
:-) (which is the case in some backwaters, and in fact, in areas where you cannot keep your phone number)
:-) (i.e. with VOIP, will they use DNS, or some hidden your-number-here.our.dns.for.our.classa.ipv6 (like newnet does)
I am inclined to agree with you! IANATT (telco-techie).
IP != phone number (except where it did in the old days, or still does in some backwaters)
DNS = phone numbers, a routing layer on top of an assigned network that provides physical addressing (albeit dynamically addressable (dns tables, and trunk exchanges))
Of course, if I have any mistakes in this, I would just reffer you to some more intelligible post by someone who knows much more than I do about this, but my point is dns is like phone numbers, and we should keep our phone number
ip is like line id, we should not care about it.
If the plaintiff can given himself a problem with configuring ip's, perhaps he has brought it upon himself for hardwiring his connections so. It would be like giving everyone your line id instead of your phone number!
Now all telcos may switch to VOIP, will we see a third level of phone numbers. Who will get the phone number 'tod' ?
Well that is that.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
You misunderstand how courts are used. You are thinking in terms of "fair", "honest", "legal" and "possible". Which would be great, if that was how things worked.
In practice, you have Person A, who wants something he can't have. But he has a lot of money, and he talks to a lawyer. The lawyer says "Sure, we can sue them, what the hell!", files some papers, sends him a bill. After that, the defendant ends up hiring another lawyer, the judge starts trying to figure out what an IP is and how it relates to the internet and what the law says about it. Since he doesn't know what the hell is going on (he's a judge, not a geek) then he uses standard judicial practice - a TRO. (I don't know what's going on, so lets slow things down while I figure it out.) When it's all said and done, he'll do what he should do, and Person A will lose the suit. In the meantime, the lawyer that told him "Yeah, we can sue" has made a lot of money - as has his friend who defended the suit. It is, sadly enough, the American way.
...or the first thing about TCP/IP. when you have to start bartering individual IPs with other ISPs, how do you propose to subnet it? How are you going to admin it? Particularly when every man and his toaster want their own IP addresses? This is just such a dumb idea that I'm gobsmacked. It'd totally break DNS and the current model of the internet, hence it won't happen. Dumb, dumb, dumbitty-dumb dumb.
With DNS, *why* would you want to port your IP address, anyway?
Here's my understainding of how telephone routing USED to work. I will ignore muliple telephones all connected to the same wire since effectively they are the same telephone.
:-) ).
A telephone connection is essentially a problem of getting a relatively long, dedicated conection from one telephone to another telephone. Much of the phone companys' infrastructure is for figuring out how to make the connection and to provide the appropriate bandwidth. Once the connection is made much of the "intelligence" goes away to make other connections for other customers.
The requestor picks up their phone, gets dial tone from their local CO ( Central Office) and dials a number. If the receiver is local to the CO the appropriate wires are selected and the call goes through. If the call is to a phone connected to another CO then the originating CO either connects directly to the owning CO or routes through a long haul CO. The long haul CO routes through its buddies and eventually the connection request gets to the CO that "owns" the telephone number. That CO then finishes the connection. Once the connection is made it remains active until the phones are hung up.
The routing was based on inteligence built into the telephone number. Different areas of the world have slightly different numbering schemes but they all work essentially the same way, a series of digits that specify more and more accurately the actually phone line. In North America you have an area code, calling area and set number. The non-local calls use the area code to figure out which CO to call. If a local CO doesn't know where to connect ( not one of its "buddies") then it goes up to its long haul CO ( its "parent").
All of this is almost identical to IP routing except that for IP the connection and route is remade for every packet.
Now here's the kicker. The CO's don't keep track of telephone numbers associated with a telephone. They keep track of numbers associated with wires. If you take a telephone, unplug it, move it to a different building, as long as the same electrical signalling is used, the telephone will work but have a new number. You can't do that with IP, the thing at the end of the wire has to be reconfigured if its moved outside of the sub-net. The reconfiguration may be automatically done via DHCP but it must happen. When the PC ( or whatever) "hears" its IP address(s) on the wire it starts listening. Telephones don't do that, if the wire goes active they answer.
Along come cell phones and now things get complicated. Since a cell phone moves around and maintains its number the cell network has to keep track of where the phone is and route accordingly. Thats why number portability became an issue. People became used to having the same number no matter where they were physically located. Before cell phones nobody expected to be able to move any distance and still have the same number. It was possible as long as your new, long time, location was attached to the same CO as your old CO ( change the telephone number to wire mapping at the CO) but that was it without doing call forwarding.
Notice that the telephone network is now changing from a IP address type of functionality to a DNS type. Its in transition but at some point down the road many people will be carrying an "electronic identity" card that is unique to them and is called a personal telephone. It probably won't be mandated by law but by user convenience. People who carry cell phones generally want other people to contact them, or at least they want to be able to contact other people. ( I'm including PC's talking via wireless modem as "people"
It is possible to implement portable IPs without making most routing tables any bigger than they are. You basically make IP routing redirectable, much like a soft link on a Unix file system.
I.E. You originally ask for 1.2.3.4 and somewhere a router passes back a "No you really want 5.6.7.8" message. You then ask for 5.6.7.8 and the process repeats.
The potential for abuse and the administrative overhead and misconfiguration would be big.
Not surprisingly, this case is really mostly a dispute about money.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Apparently they're a virtual web hosting / colo company that runs on a reseller market, so it does take a fair bit of coordination about who's controlling which parts, including who's controlling what parts of DNS. So it's not simply something that NAT can fix, though their system was apparently not organized very well and it's taken them six months to change over half their infrastructure.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
to allow the client to continue to use NAC' service under the old contract and give them sufficient time to move to new setup. The judge should have read the ARIN policy before ordering NAC to go against the rules that ensure the proper running of the Internet.
You just tell the computer you want it to be known as xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and the rest of the network figures it out. There's no reason why they can't take their IP addresses with them.
Between the Plaintif case (affidavit) and the restraining order it would appear that NAC is being ordered to do stuf that they would normally do in the process of an orderly customer migration move away.
This includes that during the migrateion, NAI should:
The allegations of the plaintifs appears to be that NAI:
- Has jacked the prices unreasonably in the last year.
- Has held the customer's service levels at randsom.
- Has (repeatedly) threatened to downgrade and cut off service
- Has unreasonably demanded customer lists
- Has bargained in bad faith WRT the details of Pegasus' move
etc. etc. etc.This is essentialy a contracts case, not an internet case. There's nothing that I can see in the order that wouldn't be done by an isp acting in good faith during a customer's move... except for the fact hat NAI is accused of not acting in good faith.
It should also be noted here that, although a customer doesn't own the IP allocations of it's service provider, neither does the service provider. It's really a public trust, and the service provider is generally expected to act in good faith with respect to providing these services. If Pegasus wasn't accusing NAI of acting in bad faith, I doubt that the court would have issued the injunction in question.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Not to mention the cost to the customer when changing ISP's and having to reconfigure their servers for the new IP address. How does it break DNS, all it means is ISP's will have book out individual IP address instead of ranges of IP addresses (personally I think compulsary IP transfer would be cool - just think of spammers being permanently stuck with the same IP address). There is also VOIP to contend with, and who knows you might end up dialling an IP address to make a phone call (IPv6 would be a hell of a phone number to memorise ;-)).
Face it with telephone number portability to prevent lock in, it will happen (telephone companies could not argue the cost and inconvenience to prevent number portability, so ISP's will end up stuck with it too).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Since an IP is like a street address...
does that mean I can sue city hall to have my street address move with me? (and make the USPS employees go postal every day when they try to get my mail through)
Well, we all know how Network Solutions makes it next to impossible to actually access a human being in the company when their seamless process doesn't go quite as smoothly as it should have (back in the day when you had to authenticate email addresses, fax over letterhead, etc for a simple DNS change).
On September 11th, 2001, terrorists struck the World Trade Center and Pentagon with jets. The entire world was awestruck, watching the flaming wreckage on TV, shocked, paralyzed. No one knew what the hell to do that day.
Me? I knew exactly what I could do. I called Network Solutions!
I was talking to a human being in 60 seconds and asked the poor sod who was still at work to change my nameserver IP addresses.
He did.
I'd never been able to get someone at Network Solutions on the line before that day to make such a change, and never been able to since.
Now /THAT/ is what I was after. Personally I find IP address changes to be trivial (although it does tend to foul up node/ip locked licenses). I did not mean that NON-routable addresses (e.g. 192.168.1.x) or reserved addresses (e.g. 127.0.0.1) were not "portable". What I was trying to state is that a providers range of addresses (say some class C) x.y.z.?, you should not be able to take x.y.z.10, x.y.z.12, x.y.z.56 and say those are "mine" and pull them out to another provider.
Personally I think it would be insane to even consider the level of effort that would be involved with the logistics on this.
As a previous post stated though, attempts using (and excuse me if I don't have this correct, I'll go back and read it) BGP to manage the routes to the host was in play but the tables to do this were foiled by the sheer volume of records that had to be managed.
Thanks.