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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."
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'm afraid it rather is like taking your home address (or zip code) with you.
The reason is that the internet core routers already have over 100.000 entries in the IPv4 routing table. When routing millions of packets a second, the router needs to do millions of route lookups a second.
This still works (barely) because the number of entries in the routing table (think of them as zip codes) can be looked up easily. If the postal service had portable, personal zip codes, the zip code system would also be completely useless...
Beyond a certain point, there is simply no physical way that you could fit all the routing table entries in a cache that can be accessed fast enough to look up the routing table entries as fast as the packets come in.
I'm sure the state of New Jersey will legislate a higher speed of light to get around this problem, but that's not going to fix it for the rest of us...
The problem is that if IP addresses are well aggregated, all a BGP-speaking router (that's the big ones in the core) needs to know is "for this very large block of addresses, use interface A; for that very large block of addresses, use interface B; for this other very large block of addresses, use interface A again." That is your routing table, it takes processor time to traverse for every packet, and it's growing; and if sizeof(routing table)*sizeof(traffic throughput) grows faster than Moore's law, it gets rather troublesome for the internet.
If you route geographically or per end-user or (shudder) per person, the number of entries that your core router has to potentially traverse explodes. This is the essence of CIDR, and we have separate naming (i.e. DNS) and routing (i.e. IP addresses) specifically so that end users may have a portable name irrespective of the routing infrastructure.
In the phone system, where naming and addressing are both conflated into your phone number, it's a lot more painful. (All of a sudden there isn't a simple programmatic way of mapping a three-digit prefix to to the operator that will handle the call.)
The problem of routing table size remains regardless of the size of the IP space - IPv6 will solve a lot of problems, but this isn't one of them.
...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.
The company in question is Pegasus Web Technology run by a Mr. Jason Silvergate.
-davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Interesting paralell.. lets fix it up, and it'll be usable.
:)
IP is not a phone number. It's an address. Such as "123 Baker St, State, Country". IPv4 can be thought of as being of the form Country.State.Street.Number (except with numbers from 1-255 for each field).
IRL, Hostname is like a name in a guide to the city, like "Joe's pizzaria", that you want to get to. On the net, it's a website like "www.yahoo.com" that you want to get to.
IRL, a DNS server would be an addressbook. It tells you Joe's pizzaria is at 123 Baker St. If Joe's pizzaria moves, the addressbook can be updated, and can tell subsequent users that Joe's pizzaria is at 456 Main St. Likewise, it will tell you that "www.yahoo.com" is at 15.234.43.23
With the above descriptions, even the n00bs can feel smart, and think they understand the whole interweb thing..
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
Please read RFC 2772. Having portable IP addresses the way you describe is explicitly forbidden with IPv6, for good technical reasons!
After reading the thread on NANOG you should have read the scanned case papers. Reads like a divorce proceeding. Lots of screaming and pointing out the other's failings.
From reading those, it is clear that the judge was making his decision not upon the technical merits/problems of portable IP space, but upon the claim by the customer that the ISP was trying to steal/wreck their business.
In my experience this happens particularly often if, when changing DNS records and TTLs, one forgets to increase the serial number - which tells the querying server that something *has* changed.
I'd expect a caching server to disregard a short TTL as it would defy the purpose.
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 just love people who have no idea what they are talking about trying real hard.
Everything these days is done with DNS. anyone sutpid enough to go to a site via IP address is brainless and should get a nice web page telling them connection refused. Heck, I even have auto updating DDNS to my home cable modem line, I don't even type in an IP address to hit my home machine. In addition to that, would you buy something from a company that says Cheap cd's.. come to our website at https://10.11.12.13/sendusyourcreditcardinfo.html ? Nope, you wouldn't.
These ISP's are contractually assigned these addresses by ARIN, they do not have any ownership of the addresses. Depending on the size of the block of addresses, and their colo setup they could have to disrupt the address range much longer than a simple changing of IP addresses and a TTL expiration on a DNS server.
There are a ton of technical reasons this is a very bad idea(tm) if it gets as bad as people taking individual addresses with them you will never be able to get anywhere becuase BGP tables will become so huge current routers won't hold them.
Just three more hours seapeople and you can finally take me away from this crappy God Damned planet full of hippies
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.
Actually, IP addresses are like what phone numbers used to be. Back in Ye Olden Days, you phone number essentially described the physical location of the wire pair that delivered your dialtone. A phone number of 471-1234 meant your pair was out of Central Office 47, sub area 1, pair 1234. You could change your last 4 digits, but not your 3 digit prefix, as the prefix designated the physical building where the 10,000 pairs serving your area lived. This is still the case for landlines in many areas (my boss had his shop in 471, but moved a half mile south and Verizon made him change to 477). Portability is possible with wireless phones because (by definition) they aren't tied to any particular physical location. Since a certain degree of soft routing already has to happen to get the call to the cell nearest you, it's not much of a leap to allow routing to other providers.
IP addresses aren't like that, though. They were never designed to be soft routed. That's what DNS is for. They IP address, in the end, is a number pinpointing the exact location of a physical circuit. There is no system below the IP address level to perform the necessary redirection. You can forward traffic from the old IP address to the new, but you can't take the old IP address with you.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
If you actually read the TRO, you'll see that the plaintiff just wants the addresses for a limited time (ie, until he is done transitioning to the new IPs). And we aren't talking about a small chunk of addresses either, the plaintiff is a web-hosting company with around 400,000 IPs to transition.
The short version is that according to the plaintiff, the defendant got greedy, which prompted the plaintiff to attempt to take his business elsewhere. Again according to the plaintiff, the defendant made threats to hinder the transfer, which prompted this suit.
Not quite a cut-and-dried example of judicial idiocy.
"From my cold, dead hands you damn, dirty apes!" - CH