ARIN Reverses IP policy for Virtual Hosts

RedHat Rocky writes "ARIN has suspended their 'name-based web hosting policy', see details at their site." A lot of webhosts don't like virtual hosting, and apparently complained. Still, IPv6 is coming Real Soon Now, so hopefully there won't be any number shortages.

Virtual Hosting

[jjr]

I do not see a problem with this as long if the client knows what he is getting. As long as he was tricked into getting thing that he did not want.

Re:Virtual Hosts & pre-HTTP1.1 Browsers (was:YRO w

[Velox_SwiftFox]

And the current problem is that the answer to the question: "How do I do https (SSL) secure web connections using name-based virtual IP?" is "You can't." The SSL connections are negotiated before the "desired host name" is sent.

You can use a different port number for virtual servers, but many businesses do not like it being so obvious that they are sharing a server, and those behind firewalls may not be able to connect to those ports.

IPv6

[zardie]

Yes, but *how soon* is IPv6 coming? It'll only become mainstream when all the mainstream systems (i.e. Windows) will support it out of the box. It's all still experimental.-

YRO why?

[sulli]

this has what exactly to do with our rights online? it's just an IP assignment policy.

not much information

[moz25]

The link doesn't give a whole lot of information.

I think a mixed name based / ip based web hosting solution would be best. Let the client decide which he/she wants and charge a little extra for having your own ip number.

That way, many people will _choose_ for the name based solution. It's a win either way.

Moz.

Re:YRO why?

[Rick the Red]

Can someone please give a little background here? For example, why is there "a very real and distinct negative effect that hosting all of you websites under one ip causes"? What's the problem?

As I understand it, we're talking about sites like "//www.abc.com/" and "//www.123.com/" being actually hosted on and sharing the IP address of "//www.someISP.com/", as in "//www.someISP.com/abc/" and "//www.someISP.com/123/". Right? If so, how is the "virtual address" different than the actual addresses under the someISP.com domain? Either way the outside world points you to someISP.com's DNS, which directs you to the appropriate virtual page. What is the "distinct negative effect" of this?

I admit I don't know what I'm talking about here. If I've got this wrong, please enlighten me. If I've got it right, then why is this YRO?

Re:YRO why?

[marijke]

> Can someone please give a little background here?

If you go to the ARIN site's mailing list archives and pick the VWP (virtual webhosting policy) one,

http://www.arin.net/mailinglists/vwp/index.html [arin.net]

you can read up on what the issues are. In short:

- if (say) ten IP addresses are pooled for
(say) ten thousand web sites of customers
of an ISP, everything is well until... one
of those customers does something evil/stupid
(e.g. spamming) and ORBS/MAPS blocks the IP
*number*. Or NetNanny thinks a site is too
explicit and blocks it by number.

- another issue is running out of IP space.

- apparently the pre-HTML 1.1 thing isn't much
of an issue anymore nowadays.

- the policy favors big ISP's with oodles of
class A address space, small ones can't offer
customers unique IP addresses.

- the new policy is unworkable as any IP can
lie about their address requirements, fake
SSL certificates, whatnot

- etc. etc. etc.

But read the archives yourself, i'm not the most knowledgeable person to summarise this.

--Regards, marijke [5551'35"N 505'03"W]