Wormage and the CAP.

[podo]

Rodent,

Good point... the topic...

That's a universal problem, everybody has it, it's only a little bit more annoying when you only have a limited amount of bandwidth, or if you pay for bandwidth.

You'll find Telkom (and any other ISP) pretty much unwilling to compensate you for worm traffic. This happens almost everywhere though, since nobody is going to compensate them for all the traffic they carried because of the worm, and nobody is going to compensate the backbones to which they are connected for all the traffic they had to carry.

There's no simple answer to this, in the U.S., they address this problem with lawsuits that drag on for years to figure out exactly who should pay the bill for wasted bandwidth, with everybody blaming everybody else, and the real culprit, the virus writer, usually in jail or at large, and in no condition to pay up millions of dollars to backbones sothat they can write off the bills to their upstream clients, and everyone can be compensated.

The only advise I could give you here is to use an extremely tight firewall setup, block everything that isn't outgoing.. If you prevent TCP connections from even starting up, most worms will loose interest in your system after a few packets and move on.

Willie Viljoen
Web Developer

Adaptive Web Development

 

[antowan]

Sorry PODO this doesn't stick. [] It doesn't matter whether these IP's are static or not Telkom has to reserve them anyway in order to have one available for the ADSL customer when he or she logs in. It might have to service all 10000 ADSL customers with unique IP's on the offchance that all of them log in at the same time. Thus the IP's in the range 165.165.xxx.xxx have to hang around in the air waiting to be used. It is not like some other organization can time share them if they are not used, because Telkom has to have control of them in order to dish them out. Thus static or not these IP's are fixed for a known group of users. It just gets shuffled between them. []

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by podo</i>
<br />For Pete's sake...

Yes, I know you would all like to have your own static IP address to serve your pornography and warez from, but it just doesn't work that way, even Telscum can't really do anything about that.

IP ranges these days are asigned to ISPs by the IANA and ARIN/RIPE with the specific stipulation that they MUST be dynamic. This is called conservation of IP address space and should be fairly simple to understand.

The problem is that they U.S. government initially assigned IP address blocks unanimously, thus taking for themselves the bulk of all internet address space. This persists until today, most of the routable IP addresses on the internet belong to U.S. government institutions and universities, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

What remained was given to the IANA and was in turn devided between ARIN, RIPE and a few other smaller registries.

These registries have a hard time, because there are not nearly enough IPs left for the entire world once Uncle Sam has allocated off his share.

Network block allocation rules around the world clearly state that ISPs wishing to have a block assigned for dial-up, cable or xDSL service must allocate the IP addresses dynamically.

There is a provision which allows ISPs to also request a static range and allocate static IPs to some customers on request, but these IPs must be leased, you just don't get you own routable IP or netblock for free.

Telkom of course do not offer such a service, which is reprehensable, but won't change unless somebody writes a long letter to ICASA.

However, the thought that everybody using an ADSL line should get their own static IP just because they have an ADSL line is rediculous. You won't even see this happening over seas.

There is a scheme in place for everyone to get their own static IP, but that won't happen on today's internet and probably won't happen for another 20 years or so.

The plan is known as IPv6 (or IP version 6) and is meant to replace the current IPv4 Internet Protocol standard.

IPv6 addresses are 128 bits wide, as opposed to the current 32 bit width of the IPv4 address space. With IPv6, it would be theoretically possible for every person on Earth today to have a net block of approximately three million IP addresses assigned to them, to do with as they please.

IPv6 has already been actively deployed in heavily populated parts of Japan. Japan got one of the smallest shares of the world's IPv4 IP addresses, so instead they use real IPv6, with IPv6 to IPv4 tunneling and translation to connect to normal internet hosts.

The problem standing in the way of the world wide adoption of IPv6 are the overseas ISPs for which everyone seems to have so much praise. IPv6 is already in use at many overseas universities and government or military institutions.

IPv4, however, remains the protocol of choice for large ISPs and internet backbones, because it is cheaper.

To adopt IPv6, everyone would have to simultaniously upgrade their routers to IPv6 capability, or replace routers that can't be upgraded. For large ISPs or backbones, this means spending money on upgrading or replacing thousands of routers. Their profit margin would drop drastically, so they aren't interested.

The bottom line, if you are so unhappy about your dynamic IP address, pettition ICASA to force Telkom register a static range and offer static addresses to ADSL users at an additional monthly lease fee, or pettition the world's ISPs and internet backbones to upgrade or replace all of their routing equipment in one go.

Willie Viljoen
Web Developer

Adaptive Web Development
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

He who does not understand the value of war at the right time, cannot comprehend the value of life at any time - Anonymous

 

[podo]

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by antowan</i>
<br />Sorry PODO this doesn't stick. [] It doesn't matter whether these IP's are static or not Telkom has to reserve them anyway in order to have one available for the ADSL customer when he or she logs in. It might have to service all 10000 ADSL customers with unique IP's on the offchance that all of them log in at the same time. Thus the IP's in the range 165.165.xxx.xxx have to hang around in the air waiting to be used. It is not like some other organization can time share them if they are not used, because Telkom has to have control of them in order to dish them out. Thus static or not these IP's are fixed for a known group of users. It just gets shuffled between them. []
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Antowan,

You make a good point and I hate it but I have to agree with you. The problem is though that Telkom are probably using IETF and IANA rules as an excuse.

Since this thread started to move in this direction, I've been digging around trying to find the actual IETF mandate about ranges being assigned with the condition that they must be dynamic. For the love of my, I can't find the damn thing, which means it's either been deleted or invalidated.

As for serving ten thousand users, you'll find if you do the math that Telkom's subnet actually contains no less than 65 536 addresses, with an effective amount of client usable addresses of 64 768 when broadcast addresses, and the IP used in each subnet for a router are subtracted. This means, in effect, that at any given point in time, 64 768 users could be on line, all with an IP of their own.

As I have stated before though, expecting all users to have static IPs is just not realistic, not because there is a shortage (as I have just proven is not true in Telkom's case,) but because of technical considerations to keep in mind.

I feel that we would all be a lot better off if Telkom were offering a service where those of us who want or need it, could pay a small monthly lease for a static IP. At one time, I was using a dial-up account with the now BEE controlled BCSNet, previously known as Siemens Business Solutions. For the astonishingly small amount of R11.40 per month (including VAT), they were willing to assign a static IP to my dial-up account.

How we should get Telkom to offer such a service though, is beyond me.

Willie Viljoen
Web Developer

Adaptive Web Development