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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: NAT for an ISP
On Wed, Jun 04, 2003 at 07:07:28PM -0400, Andy Dills quacked: > > > > I've got a friend who puts all of his internal servers, > > routers, and _customers_ on RFC1918 space and pipes them out > > thrugh a PNAT. Fairly small ISP - maybe 15 megabits of bandwidth - > > operating at the state local level. > > Why on earth would they do this? What you've said implies DS3 level > connectivity, so to skimp on ARIN fees seems a little ridiculous. Historical accident in many ways. I implied DS3-level connectivity, but what it really means is multiple bonded T1s from multiple providers. It started out as a T1 from here, a T1 from there, and no local BGP knowledge (and discouragement from the upstreams). In fact, using a bunch of NATs is a great way to resell cheap upstream connections. > Yeah, I read you loud and clear. "My friend is a half-baked cluebie using > techniques I'll term fun and later encourage my competitors to employ". :) Actually, I do mean the fun part. You can do some cool tricks with it. Renumbering to different providers is mostly seamless, particularly since he runs the DNS for his customers. Easy to experiment with throwing transparent caches and things like that in front of the customers since they're already going through a firewall. Now that he's about large enough to get ARIN space, the game is changing, and they're moving in the directions one would expect them to. It's not an approach that I would ever encourage a large ISP to take. In fact, I don't necessarily think of him as providing standard "Internet" services - he provides primarily web, mail, and VPN services, and then some customized stuff on a per-customer basis. But he's had a decent customer base for a small ISP, and he seems to be filling a niche, and hasn't gone out of business doing it. -Dave -- work: [email protected] me: [email protected] MIT Laboratory for Computer Science http://www.angio.net/ I do not accept unsolicited commercial email. Do not spam me.
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