John Scrivner wrote: > I think most people here track who has what address. Otherwise how could > you possibly run your network? What they likely do not do is keep logs > of who had what address three years ago.
Y'know, boss, I could add that to our in-house IP tracking system if you like. :) Since Scriv often tells me to do things like that, let's look at this from a practical standpoint. Our ISP presently uses static IPs for just about everything, which at least means the recordkeeping is minimal. (We just stick everything in a very tiny database - it could easily be a flat-file, or even a big spreadsheet, as relatively simple as it is.) Adding history entries would probably take me half an hour, maybe a full hour if I want to really debug the Hell out of it. If you're a small outfit, that's not honestly all that complicated. Now, let's say you're a bit bigger outfit, with, say, five thousand broadband customers. That's certainly too big to manage your IP space by hand, but still small enough that you can say you're a "small business" with that many customers. At that point, you'll certainly have automated things somewhat, probably with a couple RADIUS servers for customer authorization and a few DHCP servers. The way I'd do it, honestly, is probably with a DHCP server at each tower location or POP. Your records are now quite a bit more decentralized, and to comply with these requirements, you'll need some kind of automatic log-scraping, or a centralized logging server, or something. That's another server (or several servers, if you do things like with redundancy) you've got to buy, and that your sysop has to maintain. More spare parts you'll have to keep on the shelf in case one of them goes pear-shaped. More data you have to ensure is properly backed up. And so on and so on. Granted, most of this can probably be put together for just a few thousand dollars, but that's a few thousand dollars that many smaller business owners might not have. > This never happens so the issue is how long should we have to keep this > log information? Should we have to keep it at all? Should we simply use > DNS to assign names to addresses for all users which are kept up to date > then by us? (Names of customers as "A" records for all IPs) That's an awesomely bad idea, for privacy reasons. I really wouldn't want the whole world to have access to my name, just by digging up emails I sent them, and seeing that the headers show the email originated from "david.e.smith.mvn.net" or something like that. Also, it'd be a real hassle to set that DNS thing up, boss. :) > Let's look at a rights basis then. Should people who use a "public" > Internet be able to be anonymous via the connection of their ISP? I don't see why not. The Internet is, in that regard, very parallel to the existing phone system. Every Web page you visit, or every email you send, will have some numbers that identify you in a pseudonymous manner (IP addresses), just like phone calls now carry caller ID. The information is there if you want it, but many people don't use it. (A lot of folks still don't have a caller ID box, and most folks don't know how to read email headers.) If you take a bit of effort to obscure your identity, you can do so. (There are anonymous remailers and anonymizing Web proxies, and there's a code you can dial on your phone to block caller ID information.) Back in college, I ran an anonymous remailer. It may be time to start it up again... David Smith MVN.net -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
