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<font size="2"><a target="_blank" href="http://mail.blueonyx.it/mailman/listinfo/blueonyx"></a></font><font size="2">>
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Sounds to me like your WSP doesn't have enough valid IP addresses. So they are
creating their own in house subnets and creating their own network, similar to a
192.168.0.0 internal network. </font></p>
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This may be out of line, but I suggest moving to a service provider that can
offer REAL static IP addresses. </font></p>
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I can imagine the traffic lag at times. </font></p>
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<p><font size="2">No,</font></p>
<p><font size="2">Actually just the opposite.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">When you create subnets, you loose usable real-world IPs. You loose three IPs per subnet - the network ID, the default gateway, and the broadcast. If you take a .24 (255.255.255.0) block and break it up into 32 networks of eight IPs each - you'll loose 96 real-world IPs (and each of those 32 networks only has five usable IPs left). That's a HUGE loss of potential revenue!</font></p>
<p><font size="2">But if you do it this way, you not only don't loose those 96 RWIPs - you also gain the ability to move IPs/sites around among your virtual hosting servers with only a change in the router's static routing table.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">One of my customers has a entire 24 network, half another, and parts of a third supporting the virtual sites on eight or nine BQ and BX virtual servers. The servers each have a IP out of a /28 network on their main interface (a separate network than the virtuals are on). Then each site that has its own IP gets one out of those other blocks. If I need to move/migrate sites around, I do a cmuExport on the departing server, scp to the new server, a cmuImport on the new server, and then point the traffic to the new server in the router.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">I'm not saying this is a optimal solution. But it does have advantages over using subnets. For example - if you have the main server interface and all the virtuals in a single subnet, what do you do when you run out of IPs?? So if he had a /29 (255.255.255.248) network - he'd only have five available IPs. One for the server, and four available for virtual sites. So what does he do when a fifth customer is ready to come on-board (wanting a real-world IP)?? Uh Oh! That could be a nightmare of changing all the IPs when the ISP gives him a new /28 subnet (then you also have to change the DNS for all of the existing customers, each customer has to update their apps that used IPs instead of names, etc....). WHEW - what a nightmare!
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<p><font size="2">So this way of doing it does solve a lot of problems and conserves RWIPs. Unfortunately it does cause some other small problems. One specifically I reported three years ago and still hasn't been fixed. So I just manually fix the interfaces at the command line, and roll on happily.</font></p>
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<p><font size="2">Chuck</font>
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