Re: who offers cheap (personal) 1U colo?

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

On Sat, 13 Mar 2004, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
> So DOCSIS has a technical limitation which may or may not apply.  This is
> reasonable justification for limiting upstream bandwidth, not for specifying
> that users can't run servers.  If users can run servers effectively in the
> limited available upstream bandwidth, then there is no _technical_ reason to
> prevent them.

I think people are being sloppy about saying no servers on certain types
of networks.

I think the actual requirement is for a long-term end-to-end identifier
for systems, and maybe even network users, before they can do certain
activities on the network so you can trace or block the system.  Systems
without long-term unique end-to-end identifiers would only be able to do
a limited number of things because they are essentially fungible.

Neither the location nor type of access media is important.

A student in a college dorm room with an uncontrolled DHCP address may not
be able to run a server, even though they have more than enough symetric
Gig-ethernet bandwidth and you know what dorm it is physically located
because all student servers look alike. On the other hand, a mobile
server on a US Navy ship on a 1200 baud radio connection with a fixed
address would be permitted to run a server even though you may have no
idea where in the world the ship is physically located today because
you could identify which server it was. (server clusters acting as a
single system doesn't change this.)

If you want to spend about $50/month for a static IP address for your DSL
line, then the question becomes should you be able to send mail
directly from your home server with a static IP address on a DSL line
until abused?  No need to buy another box, find a colo or figure out
how to remotely administer another system or tunnel to it to send mail.