On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 05:01:14PM +0100, David Cartwright wrote:
Ok: wrt ADSL and static IP addresses: true enough (unless you can find a cable provider that does static, I'm not aware of any), but anything that *requires* static IP probably shouldn't be on the end of an ADSL line anyway. There are plenty of dynamic dns services out there, which resolve this particular problem neatly.
Oh, I dunno. ADSL is stable enough to host things like secondary DNSs, secondary mail servers and that kind of thing. This gives me the ability to have secondary services of this type that I own and control without the need to pay expensive hosting charges. Mine has been up for months and seems extremely stable (he says, tempting fate :-).
You can now get SLAs on ADSL lines too. They can also be good for proofing things for people. I agree with the stability, I had my USB frog up for weeks which only needed rebooting when I had power cuts (we had a key meter when i lived in London) or wanted to swap hardware around. I have had one day where I had no DSL for a whole afternoon because BT broke the exchange so we had no telephone either and one other occaision when the ISPs radius server crashed at about 9.30pm and didn't get restarted until around 3am.
On the dynamic DNS front, it can be a pain if (for instance) you want the firewall in your main hosting centre to trust connections coming from your home office, but your IP address keeps changing. This said, there are solutions to this problem, such as using VPN connectivity instead of trust arrangements (which adds the benefit of encryption, of course).
If you are my boss you do have VPNs but the firewalls only allow incoming VPN connections from certain ip addresses, it certainly adds a little more security which helps.
Adam