MediaOne dns problems

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Chris Janicki writes:
| But the *only* reason for having a static IP is to provide services,
| thereby utilizing the upstream much more than a surfer-only.  Therefore
| you want to use more bandwidth (of which upstream is a more limited
| resource), but not pay for it?

It's not at all difficult to think of other reasons one might like  a
static address.  Some of the people on this list would like to set up
their own  gateway/firewall/server  system,  not  because  they  have
anything  to  give/sell  to  the Net, but because they want a machine
that they can experiment and learn on. There are jobs to be had doing
this  sort  of thing, but there's a major bootstrapping problem.  You
can't get the job until you have the experience; you  can't  get  the
experience until you have a job that gives you access to a machine to
learn on.  But if you can learn on your home machine, you  can  break
the vicious circle.

Also, there are a lot of people who might like to put up a  web  site
with  things  like pictures of their children, their vacation, and so
on.  This isn't likely to be a big deal web  service;  we're  talking
about  maybe  a few hundred hits a year total in most cases, which is
hardly a load on a cable that's hyped as "lightning fast".  Sure, you
can  go through the grief of getting stuff uploaded to the "free" web
space at the  ISP,  but  many  users  will  rightfully  respond  very
cynically to this, if they've ever tried it.  It's a lot easier (even
on Windoze) if you can just fire up a local web server, and point  it
at the directory that it's to serve.

The neighborhood that I live in (Cedarwood, in Waltham) has  its  own
web page.  I'd guess that it would not be what you'd call a major web
site. It's full of things like an announcement of a Family Fun day at
the  neighborhood playground, various events at the nearby elementary
school, and so on.  This would be a reasonable site to have on a home
machine. There are millions of such potential sites that are unlikely
going to turn into bandwidth hogs.

Such things hardly qualify as "services", and they're hardly  a  load
for poor little AT&T's wires.

Allowing home SMTP servers is an example that lightens the  load  for
the  ISP.   The  amount of traffic to the home machine is exactly the
same, since each message is copied once in either case.  But the  ISP
then  doesn't  need to supply disk space to hold customers' messages,
and doesn't need to clean up after the messes that  their  own  email
service  inevitably produce (since most of them use a Microsoft email
package ;-).  The customers get faster delivery, the ISP saves  space
and  time, and everyone wins.  But this doesn't work too well if your
address is constantly changing.

My suspicion is that the primary reason for the clumsy  way  that  M1
and  other  cable/dns  services  work  is cluelessness on the part of
their management.  We're talking  about  broadcast  media  and  phone
company  managers  here,  after  all.   Yeah, they hire knowledgeable
technical people, but those aren't the ones making the decisions.

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