[TriLUG] No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Rick DeNatale rick.denatale at gmail.com
Tue Nov 15 10:40:21 EST 2005


On 11/15/05, Greg Brown <gwbrown1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Let's say you want to run a web server.  Don't you have to somehow
> > convince the ISP that you are THE customer who should get port 80
> > requests?  Or am I missing something.
> >
> > --
>
> The ISP is going to provide you with a valid, routeable IP address
> that can be reached from anywhere on the Internet.  Around these parts
> this is common, up North you get a 10.x.x.x address unless you go
> "business class" that is still DHCP.

I understand that that's how NORMAL isps work.  That's how my ISP works.

The original poster said that he is using DirectWay.


http://directway.direc-way.us/index-3.html

Note that for all plans but the last, in the IP address column they
say that you will get a NAT address, and the footnote says:

"(a) - Network Address Translation (NAT) will be used. Nat enables
assignment of private IPs (up tp 253) to devices, keeping them private
from users outside of the network."

As I read this, it seems to be saying that if you are on any of the
DirectWay plans other than their business plan (at $199/month btw
OUCH!) you won't get a valid ROUTEABLE ip address, you're going to get
a local address inside THEIR nat routing.  Since they say there are up
to 253 addresses available I think that this means you're going to get
a 192.168.0.* address.

I only started to look at this when Brian Henning said that they
didn't provide a static public-facing IP address. I focused on the
static part and figured, heck, I can get to my servers using a dynamic
ip address, so why wouldn't it work for DirectWay as well.

The problem isn't that the ip address isn't static, it's that it isn't
'public-facing'.  Sure you can set up port-forwarding on a
public-facing NAT router that YOU have control over, but that doesn't
seem to be the case with the non-business DirectWay offerings.

No one outside of the "lan" that DirectWay puts you on is going to be
able to connect to you unless you somehow convince DirectWay to set up
port-forwarding of, say port 80, to YOU, and somehow I doubt that
convincing them that YOU deserve that privilege instead of another
customer is going to be difficult.

So how to folks "up north" who get a 10.* address from their ISP
publish servers on the internet, or do they?  Those addresses aren't
publically reachable either.

--
Rick DeNatale

Visit the Project Mercury Wiki Site
http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/



More information about the TriLUG mailing list