pro/cons of virtual hosting services

At 17:17 14/11/95, Daniel Karrenberg wrote:
>  > poole at eunet.ch writes:
>  > > We strongly discourage use of IP address space for virtual hosting
>  > > services because this represents no technical reason to assign more than
>  > > one address to a host.  Therefore it is in conflict with address space
>  > > conservation.
>  >
>  > A would strongly suggest that this is a NON-problem, even with the gigantic
>  > increase in WWW servers that we are all experiencing it is hard to see how
>  > this could ever become a serious consideration.
>
>Unfortunately we have seen some significant address space requests based
>on this.  Note that we are not talking about one additional address per
>organisation served, but one additional address per arbitrary entity
>requiring a virtual server.  Given the boom in http based services this
>may become quite significant.
>
>To repeat: The second soloution proposed provides all aspects of
>provider independence.  Why should we waste address space if wasting it
>does not provide significant additional functionality?

It *DOES* provide additional functionality. We had that kind of debate lots
of times in lots of places. DNS is the simplest, most integrated "directory
assistance" provided on the Internet, and many (most?) people simply try
"http://www.company.com" when they need info about that company.

The virtual hosting hack is nothing else but a hack. It should never have
been used that much, and the "Host:" or "Full-URI" header should already be
part of the HTTP spec (it is now postponed till version 1.2 of the spec, if
I remember), as the HTTP WG is still trying to normalize the current
practice, instead of trying to defined a new good practice (this is not a
criticism, the people on the WG do work a lot to define precisely and
minutely the protocol, but I think they should place this into perspective,
and see that that header should be part of the spec ASAP, before it's too
late and the installed base is too large).

I think RIPE should put pressure on the people in the WG to include that
f***ing header in the spec very soon (1.1 would be a good idea). In the
meanwhile, virtual hosting is the only way to do this, so I guess we'll
have to do with it.

Jacques.

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