Nightfox wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

Re: Re: old inet = your own DNS?
By: poindexter FORTRAN to Nightfox on Sun Oct 25 2026 09:56 am

Remember, this started at a time when Xfinity was trying to figure out a way to charge by the client computer. They wanted to move you to a business account or figure out a way to charge more if you had lots of clients behind their firewall. You'd call in for support, one of the first questions was how many client PCs you had.

That was when I got my first firewall - a WRT54G, and started playing with third-party OSes. Set my modem into bridge mode and told them I had one client - my firewall.

I remember ISPs wanting to do that. When we first got broadband
internet in 2002, I bought a router to share internet, and I heard ISPs technically didn't like customers doing that because they wanted to
charge per computer. The service tech who set up service at our house didn't mention anything about it though.

A friend of mine also had broadband internet, and he used a switch
(rather than a router/firewall) to connect his computers, and he said
the ISP started charging him per computer connected to their service.

Is this an American thing?

I never remember hearing about this being an issue in Australia. Maybe some of our large telcos did, but the smaller ones, like the one I was with couldn't give a toss. Same with hosting your own servers, as long as you didn't run a business from your residential connection they didn't care if you had a web server etc. I've seen in the US you have to be careful.

In fact, the ISP I'm with now, is geared towards techies and they actually acknowledge that people will run their own servers, and that they are a good option for such customers.


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Nightfox wrote to phigan <=-

Re: Re: old inet = your own DNS?
By: phigan to Nightfox on Mon Oct 26 2026 06:09 pm

computers, and he said the ISP
started charging him per computer

If you don't put the computers behind a router, they would get public IP addresses, which the ISP has a limited number of. It would make sense for them to charge by IP being used ;).

That makes sense to me. Back then, I figured that's what ISPs wanted customers to do, in order to make more money.

ipv6 makes this all redundant now! Completely changes the game.

You get a prefix, and you can assign billions of unique public IP addresses. In practice most people won't use more than several at a time. With ipv6 your ISP is not supposed to give you just one IP address, I don't think they even can.

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Re: Re: old inet = your own D
By: boraxman to Nightfox on Wed Oct 28 2026 10:44:19

I never remember hearing about this being an issue in Australia. Maybe some of
our large telcos did, but the smaller ones, like the one I was with couldn't give a toss. Same with hosting your own servers, as long as you didn't run a business from your residential connection they didn't care if you had a web server etc. I've seen in the US you have to be careful.

It's never really been an issue in my local area to my knowledge.

In fact, the ISP I'm with now, is geared towards techies and they actually acknowledge that people will run their own servers, and that they are a good option for such customers.

I use Verizon 5g at home for my internet service now, and the routher that comes with service I have has NAT, port forwording, and DYNDNS options built into it, so very helpful for everything. I cannot recall if it was the same way with the T-mobile at home router also when I had it. But I do believe with tmobile 5g they had it to where all our popular ports were not accessible regardless. Verizon does not, and it was the same with Spectrum.

back long ago we were fed a an ISDN connection from our local ISP, and to pay for it in return we created and hosted a webmail portal for him, which was kinda crazy. Definatly something that would would probably not "go" in todays security conscience world.





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boraxman wrote to Nightfox <=-

In fact, the ISP I'm with now, is geared towards techies and they
actually acknowledge that people will run their own servers, and that
they are a good option for such customers.

I used a small ISP for DSL back in the 2000s, loved it. He ran his own
news server, offered shell accounts, tilde web space, and blocked
inbound TCP 25 - unless you emailed him and he knew you weren't a total
knob. Static IPs. Secondary DNS. MySQL databases.

He was an old Pac Bell guy, so if there was a problem with my line, he
gave them hell. I might have had an outage every 9 months or so - as
opposed to my weekly outage with Xfinity... :(



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boraxman wrote to Nightfox <=-

ipv6 makes this all redundant now! Completely changes the game.

You get a prefix, and you can assign billions of unique public IP addresses. In practice most people won't use more than several at a
time. With ipv6 your ISP is not supposed to give you just one IP
address, I don't think they even can.

I don't see widespread adoption happening anytime soon. How long has
IPv6 been the next big thing?



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