Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!jln
From: jln@accuvax.nwu.edu (John Norstad)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Re: MacTCP/Telnet
Message-ID: <4649@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 2 Mar 90 19:23:53 GMT
Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu
Reply-To: jln@accuvax.nwu.edu (John Norstad)
Organization: Northwestern Univ. Evanston, Il.
Lines: 27

In article <9003011903.AA18844@jessica.Stanford.EDU> 
morgan@JESSICA.STANFORD.EDU writes:

(writing about FastPath boxes and dynamic and static IP addresses)

> Personally, I've never understood why anyone would use
> statically-assigned addresses, since they're harder to set up and have
> no obvious benefits.  Are there applications that require them?

We use them for two things here at NU:

1) We have a Mail*Link mail gateway from StarNine on our QuickMail server. 
It needs a static IP address so that other Internet hosts can find it.

2) For security reasons, we plan to assign static IP addresses to all 
those staff Macs whose owners use the NetNews HyperCard stack to post 
USENET news articles.  We configure our NNTP server to allow postings only 
from those fixed IP addresses.  It's too easy for students on the public
access Macs to use NetNews to masquerade as other people when they post.
Unfortunate.  Our scheme isn't perfect, but it helps.

There's probably other reasons for using static addresses - these are just 
two of them.

John Norstad
Northwestern University
jln@acns.nwu.edu