randomizing lease renewal?

[Shane Kerr]

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> 2) Why ? In the years I've been on this list we've only ever been 
> given one sensible reason for such a function, but normally it's a 
> variation on "we want to make it hard for people to run servers".

One possible alternative reason is for the privacy of the users.

If leases are relatively short and the server does not maintain long-term logs,
then there is no way to map past activity to a specific client ID. This protects
users from both the black hats (like evil hackers compromising the server box)
and from the white hats (like court orders to report who is using a given IP at
a given time).

I think I read recently that some American university has just such a system set
up (although possibly just because the administrators hate the RIAA), so I
deserve no blame or credit for the merits of such an idea. :)

- --
Shane
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