I’ve been enjoying the occasional posts over at Dreamhost’s “official” weblog, posts that are usually chock full of interesting tidbits that relate to running a mid- to large-sized internet service hosting company. Today’s post comes from Josh Jones (who happens to be Dreamhost’s CEO), and talks about the hoops the company has to jump through in order to be able to request additional internet addresses; the part that’s interesting to me is that the rules which govern the handing out of blocks of IP addresses make it downright necessary for smaller companies to play games so that they don’t get caught without any additional addresses to give their customers. It’s the sort of situation that the next generation of IP addressing (IPv6) was designed to solve, by giving organizations blocks of addresses so big that they’d be able to provide unique ones to over 18 quintillion devices — but most people don’t see IPv6 achieving universal support for the next half-decade or so. So let the addressing games continue!