[138418] in North American Network Operators' Group
IPv4 address shortage? Really?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vadim Antonov)
Mon Mar 7 19:03:16 2011
From: Vadim Antonov <avg@kotovnik.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2011 03:43:20 -0800
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
I'm wondering (and that shows that I have nothing better to do at 3:30am
on Monday...) how many people around here realize that the plain old
IPv4 - as widely implemented and specified in standard RFCs can be
easily used to connect pretty much arbitrary number (arbitrary means
>2^256) of computers WITHOUT NETWORK ADDRESS TRANSLATION. Yes, you hear
me right.
And, no, it does not require any changes any in the global routing
infrastructure - as implemented now, and most OS kernels (those which
aren't broken-as-designed, grin) would do the trick just fine. None of
that dual-stack stupidity, and, of course, no chicken-and-egg problem if
the servers and gateways can be made to respect really old and
well-established standards.
DNS and most applications would need some (fairly trivial) updating,
though, to work properly with the extended addressing; and sysadmins
would need to do tweaks in their configs since some mythology-driven
"security" can get in the way. But they don't have to do that en mass
and all at once.
The most obvious solution to the non-problem of address space shortage
is the hardest to notice, ain't it?
--vadim
P.S. Hfr YFEE gb ebhgr orgjrra cevingr nqqerff fcnprf bire choyvpnyyl
ebhgrq fcnpr, Yhxr. Guvax bs cevingr nqqerff ovgf nf n evtug-fvqr
rkgrafvba gb gur sbhe-bpgrg choyvp nqqerff.
P.P.S. Gb rkgraq shegure, nygreangr gjb qvfgvapg cevingr nqqerff fcnprf,
nf znal gvzrf nf lbh pna svg vagb gur urnqre.
