[AusNOG] IPv4 Exhaustion, APNIC EC, and James is a nice bloke ; -)

[Mark Newton]

On 19/07/2008, at 11:07 PM, Michael Kratz wrote:
>
> And, whilst its easy for people to point and say, well, use a  
> firewall.
> The average Joe wouldn't have a clue, nor care, nor understand the
> implications.

Sadly, neither does the average Taiwanese consumer CPE "firewall"
manufacturer.

> The other issue that comes to mind, is that NAT makes portability for
> small businesses and home users, dead set easy. They don't need to
> renumber their entire LAN every time they shift ISPs if it's behind  
> NAT.

The theory with IPv6 is that that's supposed to be easy because
with SLAAP you don't need to inform any of your end-user devices
about their prefix, so renumbering simply becomes a router reconfig
job.  And every world-routable device is going to have lots of
IP addresses anyway, and hence swapping out one non-portable
address for another isn't going to make a whole heap of difference.

But SLAAP is sufficiently flawed that everyone'll run DHCPv6 servers
anyway (can't use SLAAP to tell a host what its nameserver should
be, or what file it should tftp when it boots, or anything else
other than its address and default router).  So it's hard to see
how renumbering a v6 DHCP'ed network is going to be any easier
than renumbering a v4 DHCP'ed network.

btw, NAT doesn't always make renumbering easier for enterprises.
In particular, I'm thinking of enterprises which merge, and find
that they all of a sudden need to glue together two 10,000-host
networks which both use net 10.  Organizations like banks and
mining companies have those kinds of headaches all the time, and
I'd imagine that globally unique private addresses will be a godsend
for them.


    - mark

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Mark Newton                               Email:  newton at internode.com.au 
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