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Thu Oct 18 22:34:48 UTC 2007

> > Consider an auto company network. behind firewalls and having  
> > thousands and thousands of robots and other factory floor 
> machines.   
> > Most of these have IPv4 stacks that barely function and would never 
> > function on IPv6.  One company estimated that they needed 
> 40 million 
> > addresses for this purpose.
> 
> I guess I have a certain amount of skepticism that an auto 
> company's robotic control network needs to have public IP addresses.

Of course they don't need public addresses, but they do need to have
non-private globally unique IP addresses.

And RFC 2050 does allow such companies to go to an RIR and get an
allocation of globally unique IPv4 addresses. You may not have noticed
it, but IP addresses are *NOT* Internet addresses, they are
internet-protocol addresses, and can be used on or off the Internet
wherever IP stacks are used.

--Michael Dillon