Post-Exhaustion-phase "punishment" for early adopters

Wed Feb 9 02:54:25 UTC 2011

>From: R. Benjamin Kessler <Ben.Kessler at zenetra.com>

>>From: George Herbert [mailto:george.herbert at gmail.com] 

>>"Let's just grab 2/8, it's not routed on the Internet..."

>+1

>I was consulting for a financial services firm in the late '90s that was 
>acquired by a large east-coast bank; the bank's brilliant scheme >was to 
>renumber all new acquisitions *out* of RFC1918 space and into (at the time) 
>bogon space.  
>

>If I recall, some of the arguments were "they were too big to fit into RFC1918 
>space" and by having all of their divisions in non->RFC1918 space it would make 
>it easier for them to acquire new companies who used RFC1918 space internally.

>I wonder what they're doing now...

<fireproof underwear = on>

If we make the assumption that the hosts which were numbered in the space 
formerly known as bogon are typical enterprise hosts, it wouldn't be surprising 
if they were just fine: they probably don't *want* to have end-to-end 
connectivity, and are perfectly happy with the proxy-everything approach.

If you're going to NAT everything anyway, then the damage done by having 2/8 on 
both sides of the NAT isn't any worse than having 10/8 on both sides of the 
NAT.  If it turns out that they start running across the hosts in 2/8 as 
customers, those can get NATted into some third block, with probably a lot less 
effort and confusion than trying to sort out the chunks of overlapping 10/8s.

David Barak
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