IPv4 address shortage? Really?

Vadim Antonov avg at kotovnik.com
Mon Mar 7 11:43:20 UTC 2011


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.





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