DoD IP Space

Thu Feb 11 21:11:33 UTC 2021

On 2/11/21 6:29 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
>
>> On Feb 11, 2021, at 05:55 , Izaac <izaac at setec.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 04:04:43AM -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
>>> without creating partitioned networks.
>> Ridiculous.  Why would you establish such a criteria?  The defining
>> characteristic of rfc1918 networks is that they are partitioned.
>>
>> The ability to recognize and exploit partitions within a network,
>> natural or otherwise, is the measure of competence in a network
>> engineer.
>>
>> Stop making excuses.
> Ridiculous… TCP/IP was designed to be a peer to peer system where each endpoint was uniquely
> addressable whether reachable by policy or not.
>
> IPv6 restores that ability and RFC-1918 is a bandaid for an obsolete protocol.
>
> Stop making excuses and let’s fix the network.
>
> Owen

TCP/IP wasn't designed; it evolved (OK, a slight exaggeration). The 
ISO-OSI protocol stack was designed. Many years ago, I taught a course 
on TCP/IP networking. The course was written by someone else, I was just 
being paid to present/teach it. Anyway, I vividly remember a slide with 
bullet points explaining why TCP/IP was a transitional technology, and 
would be rapidly phased out, replaced by the "standard", intelligently 
designed ISO-OSI stack. By the time I taught the course, I had to tell 
the class that every single statement on that slide was incorrect. In 
the end, evolution beat out intelligent design, by a country mile.

It was probably a couple of years later -- the year definitely started 
with a 1 -- that I first heard that IPv4 was being phased out, to be 
replaced over the next couple of years by IPv6. We've been hearing it 
ever since.

That doesn't mean that we'll be living with IPv4 forever. A peer to peer 
system where each endpoint is uniquely addressable is desirable. But in 
a world of virtual machines, load balancers, etc., the binding of an IP 
address to a particular, physical piece of hardware has long since 
become tenuous. IPv4 is evolving into a 48-bit address space for 
endpoints (32-bit host + 16-bit port). That development has extended 
IPv4's useful life by many years.

There is pain associated with continuing to make IPv4 work. And there is 
pain associated with transitioning to IPv6. IPv6 will be adopted when 
the pain of the former path is much larger than the pain of the latter 
path. Saying "RFC-1918 is a bandaid for an obsolete protocol" is using a 
normative, rather than empirical, definition of "obsolete". In the 
empirical sense, things are obsolete when people stop using them. Tine 
will tell when that happens.

Jim Shankland