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Re: was bogon filters, now "Brief Segue on 1918"

  • From: Patrick Darden
  • Date: Thu Aug 07 13:48:11 2008
I've always enjoyed your posts Michael. You are obviously an expert, with no patience for idiocy, and you always go for the throat and try to hurt the other person as much as you can. Your messages are always very entertaining.

In this case, however, you are responding to a conversation that is pretty much over and done. I've already received umpty emails telling me how right I am, and another umpty emails telling me I am an idiot and I should go back to knitting. Most of the latter were privately sent, and I appreciate both their candor and discretion....

The reasonable voices seem to feel that it doesn't matter if I am right, as the real world just doesn't care. I have to agree with that. That's kinda the whole point, I think.

The forward thinkers feel as you do that IPV6 is the real answer. I believe I was the first to say that in this thread.

As far as the individual points that you satirize below--well ok then. We are not talking about people. I was not the person who raised people as a metric. Jump his case if you feel the need. I was actually jumping his case about it myself, albeit tongue in cheek, and hopefully with no hard feelings.

However, the original conversation centered on the best way to design private networks so that internetworking between companies who did not confer on eachothers' network design does not cause problems, and how very few companies follow RFC1918 very well in my experience.

Whether they fail at RFC1918 for real reasons or not, they still fail.

As far as companies that design their own networks so they have trouble interoperating with themselves--well, bummer for them. I bet they wish they had done their design more efficiently instead of making "large sprawling" networks with plenty of room for growth for soda machines. Because you just can't assign enough IP address space for your soda machines.

"Cute sound bites does (sic) not make you an expert in anything. " I agree with this too. But just because it's cute, doesn't mean it's wrong.

--Patrick Darden



[email protected] wrote:
Your point seemed to be that it is not a large enough allocation of IPs for an international enterprise of 80K souls. My rebuttal is: 16.5 million IPs isn't enough?

You don't seem to understand how IPv4 networks are designed and how that interacts with scale, i.e. the large sprawling
networks that international enterprises have. You don't simply
count out x addresses per employee. Instead, you design a subnet
architecture that a) can grow at all levels, and b) can be
cut off the network when you sell off a branch operation or two.

This leads to large amounts of IP addresses used up in padding
at all levels, which then leads to these organizations running
out of RFC 1918 space, a more and more common occurence. This,
in itself, is a good incentive to move to IPv6, since the
seemingly wasteful subnet architecture is considered best practice
with IPv6, and a ULA prefix or two gives you lots of space to
keep growing.

What are we talking about then? 100 IPs per person--say each person has 10 PCs, 10 printers, 10 automated factory machines, 10 lab instruments, 49 servers and the soda machine on their network? 

Nope. We are not talking about people, but about network
architecture and topology. Two people in one office need
two addresses. Put them in separate offices and they need
two subnets. Topology dominates the design.

I don't think you have that many soda machines. Even on 5 continents. Even with your growing Asian market, your suppliers, and the whole marketing team.

I believe the first two companies to run out of RFC 1918
space (or to project that it would happen) are Comcast,
and American cable provider in one continent, and a
Japanese cable provider on a small Pacific island next
to China.

//Err. Doing it wrong does not justify doing it wrong.

Cute sound bites does not make you an expert in anything.

In any case, IPv4 is yesterday's news. Nowadays everyone is
scrambling to integrate IPv6 into their networks and shift
services onto IPv6.

--Michael Dillon