On 07/01/2017 05:38 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| From: James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
| I have no use for those who insist IPv4 is good enough, when it | hasn't been since the day it became necessary to use NAT.
Actually NAT was not introduced to deal with a global shortage of IP addresses. It was introduced to get rid of a local shortage.
For example, Rogers@home (the first broadband service for consumers in my area) was marketed as meant for hooking one device (not a server!) to the internet. The theory was that you'd pay extra for each other device and they would get their own IP. This wasn't 100% crazy since most homes that had a computer that could connect to the internet had only one.
I ran NAT (and servers) at home with a Linux gateway because I did already have a LAN. (Unlike most folks, I had globally routable addresses in my LAN but of course Rogers could not route that traffic to me.)
These days, I get a /56 prefix from Rogers. That's 2^72 addresses, which get split into 256 /64s. Rogers can route the entire /56 prefix to me. My first Internet connection was with io.org, using SLIP, not PPP, over dial up. I had a static address then. I also had Rogers@home.
Pretty soon people wanted to run LANs at home BUT they were Microsoft LANs -- not safe in public. So naturally a broadband router-with-NAT made a lot of sense.
Back in those days, Microsoft networks did not use IP. I recall reading, while at IBM, what went into making it IP compatible. (I had access to a lot of technical info, when I worked at IBM.)
Now many folks think NATing is the normal and most reasonable form of firewall!
NAT actually damages the internet's original design. Nodes are peers, not clients or servers. But only initiators (clients, roughly speaking) can be behind NAT. So many protocols have had to be butchered to survive NAT.
Yep, you may recall the days when FTP wouldn't work through NAT. However, the address limitation of IPv4 was recognized well over 20 years ago and led to the development of IPv6. As I mentioned, I first heard of it in 1995. You may want to see what Vint Cerf has to say about it. He's been regretting 32 bit addresses for many years. Incidentally, I first heard about NAT when I saw a dial up NAT router, at Computer Fest in 1996. Also, at IBM, I had 5 static IPv4 addresses, 1 for my computer and 4 for testing in my work. I similarly had 5 SNA addresses. Back then, my computer's address was 9.29.146.147.