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By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

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21–30 of 188 posts

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#21
post #8

I'm all for supporting innovation and community services, but I think author is not mentioning other possible causes, like DMCAs, malware and spam (including unintended), which could have damaged the reputation. I just wonder why MIT didn't give more time to move and why it doesn't provide a replacement in eg cloud credits.

But it still just doesn't make any sense to me. They can just firewall the entire campus network, and firewalling can very well be done without NAT...

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#22
post #6
post #3

Does MIT have IPv6? If so just use that.

Author here -- MIT does not currently have IPv6. Although MIT did receive a /24 IPv6 allocation, https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET6-2603-4000-1 , it's not routable everywhere on campus yet. Unfortunately, IPv6 deployment is still below 20% (as measured by Google, https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html ) so a publically-accessible IPv6 address is not yet sufficient.

20% is starting to reach critical mass.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#24
post #7

Author got it wrong. MIT wants you to use IPv6.

How can MIT people use IPv6 when it hasn't been rolled out on campus yet? How does it make any sense to put the campus (Ethernet) network behind a NAT, when MIT still has 18.0.0.0/9, half of what MIT has before but more than plenty to go around?

NAT will make future sales of IPv4 blocks easier? As you say, MIT doesn't need all those 8 million IP addresses, and eventually will adopt IPv6 anyway. Might as well sell surplus v4 space while it's still valuable.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#25
post #11

A lot of fuss, but if you look at the presentation slide in the middle of the page ( https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PyyPpTv1p7g/WU7hMEBnm4I/AAAAAAAAE... for reference) it is clear that MIT is not stifling anything or shutting anyone's mouth. MIT is just moving to IPv6. Actually... MIT forcing an entire generation of future engineers to deal with IPv6... That will literally push innovation.

On the other hand, selling its IP4 blocks may do more to slow down the move to IPv6.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#26
post #8

I'm all for supporting innovation and community services, but I think author is not mentioning other possible causes, like DMCAs, malware and spam (including unintended), which could have damaged the reputation. I just wonder why MIT didn't give more time to move and why it doesn't provide a replacement in eg cloud credits.

But it still just doesn't make any sense to me. They can just firewall the entire campus network, and firewalling can very well be done without NAT...

At a certain level of firewalling you bring the disadvantages of NAT. For example, if you block all input, or even just HTTP(S).

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#27
post #17

kudos to this well-researched post. As a student with a server in a dorm room, I really hope they don't take away my public IP address.

There are advantages to being on a private network behind a firewall ... and they could still offer a DNS name and routing to your computer if it was on a private network. It's likely that the only difference is that you'd also have to specify what ports you want exposed to the outside world. This is a win for you from a security perspective - having additional layers of security won't hurt you.

NAT is not security at all.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#28
post #8

I'm all for supporting innovation and community services, but I think author is not mentioning other possible causes, like DMCAs, malware and spam (including unintended), which could have damaged the reputation. I just wonder why MIT didn't give more time to move and why it doesn't provide a replacement in eg cloud credits.

If it went down like it did at CMU, IT polarized into a camp that wanted to maintain the traditional stack and a camp that wanted to tear it down and replace it with contemporary cloud services. When the latter won, they wasted no time in salting the earth of the former's territory. Disclaimer: I wasn't actually party to any of this, I heard it second hand, corrections welcome.

So why did the latter win?

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#29
post #11

A lot of fuss, but if you look at the presentation slide in the middle of the page ( https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PyyPpTv1p7g/WU7hMEBnm4I/AAAAAAAAE... for reference) it is clear that MIT is not stifling anything or shutting anyone's mouth. MIT is just moving to IPv6. Actually... MIT forcing an entire generation of future engineers to deal with IPv6... That will literally push innovation.

> Actually... MIT forcing an entire generation of future engineers to deal with IPv6

Then why are they doing NAT?

Edit: Although moving to NAT might push innovation too, or at least some clever hacks. Speaking of that, if you want use a relay to do NAT traversal then is TCP over ARQ (on UDP) as bad as TCP over TCP?

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#30
post #25
post #11

A lot of fuss, but if you look at the presentation slide in the middle of the page ( https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PyyPpTv1p7g/WU7hMEBnm4I/AAAAAAAAE... for reference) it is clear that MIT is not stifling anything or shutting anyone's mouth. MIT is just moving to IPv6. Actually... MIT forcing an entire generation of future engineers to deal with IPv6... That will literally push innovation.

On the other hand, selling its IP4 blocks may do more to slow down the move to IPv6.

Indeed! If anyone needs to feel the squeeze for IPv4 to make a move to IPv6, it is AWS... which MIT is conveniently selling the IPv4 addresses to!
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