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By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

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Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#41

Post by Animats »

pdonis wrote: post #35
znpy wrote: 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.

> MIT is just moving to IPv6. The "just" is incorrect. There are four bullets on the slide: DHCP, IPV6, private IPV4/NAT, and firewall. From the diagram it looks to me like even if you move to IPV6 (which, as others have noted, MIT has not yet rolled out, so at this point you can't), you will still be behind the firewall, so setting up a service visible to the Internet will still be more difficult than it used to be.

MIT doesn't have IPv6 everywhere yet? That's lame.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#42

Post by jjoonathan »

yuhong wrote: post #28
jjoonathan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The non-CS departments weren't huge fans of Andrew when I was there. Instead of learning to use it, they would work around it. I suspect the tension eventually came to a boiling point.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#43

Post by new299 »

imjustapie wrote: post #32
Reason077 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But why is MIT making money on those addresses more valuable than giving its students an opportunity to experiment and innovate? Why would selling those "unused" spaces to Amazon further the cause of IPv6? Also MIT hasn't even rolled out IPv6 yet...

Would the logic not be that the money will be spent on more useful things for students?

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#44

Post by KGIII »

robertch wrote: post #4

Projects have broken over this, with no real gain for implementing it. You would expect more rationality from MIT, of all places.

No, no I would not expect more rationality. I am an alum. I am long since out of academia and have no idea what is behind this. However, if I had to guess, I bet there is some inner politics. Just 'cause it is MIT doesn't mean it is is free from human nature. And, truthfully, I've seen some petty things get all sorts of dramatic.

We are humans. We're not rational beings, we're rationalizing beings. We like to pretend we are better but there is a valid reason that they say science progresses one death at a time.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#45

Post by ghshephard »

Wow - 2603:4000::/24. That's the largest block of IPv6 addresses I'm aware of being handed out to a single entity.

Normally, ISPs get a /32, from which, they hand out /48s to their customer. And, with pretty much zero paper work, and ISP can get a second /32 (usually adjacent with their first /32 so they can summarize as a /31).

So - an ISP might get 2001:1868::/32 and then hand off 2001:1868:0209::/48 to a customer.

Because a /48 allows 2^16 or 65k networks, each network containing (effectively) an infinite number of hosts, pretty much every single geographic region company can be effectively served with a single /48. The /32 allows the ISP to have 65K customer (each of which has 65K networks).

What on earth is MIT going to do with a 2603:4000::/24? I'd love to hear the story behind why they got such a large block.

edit: according to https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html this is considered a "medium" (WTF?) allocation with a cost of $4k/year.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#46

Post by unsignedint »

imjustapie wrote: post #40
unsignedint wrote: post #23

Perhaps doing it over .onion? Actually I have been experimenting this for my pet projects. Downside is that it's relatively slow but getting "global" address is click (well a few lines of config) away...

But that would just be ridiculous, considering that experimenting with Tor relays is like a favorite student passtime...

You don't need to run a Tor relay in order to run a hidden service. I have thrown in this idea as it's a dead simple (cheap/free, and you don't have to coordinate with anyone) to get your stuff publicly, let alone for experimental purpose.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#48

Post by rspeer »

pdonis wrote: post #35
znpy wrote: 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.

> MIT is just moving to IPv6. The "just" is incorrect. There are four bullets on the slide: DHCP, IPV6, private IPV4/NAT, and firewall. From the diagram it looks to me like even if you move to IPV6 (which, as others have noted, MIT has not yet rolled out, so at this point you can't), you will still be behind the firewall, so setting up a service visible to the Internet will still be more difficult than it used to be.

The post isn't objecting to the firewall, though.

I totally understand the need for a campus-wide firewall. The MIT network is a juicy target for botnets, and individual students are not good enough at running security on their own computers. The old approach to IP assignment was that you needed to get your IP approved and made routable by IS&T anyway, and if they detected botnet activity on your computer, they'd manually intervene and make it unroutable again. That sounds like a lot of work.

If computers end up with firewalled but publicly routable IPv6 addresses, that sounds perfect.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#49

Post by jpace121 »

I wonder if any of this is related to the new NIST Standards[1], which have to be followed by research labs who receive government funding. I could see MIT, already having to retrofit a lot of their research networks, also changing around the network architecture in other places aswell.

[1]:http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP...

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#50

Post by kevin_b_er »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #29
znpy wrote: 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?

> Then why are they doing NAT?

Because they sold their IPv4 addresses.

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