Live data from Hacker News

By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

blog.achernya.com

161–170 of 188 posts

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#161
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. IPv6 is great in concept but the world just isn't ready for it yet. Even our Google Wifi access points don't support IPv6 in their latest firmware, so I have no way of using IPv6 even though Comcast supports it. AWS IPv6 support has been sketchy until only this year. Many parts of the world are happily dancing with their IPv4 NAT and their sysadmins have no incentives to support IPv6 whatsoever. Forcing people to…

Forcing people to use anything is never a good way to promote innovation. Two words: seat belts. The auto industry fought this tooth and nail, as did parts of the general public. But once this painful transition was accomplished, it resulted in a big improvement in automotive safety. Other examples include EPA regulations that forced out the use of hazardous chemicals and processes. This, in turn, also produced a not…

Creating seat belts is innovation. Creating regulation requiring cars to have them and passing laws that people have to use them is not innovative.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#162
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20% is starting to reach critical mass.

I'm not switching my private network. This has nothing to do with wider adoption, nor do I have issues with IPv6 as a protocol. What's blocking me is router firmware. It can do IPv6, but only as an afterthought. Sadly, no level of adoption is going to fix that, until I buy a new router.

Time for a new router, then, and by "new" I mean any produced in the last ten years. I have several old routers in a junk drawer that only do 10/100 and even they support it.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#163
> Instead of being renumbered into publicly-accessible IP ranges, IS&T is moving all of campus into RFC-1918 10/8 addresses, and enforcing the campus firewall, which will be made up of Palo Alto 7050 devices, which are best known for their deep-packet inspection feature, App-ID.

Then later in the article:

> NAT deployment doesn't benefit the Institute in any way, other than to make things more difficult.

Possibly ignorant question-- could this choice be influenced by the inescapable rise of cheap IoT devices flowing in from China?

I mean if a freshman arrives with a desktop rig they bought purposely to use as an experimental server, and they explicitly register the software using a web form, you can imagine a very loosy-goosy relationship among students and IT built on good faith.

But if a freshman unloads their luggage and a few dozen random internet-connected baubles drop out and start joining the network, what is IT supposed to do? Especially considering MIT probably does a lot of research for DoD...

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#164
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

MIT just sold off half of its class A subnet. MIT was always going to be the last place on earth to go total IPv6

Are you saying that owning an entire class A of IPv4 addresses was a disincentive to go IPv6? ;)

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With their IPv4 /8 they had 2^24 IPv4 addresses to work with, or, from a network perspective, 2^16 /24 (65K) networks, each network containing no more than 254 hosts. If they had requested a boring /48 IPv6 allocation (that anybody can have just by asking) - they would have had 2^16 /64 networks, and each network could have had basically an infinite number of hosts. But, this is the IPv6 world, so I would have expect…

I don't see what the problem is. The IPv6 address space is so large it doesn't matter at all.

Isn't that what they once said about IPv4 when they were divvying it up?

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#167
When I was at the Institute (80s) the IT services were a barrier to computation. They had their big 390/VM system used for accounting and some course 15 stuff. One intern digitized the Mens et Manus logo and IT excited trumpeted that they had done so -- jeez it had been in a font on the Xerox XGP at the AI lab for what, 15 years at that point?

All of course 6 ignored them, and I don't believe they had any impact with Athena. Certainly they would have been upset by faculty writing the root password on all the whiteboards.

In fact they had nothing to do with IP allocation (I doubt they knew what TCP was). I wonder what bureaucratic maneuvering gave them control of that!

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#168

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.…

Deutsche Telekom (AS3320) has a 2003::/19.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With their IPv4 /8 they had 2^24 IPv4 addresses to work with, or, from a network perspective, 2^16 /24 (65K) networks, each network containing no more than 254 hosts. If they had requested a boring /48 IPv6 allocation (that anybody can have just by asking) - they would have had 2^16 /64 networks, and each network could have had basically an infinite number of hosts. But, this is the IPv6 world, so I would have expect…

I don't see what the problem is. The IPv6 address space is so large it doesn't matter at all.

That's true when we are talking about /48s. There are enough /48s to hand out to everyone (and then everyone gets 65K networks to work with). In the current Global Unicast space (prefixes starting with 001) there are 2^45 /48s. Effectively unlimited number, as there are 2^33 people on earth - so everyone would get 2^12 /48s.

There are 2^21 /24s in the existing Global Unicast Space. About 2 million. A large number, to be sure. But if every entity in the world MITs size asked for a /24, we'd start burning through them pretty quickly....

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#170
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are replacing their /8. They want to make sure they are never constrained.

With their IPv4 /8 they had 2^24 IPv4 addresses to work with, or, from a network perspective, 2^16 /24 (65K) networks, each network containing no more than 254 hosts. If they had requested a boring /48 IPv6 allocation (that anybody can have just by asking) - they would have had 2^16 /64 networks, and each network could have had basically an infinite number of hosts. But, this is the IPv6 world, so I would have expect…

They want it to sell it in a couple of centuries
Post reply on HN