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By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

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Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#141

Post by imjustapie »

timdorr wrote: post #95
dheera wrote: 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. Of course it is. That's how innovation happens. They are focused on overcoming a constraint of the system they operate within. In this case, it will be to get around the limitations of the private IPv4 network, or to make the upcoming IPv6 network easier and more appealing to use. Most innovations are to overcome some sort of limitation, whet…

It still makes no sense that forcing researchers and students at MIT to access the Internet through a NAT has anything to do with innovation in IPv6, though, unless you count all the innovative ways students are going to come up with getting around the IPv4 NAT... which is a pretty pointless exercise.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#142

Post by imjustapie »

compuguy wrote: post #134
fragmede wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SIPB (MIT's volunteer student computing group) offers free "cloud hosting" to anyone with an Athena account. http://xvm.mit.edu/

Honestly that sounds like a better alternative, than hosting on bare metal.

By default the service max out at 512 MB of RAM (yes, the service was invented in a different decade, way before AWS was cool). So if I want anything more than that, I'm better off running my own server.

Also ironically, I can't reach any of the newly NAT'd networks from my XVM instance. I bet the XVM maintainers haven't been warned about the NAT.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#143

Post by rb2k_ »

dheera wrote: post #62
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.

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…

> Even our Google Wifi access points don't support IPv6 in their latest firmware

They actually rolled IPv6 support out with their latest firmware.

I'm at sea at the moment, so I can only find the play store note: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

"WHAT'S NEW

IPv6: Enable IPv6 on your Google Wifi."

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#144

Post by giobox »

cr0sh wrote: post #113
russellbeattie wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but NAT provides practical security for all but the most pedantic use cases. I'm terrified of IPv6 for this exact reason - it assumes every device will have direct access to the Internet. As we've seen with security cameras and other IoT devices, they just aren't designed to protect themselves and are easily hackable, so making them accessible to the wider Internet is crazy. Firewall options for IPv6 for most…

IPv6 supports NAT...

True, but I think its fair to say the crazy wide proliferation of IPv4 NAT in consumer routers wouldn't have been nearly as large if IPv4 address exhaustion hadn't been a very real thing forcing hands. IPv6, at least for the foreseeable future, doesn't have this motivating factor for using NAT.

I completely agree in principle with the old adage "NAT is not a firewall", but in reality it often effectively works as one for many consumers, many of whom probably don't have the technical knowledge to understand the protection it has indirectly afforded them for the past however many years.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#146

Post by dheera »

thwarted wrote: post #128
dheera wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Innovation will happen, but it is heavily misdirected. What if I'm a biology expert and want to run a server to demo something cool? I should be spending my time doing innovation in biology. What if I'm a deep learning enthusiast and came up with something cool to demo? I should be spending my time hacking at that. What if I'm a physics student and want to start a blog? The majority of MIT students are awesome innova…

Running a server isn't demoing something cool in biology, coming up with something cool to demo in deep learning, or starting a blog. If these people are going to spend their time doing innovation in biology, hacking on deep learning, or writing about physics, they shouldn't be spending their time running a server or configuring IP.

Why not? It's 2017, and it's super-easy to spin up a server and code something cool to demo something you did in any of these fields. Or spin up an MVP of a random product idea you have. Never tell anyone that "they should not be doing something" when they want to. That too stifles innovation. The idea is to create a low-friction path for people to do what they actually want to do.

NAT is technological friction. Telling people that "they should not do something" is also friction.

What about even just learning to write apps in your own time? I built dozens of demo websites while I was a student there. A few were slashdotted. Having IPv4 addresses and access to bandwidth from my bedroom was a massive blessing.

The problem isn't configuring IPv6. The problem is without IPv4 you cannot easily make a server that is guaranteed accessible from anywhere in the world, by anybody. That's not a problem that most MIT students are in a position to solve or innovate in a short time. At least not without spending money for an AWS instance that frankly most undergrads don't have the money for.

Innovating in making an HTML5 app to demo your cool bioinformatics project on the other hand is a weekend hackathon deal.

And servers are basically free at MIT. You can just pick up and assemble them up off of reuse when labs throw away various parts. Plug them into your gigabit ethernet socket in your bedroom, get an IPv4 address, and you're up and running in less than an hour.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#147

Post by p1mrx »

cma wrote: post #25
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.

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

By a couple weeks, perhaps. Before IANA ran out of IPv4 space in 2011, they allocated a /8 roughly once a month:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#/media...

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#148

Post by bluGill »

kazen44 wrote: post #115
srcmap wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometime, I felt force all IOTs devices, typical laptops, Phones, behind NAT is actually safer for internet as whole. Security via network segmentation. IMO, NAT gateway is good place to lock down and put in network security appliance to track/block all the unwanted connections.

except NAT does neither network segmentation or lock down the network. Those things are done by a router and firewall. Implementing proper security of IoT devices can be solved by A) writing more secure software for IoT devices and B) having a proper firewall solution with sane defaults. Using NAT as a tool to masquerade your IP addres is not secure. see NAT hole punching for example [1] NAT is terrible from a networ…

> NAT is terrible from a network engineering perspective, it was mostly a patchwork to deal with the rapid expansion of the internet and the shortage of IPv4 space

NAT is very useful to the network engineer. NAT lets you turn one network into a different one on a simple one-to-one translations basis.

However NAP got mixed up with masquerading to the point where when someone says NAT they assume you also mean masquerading when in fact the two are different concepts. NAT when you are doing a many-to-one translations is a disaster in many ways, but it works just well enough (and face it, the alternatives don't exist)

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#149

Post by imjustapie »

mintplant wrote: post #124

At UCSD we not only got a public IPv4 address for each device but also an automatic *.dynamic.ucsd.edu subdomain assignment based on the device hostname. Came in handy for my Raspberry Pi.

Yep, that's the way it's traditionally been at MIT as well. The DHCP hosts get things like DHCP-ipaddressspelledoutinenglish.mit.edu. The fear is that it's all going away.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#150

Post by inopinatus »

yuhong wrote: post #65

"The Library has the entire Net 18 address space registered at many hundreds of publishers of licensed e-resources. With no prior notice, we have been forced into non-compliance with our licenses with every such provider." I wonder what if the publishers actually sued MIT and Amazon, with maybe a injunction preventing Amazon from using the space.

That kind of statement is simply an institutional prelude to internal negotiations for an increased departmental budget.
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