> How so? Because change is costly, especially when the change is going to effect many long term systems and processes. I'm not specifically talking about monetary cost here.
> By "private", I presume you mean addresses from the RFC-1918 blocks. Correct. > What connectivity exists between these endpoints and the outside world? Are > they just using these addresses for management or VoIP, thus completely > alleviating the need for NAT or anything like it? Are they using WAP and > friends, or HTTP proxies, or web accelerators, thus not needing outside > connectivity at layer 3? As stated these are mobile devices (cell phones or 3G data services). They provide internet connectivity which is used for many purposes. The majority of customers probably use it for Facebook access! :) > But as far as I can tell, you don't actually know what's realistically > possible. If you know more than you've stated, please inform us. So far, > all we seem to know is that "Telstra is large" and > > "Telstra uses RFC-1918 addresses". They are using private addresses to provide 100's of thousands (I don't know the exact number which seemingly you need to justify my comment) customers with internet connectivity. You have to beg borrow and steal to get a public IP (in fact they will tell most customers that they won't do it at all). So I know that it is realistically possible to provide internet access for a very large number of endpoints without each of them having to have their own public IP. In a university surely the majority of the traffic is for similar basic internet purposes? I'd like you to answer that question please seeing as you have worked in a university. Whilst I haven't worked in one I have had to work with one. > When I worked for IT at a university, we always had very tight budget rules. > You cannot hand wave the problem away by saying "Universities are large and > thus have lots of resources". They have lots of resources because they are > large; that doesn't mean they have *excess* resources. Why are excess resources required? My point was that they have people dedicated to their network. It all comes back to the fact they didn't have to do things any differently. > A1. You claim universities don't need all of the addresses they have been > assigned. I claim that some don't. I don't know the exact allocation or utilisation for all universities. > A2. Others ask you for who should be able to obtain these unneeded addresses. > A3. You say "ANYONE who needs" one should be able to obtain an address. > A4. The set "ANYONE" includes "Universities". Let me try to clarify. If there are large numbers of UNUSED public IP's in the hands of organisations and they were handed back then anyone, yes, including universities, that actually NEEDED them could be allocated them. They aren't being used, they aren't needed, put them back in the pool so that they can be used by those who need them. > Your argument seems to be that we should (be|have been) more conservative > when handing out address space, because there will likely be need for it in > the future. If I'm the organization, why > shouldn't I adopt that argument > for my currently allocated address space? Ok here is an example. In the past I have had to justify why I need 8 public addresses. I've had to list what each one will be used for. For a whole 8 usable addresses. Forgive me if I' m annoyed that other organisations have tens of thousands spare and am now considering selling them. > Define "needs an address". You're saying the univ's don't "need" > all the address space allocated to them. So who does? What's the criteria? If you have tens of thousand spare and am considering selling them, you don't need them. If you had the luxury of not having to use NAT etc and have many spare IP's, you don't need them. It is It's my opinion and clearly you don't agree with that. Perhaps things have been different in the US, perhaps it's always been easy to be allocated however many public IP's you wanted. James. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
