Re: IP network address assignments/allocations information?

[Keith Moore <moore at cs.utk.edu>]

> I'm not advocating one technology over another. I am claiming that in the
> IPV4/Private/Public/NAT world, a bigger pool of Private space would be a big
> help to many organizations.

I think this is a fine idea.  What we need is to reserve enough private
address space so that each organization can have its own chunk of private 
address space.  That way, organizations won't have to fiddle with
their mapping tables to avoid conflicts!   In fact, I think we should
reserve the entire remainder of IPv4 address space, and most of IPv6
address space, for use as private address space.  Of course, for the sake
of routing scalability it will be necessary to assign most of this private 
address space out of larger chunks that are assigned to ISPs, but except
for that little detail, it sounds like a wonderful idea!

(end sarcasm)

seriously, the only way you can have private address space large enough
to map all of the other private address spaces (that you wish to talk
to) into your private address space, is to reserve a portion of
your own private address space that is large enough for all of the 
other private address spaces (that you wish to talk to) combined.   
problem is, everyone else's private address space is potentially
as large as your own.  making the private address space larger won't
solve that problem.  it might give you a few months' breathing
room, but eventually you end up having to limit the amount of 
address space that any organization can use, so that there's room to 
map it into everyone else's address space. once you do that
you might as well just assign a chunk of address space to each
organization.  and for that we need IPv6.  

Keith