Re: IP network address assignments/allocations information?

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry at piermont.com>]

Daniel Senie <dts at senie.com> writes:
> > It is *astonishingly* expensive. It only seems cheap until you have to
> > maintain it. And yes, I'm going by Actual Live Customer Experience In
> > Actual Live Large Companies.
> 
> The counter argument is that for the Home Networking case, which is a
> HUGE market, it is indeed cheap and easy to use. Please accept THAT
> reality.

I'm not even sure its a good thing there.

You're at work. You want to check your answering machine. Its behind a
NAT, so you can't. You want to program your VCR. You can't. Its behind
a NAT...

> NAT can be used for a variety of things. Perhaps we can agree that it's
> a good hammer when the nail is a home network, and concentrate on what
> to do about the large corporation issue.

I don't agree that NAT scales, ever. Its a great kludge if you are
using it for a very limited number of things. As I said, letting two
people surf the web behind one cable modem with one IP address works
on a NAT. Does NAT scale to true home networks, where every light bulb
is SNMP manageable? No. Does it scale even to a modest home network?
Only if you think the sole application is letting you surf the web on
your toaster, which I doubt is the future.

Perry