[ipv6-wg] Re: RFC 1918 in "production networks"

Hi,

Thus wrote Gert Doering (gert at space.net):

> On Fri, Feb 05, 2010 at 01:02:18AM +0100, Shane Kerr wrote:
> > Perhaps publicly-routable IPv4 addresses are easy for people on this 
> > list to get, but I am sure that is difficult for a lot of businesses. 
> > I wouldn't know how to do this if I had a small company of my own!
> 
> Pick your ISP by different criteria than "who is offering the lowest price?".
> 
> (Every ISP *could* assign public IPv4 addresses [according to RIPE policies,
> of course :-) ], but the larger mass-market ISPs usually don't do this,
> because evaluating network requests and handling RIPE documentation etc.
> costs money...)

Even the larger mass-market ISPs will give you a range if you pick a
business contract instead of a residential private user one.

As to what you do when you are a small business is simple: you pick a
local range that is different than what your phone company uses, and tell
your "road warrior" people to use their data plan in a fix, resp renumber
your 5 internal servers and DHCP range if it collides with a partners'
network range. You can do -that- very easily over a weekend.

It gets a lot more interesting for large companies (much harder to
renumber) connecting to other large companies. There not only is double
NAT, which is bad enough in a static setting, there's the crawling horror
of having someone tell you "oh you can get the necessary info by soap
from 10.9.8.7" and you get a merry game of finding out which 10.9.8.7 they
were referring to, how it is natted, how your server is natted (and whether
both are natted the right way, ie not as client on a collective address
but on their own addresses), and making sure the firewalls in the path open
to the right addresses for that segment of the path (add fun: have six
different departments controlling routers, firewalls and servers).
I can't wait to have globally unique addresses everywhere.

regards,
	spz
-- 
spz at serpens.de (S.P.Zeidler)