[arin-ppml] IPV4 allocations

[Matthew Petach]

On 1/3/09, eBoundHost: Artur <artur at eboundhost.com> wrote:
> How many IPs in use today are used for people connecting to the net vs
> servers?

Well, I've been trying to assign an IP address to my brother for years
now, but it still hasn't stuck yet; so, unless you're a bit further along
in your bioengineering, I imagine 100% of the IP addresses in use are
used by computer-type devices, and not by people.  :P

Now, many of those computer-type devices may happen to be used
more interactively by humans, while others may be less interactively
engaged by humans; but fundamentally, every IP in use is used by a
computer-type device (network gear, etc. and other special-purpose
gear fall under that same ruberic of "computer-type device").

Fundamentally, we can't really distinguish among the various
computer-type devices to be able to say "oh, this category or
subset is fine to NAT, but these others aren't" at the ISP level.
Applications today are becoming more and more highly interactive,
with information flowing bidirectionally on multiple ports.  Even as
an end user at home running NAT, I'm finding the number of NAT
rules and ACL openings that have to be allowed is increasing over
time, as embedded gtalk, jabber, YIM, AIM, and other seemingly
end-user applications start to need more and more bidirectional
connectivity between them.  Trying to stave off the IPv4 runout
by arbitrarily trying to draw lines between computer-type devices
that are allowed to engage in bidirectional end-to-end communication
vs those that must sit behind a NAT and can only engage in
unidirectional communication is a dead-end course; we'd be
better off focusing our energies on paths likely to lead to
positive outcomes.

Matt

> Best Regards,
>
> Artur
> eBoundHost.com
> http://www.eboundhost.com