[arin-ppml] Just a reminder of some quick mathematics for IPv4that shows the long term impossibility of it

[Mike Burns]

Hi Owen,

>>
> Does a rat who has lived its entire life in a cage realize it is in a 
> cage?
>

I took a population of ad libitum "rats" and put them to this very test.
I had about 100 or so DSL users who reprsented normal business and 
residential use.
The used to each get a routable IPv4 address from a DHCP pool.
Then I switched them to CGN and waited for complaints, upon which I would 
have switched back.
I waited and waited. There were no complaints.
It's been three years no and counting, they are still on CGN, and they are 
YouTubers, gamers, P2P participants, Skype users.

Continuing to call CGN a nightmare looks ludicrous to me.


> Just because they haven't actually experienced the internet and have been
> fooled into believing what they have is access to the internet does not
> make the claim any more accurate.
>
> As I said, they don't have internet access. They have a controlled
> and limited subset of the features that define internet access.
>
> The internet is a peer-to-peer network where each system has a
> globally unique potentially reachable address and can operate
> as both client and server. Machines behind a NAT have access
> to only a subset of those defining features.
>
> Owen
>


Think about the etymology of the word Internet for a moment. It was designed 
as a network of networks, not a single Layer2 network.
End-to-end addressability was not a goal of the founders of the Internet, it 
was network-to-network reachability.
In fact, the era of end-to-end for the Internet was the limited timeframe 
between popular acceptance and NAT.
Most people would fear to put a real IP address on a computer today, I know 
that I would.
I use Logmein from behind NAT to address another computer behind another 
NAT.
Rendezvous servers exist for that purpose, and the market favors them.
Holding on to some dream of complete end-to-end reachability leaves out the 
inevitable firewall application between them in any case.
Juniper and Cisco have enabled CGN on their big iron boxes, do you think 
they are unaware of the nightmarish negative impact of CGN you ascribe?

Regards,
Mike