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

[Mike Burns]

Hi Ted and thanks for the financial concern,

> I would say in your case that it IS a nightmare.  It's a financial
> nightmare.
>
> Did the CGN box you put in save you money?  It seems to me that it
> did not.  It seems to me you spend a lot of money 3 years ago to do
> this and that expense did nothing to get you more revenue.  It seems
> to me that if you HADN'T spent the money on the CGN box that you
> would still have those same 100 customers today, you would have the
> last 3 years * 100 in revenue from them - you just wouldn't have the
> loss of money you spent on the CGN box.

I had redundant CGN boxes running Mikrotik.
Those are really cheap.
Remember this was a test for my personal edification.
I had plenty of IP addresses available to me.
In fact, upon any complaint I judged to be CGN related, they would have had 
a real ip back in minutes.
I was suprised that the one guy who needed inbound access accepted a static 
port without question.

>
> Incorrect.  I was around back then and the goal WAS end-to-end
> reachability.  The difference was that hosts then had lots of
> users connected to them with RS232 terminals.

Ted, I was around, too. I had an ARPANET account at Brookhaven National Labs 
in 1978.
There were many operating systems running the hosts on the ARPANET, the goal 
was end-to-end communication among researchers, basically.
I don't want to continue this minor digression, though, so I will concede 
the point.

>
>> In fact, the era of end-to-end for the Internet was the limited
>> timeframe between popular acceptance and NAT.
>
> Wrong because most people back then dialed in with a modem using
> a terminal emulator program.  The first connectivity was e-mail
> gateways between the Internet and BBS networks like FidoNet.
> The WWW came about later and it still wasn't that interesting until
> pretty late in the 90's, around 96-97.  And NAT came about when
> most home users were still using dialup to connect to the Internet.

That's what I meant to write. Things got interesting in the mid-90s.
NAT came out shortly thereafter. NAT ended the end-to-end connectivity 
thing.
And yet the Internet exploded in size.
Dialup was not really end-to-end because there weren't fixed IP addresses, 
so not many were hosting servers on dialup.
(I know there were exceptions, I once got a /24 with a dialup account back 
in 1995.)

>
>> 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.
>
> logmein is not free for business use so your probably violating TOS.

 I don't remember saying I used the free one.

> And if you paid for it why should everyone else in the world pay
> that company?  Remote Desktop is free for business and personal use
> and does not require some wacky active x control or java applet to
> run in a browser.  So is VNC.  both of these are also faster.
>
I use both of these products, too.
I started with Carbon Copy over modems.
Full disclosure: I have done some consulting for Logmein.
In the real world I use Logmein for instances behind NAT.
It's especially valuable for the rapid setup of remote support because it 
does not require firewall changes.
People are willing to pay for that ability, according to their success in 
the market.


>> 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?
>>
>
> They OFFER CGN on their big iron they don't "enable" it, the admin
> has to configure it for it to be enabled.  And naturally they don't mind
> if an admin does because they get to sell them more hardware that way.
>
> Ted

Well, we won't have to wait too much longer to see who is correct in their 
appraisal of the perils of CGN.
I assume somebody paid the coders at Cisco to write the CGN code.
I doubt that would have happened if Cisco's research showed customers would 
reject it.

Regards,
Mike