On Sat, 15 Sep 2007, Paul Hoffman wrote:
Certainly. Every vendor who ties a license to an IP address has already had to
deal with customers who change IP addresses. I doubt that Bill's mentioning of
this practice was meant to say "therefore we can never do anything that would
cause renumbering".
On the other hand, if you develop a system that forces enterprises to
renumber, then you GUARANTEE that a large set of them will find a way
to avoid (or at least take control of their own) renumbering, e.g.
NAT --for many reasons that have already been cited in this thread,
and some that have not been.
Example: Fred mentioned that it would be nice to just use some form of
host names, instead of addresses, but in the world I live in, MANY
groups are geographically dispersed and want Traffic Disruption
Appliances on each of their subnets to allow unrestricted flow among
their *blocks* of addresses --they certainly would not want to either
a) manage large lists of explicit host addresses *or* names, or b)
change their complex firewall rules whenever someone sez let's do the
Renumber Drill! (Is that perimeter protection model fundamentally
flawed? Of course it is, just like NAT is. Both observations will
not change the reality of their continued use. The question should
be: what will?
Note also, for fans of homogeneous networks and single network
management stations, that a single AS may have hundreds of autonomous
management domains within it. As others have said, this is not
entirely a technology problem.
-teg
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