On Thu, 22 Apr 2004, Tony Hain wrote:
You appear to overlook the case that H-D ratios apply to large complex
enterprise networks just as they do to ISPs. Also, it is not necessary for
all nodes to need public access. As soon as any do there is a need to avoid
using any public prefixes on the internal network.
I agree completely. But even large complex, enterprise networks don't need
complete, fully routed connectivity. As I said, I used to work for
Hitachi, which is a very large enterprise. This is why I doubt that
anyone really needs more than the RFC1918 space.
I understand what you wrote, but I think you are being overly simplistic. In
some scenarios it is very likely that only 5% of the nodes need public
access. This creates a situation where acquiring more public allocation is
impossible due to current policy. At the same time there is no room to grow
without guessing which /8's are going to be allocated last.
I suppose I am oversimplying. But I'm not sure I follow you.
A large enterprise network has somewhat similar characteristics to a group
of companies operating over the public network. Only a small fraction of
the enterprise needs to get to every other part of the enterprise.
Enterprises can use NATs internally the same way other companies use NATs
with the public network.
My point is that it takes a rather unusually extreme case to have an
enterprise that needs full connectivity internally, yet is so large that
it uses all of the available RFC1918 address space. There are only a few
possible organizations worldwide that could be in this group.
There are some extreme cases of disconnection. For example, the internal
NSA networks are never going to be interconnected with the public network.
It would certainly be OK for the NSA to use address space other than
RFC1918 space. However, I don't think the NSA is large enough to exhaust
the RFC1918 space. Indeed, I doubt that Hitachi is large enough to exhaust
the RFC1918 space.
The main problem with RFC1918 space is inconvenient collisions. The same
space is used by 2 different divisions, that later need to interconnect.
It is not a lack of space--it is a lack of coordination. For companies
like Hitachi (not to pick on Hitachi), this would be just bad management.
They could have coordinated this. But in other cases, such as when
companies merge and find that they picked the same blocks, there is no way
they could have anticpated or coordinated the parts of RFC1918 space to
use. More space doesn't solve this problem either (which I suspect is the
real motivator, though it was not stated as such)
--Dean
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