Re: 240/4

Consider an auto company network. behind firewalls and
having  
thousands and thousands of robots and other factory floor
machines.   
Most of these have IPv4 stacks that barely function and
would never  
function on IPv6.  One company estimated that they needed 40
million  
addresses for this purpose.

	Cutler


On Oct 18, 2007, at 2:53 PM, Jon Lewis wrote:

> 2) Anyone care to guess how much network gear is
deployed that  
> either won't or can't be upgraded?  i.e. Old cisco gear
without the  
> RAM and/or flash to handle a newer code train...the old
one in use  
> long since unsupported, or gear from vendors that no
longer exist?   
> As long as this stuff generally works, nobody's likely
to replace it.

James R. Cutler
james.cutlerconsultant.com

> Consider an auto company network. behind firewalls and
having  
> thousands and thousands of robots and other factory
floor machines.   
> Most of these have IPv4 stacks that barely function and
would never  
> function on IPv6.  One company estimated that they
needed 40 million  
> addresses for this purpose.

I guess I have a certain amount of skepticism that an auto
company's
robotic control network needs to have public IP addresses.

In an ideal world, where it's like it was 20 years ago and
we tell
everyone "register some space," yeah, it was a
grand idea.  Now, with
space running out, we need IPv6 for that, and in ten years,
all those
little robots will begin to find themselves having their
controller 
boards replaced.  There may not be a perfect path forward
for them, 
but it seems likely that they can actually deal with the
problem in
suboptimal ways until they're actually capable of IPv6.

It is in no way thrilling, but it doesn't seem likely that
IPv4-240+ is
going to be a grand solution for devices where the IP stacks
are already
admittedly barely functional, or that public IP addresses
are necessary,
in which case there's a certain amount of freedom to recycle
as much of
the existing IP space as is needed.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me
one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n
position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way
too many apples.

> > Consider an auto company network. behind firewalls
and having  
> > thousands and thousands of robots and other
factory floor 
> machines.   
> > Most of these have IPv4 stacks that barely
function and would never 
> > function on IPv6.  One company estimated that they
needed 
> 40 million 
> > addresses for this purpose.
> 
> I guess I have a certain amount of skepticism that an
auto 
> company's robotic control network needs to have public
IP addresses.

Of course they don't need public addresses, but they do need
to have
non-private globally unique IP addresses.

And RFC 2050 does allow such companies to go to an RIR and
get an
allocation of globally unique IPv4 addresses. You may not
have noticed
it, but IP addresses are *NOT* Internet addresses, they are
internet-protocol addresses, and can be used on or off the
Internet
wherever IP stacks are used.

--Michael Dillon