9 ms·

That's too bad. I think universities should make these resources that they've been granted available to students and researchers. Last time I was at the MIT me

That's too bad. I think universities should make these resources that they've been granted available to students and researchers. Last time I was at the MIT media lab for a conference, I was able to get an unfirewalled external ip address from their wireless network. It was amazing. I briefly streamed live audio of a talk via shoutcast, but of course, nobody uses that stuff anymore. It really makes you ponder what a cloudless internet would be like. A little over a year ago, my university gave up their generous range of IP addresses. You could plug in ethernet, and not just get an internet routable IP (albeit firewalled from incoming traffic from the internet), you would even be assigned a subdomain off of the school's .edu domain. It was great. Students ran servers in their dorms. Clubs ran servers. Some professors ran servers. Even though you couldn't listen on a socket for incoming traffic from the internet by default, it was unfirewalled internally. I had to briefly live in student housing, and I was able to connect to my server via the school's http proxy via corkscrew. There were so many cool uses for it. Students were encouraged to run web servers if they needed hosting. It was also much faster[1] I think CMU still provides fairly decent network services. It was an insanely useful utility provided to students, and any serious engineering school should do it. [1] http://www.speedtest.net/result/4339921583.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/4339921583.png

dangero 10y ago
IPV6 solves this, plus even without you don't need anything close to this amount of IPs to do what you're describing. It's a fairly niche case to need that many public IPs and it seems a little crazy to hold that many just in case some researcher might want to use them. Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind a NAT since most people are behind one these days.
- flyinghamster 10y ago
  I've tried to run IPv6 on my Comcast connection. Unsurprisingly, Comcast doesn't get the point of IPv6. They allocate one single IPv6 address to my router. That's right, ONE. LOUSY. ADDRESS. This seems to be a "feature" of owning your own modem rather than renting one of theirs. I hesitate to even try to get this fixed via their tech support. I guess if I want IPv6 connectivity, I'm either going to have to get a tunnel from Hurricane Electric (SIXXS is shutting down), or carve out some IPv6 space from my Linode and tunnel it to my home network.
  - jagger27 10y ago
    Rogers in Canada gives /64, which is lovely.
    - lokedhs 10y ago
      My old ISP gave me a /64 and it was anything but lovely. It's too small to break up into subnets, and they were unable to give anything larger. This caused me to switch ISP's and now I have a static /48. That's much nicer.
  - buzer 10y ago
    That doesn't sound correct. Are you absolutely sure you aren't also getting a prefix delegation thru DHCPv6? That's currently the common way to provide IPv6 connectivity currently for residential users. From what I remember hearing, Comcast was giving /60s thru PD.
    - flyinghamster 10y ago
      No, I don't get a prefix. No /60, no /64, not even a /120, just one single address. A /128. Maybe I should jump on their forums and raise a fuss. I'm not at all confident that calling tech support would get me to someone who even had a clue what IPv6 is.
      - kiallmacinnes 10y ago
        Just to be sure, with a routed network being aimed at your house, you'll actually receive two subnets (well, a single address in one subnet, and a whole second subnet). You need to use DHCP-PD or similar to make use of it. The /128 sounds perfectly normal, and is used as a "point to point" link between the ISP and your modem. Over this, DHCP prefix delegation typically gives you a whole second subnet of /60 or so. If your modem isn't handling DHCP-PD, then all your see is 1 measly address even though they've likely allocated and pushed 295,147,905,179,352,825,856 addresses to you.
        10y ago
- mickrussom 10y ago
  IPv6 solves mAAAAny issues. DNS issues causes MAAAAny more. I dAAAAbble in v6 here AAAAnd there AAAAnd the situAAAAtion is still pretty dire.
  - runjake 10y ago
    Guy who manages a two-dozen site v6 network with tens of thousands of clients here. What issues are you referring to?
    - knd775 10y ago
      They answered that question 6 times in their comment.
      - mortehu 10y ago
        If you can't access IPv6 enabled sites, you can't access Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, or Netflix, who all enabled IPv6 permanently in 2012[1]. According to [2], around a third of US has IPv6 connectivity. If AAAA records constitute some big problem, it's not well known. 1. http://www.worldipv6launch.org/participants/?q=1 http://www.worldipv6launch.org/participants/?q=1 2. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption&tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
        throwaway2048 10y ago
        Thats not how it works, if you only have IPv4, AAAA records have no effect. Google et all continue to work via IPv4.
        mortehu 10y ago
        I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say "Thats not how it works". I was referring to people with broken IPv6 setups, mostly Teredo and 6to4 (old Mac OS X versions), for whom IPv4 worked but IPv6 was not actually routable. At the time, publishing AAAA records would lock out all of those users.
- apostacy 10y ago
  IPV6 is all well and good, but I am not optimistic about it. Why should a university deploy it, and introduce all sorts of new problems? Mine hasn't. And I don't blame them. No, I think that our future is isolated carrier-grade NAT, connecting to cloud services exclusively. And that makes me sad. I had to disable ipv6 on my Linode, because Clouldflare, Google, and Facebook do not seem to trust any ipv6 traffic coming from Linode. Only using ipv4 has fixed everything. And, as for ip4 blocks being obsolete, I still think it's wrong to sell them off. Universities were endowed with these. If they don't have a use for them, they should make them available for someone who does. Not just sell them to be used for some corporation's infrastructure. I hate how so many people on hackernews seem to think that not selling these ipv4 addresses is a "waste". People are only looking at this in purely financial terms. I consider it to be wasteful to sell them to Microsoft or Amazon or whatever. No matter how much money they offer. Universities are supposed to use the gifts they are given to try to better society. Aren't these ip addresses going to just be used for things like NAT traversal? Why doesn't MIT make them available for some non profit to offer that service as a public utility? If a flight school has an operating runway and hanger, should they just make all their students use flight simulators and demolish their runway? Should an agricultural school sell off their farmland to real estate developers? If their students really weren't benefiting from their property, then they should donate it to some organization that could carry on the spirit of what they were supposed to be doing with it.
  - lamontcg 10y ago
    We really need to just pick a date and turn off ipv4 because its the only way to make this guy change.
    - apostacy 10y ago
      It's not me that's fixated on ipv4. I would love ipv6. But why aren't ISPs providing it? Why aren't universities and other large organizations switching to it by default? ISPs don't care. They would rather everyone just use carrier-grade NAT.
      - 10y ago
- apostacy 10y ago
  > Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind a NAT since most people are behind one these days. If I tried streaming a conference on youtube, facebook, or periscope, my stream could be muted or stopped because someone plays copyrighted music or something.
apostacy 10y ago
A student ran an IRC server (necromancy.poly.edu) that anyone could connect to from outside the network, if they used their student VPN. I love that that was possible. There were so many cool projects that their network facilitated. I went to this exhibition, after the network "upgrade", and spoke to a student who's wearable device gets sensor readings from itself using HTTP to a node.js server hosted on a VPS. He was having latency issues.
cperciva 10y ago
That's too bad. I think universities should make these resources that they've been granted available to students and researchers. They are... indirectly. MIT can do far more to assist students and researchers using the money they raise by selling off IP addresses than they can by holding on to the addresses in case 16 million students all decide that they want to host their own podcasts.
- apostacy 10y ago
  I don't think MIT needs any more money. Universities are often endowed with special assets that others organizations are not. Yes, universities should dole out as many IP addresses as students want. Where else will students get an opportunity to build something with that infrastructure? Maybe the university could use their infrastructure to create a non-profit ISP that serves some underutilized market. If I were endowing land to a university, I would want them to use it, or make it available for the public good. Not just sell it off.
  - johncolanduoni 10y ago
    MIT may not need more money, but I guarantee you there are people there who could do something productive with a grant. Many more than can do something productive with 1000 public IP addresses anyway.
  - klodolph 10y ago
    How many IP addresses do the roughly 12,000 students, 1,000 faculty, and 8,600 staff at MIT use? Do they use an average of 800 publicly-routable IPv4 addresses per person? Do they need that many? Do they want that many? Do they have projects that would actually use those IP addresses? Mind you, an /8 block might sell for maybe $3-$7 per address, or $50M on the conservative side.
    - apostacy 10y ago
      If the ip addresses really aren't useful to them, they can provide them to someone who could carry on their spirit of improving society. How about providing services to the general public in some way, then? Transfer them to a non-profit trust that will allocate them to anyone who would do something important with them. If a university had extra land, I would argue that they provide it to someone who could give it back to the public in some way. It is because universities are supposed to do this in the first place, that they are endowed with things.
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
>I think universities should make these resources that they've been granted available to students and researchers. MIT student body size: ~11,200 Unique IPs on this block: ~16.7 MILLION. That's ~1500 unique IPs per student.[1] >Students ran servers in their dorms. Clubs ran servers. Some professors ran servers. Well, they're still keeping a whole boatload and IPv6 is here, so you're lamenting a scenario that isn't actually happening. MIT students will not have a shortage of IPs for such activities. Sorry, but we're way past the point of any rational argument to reserve 16 million ipv4 IPs for such a tiny student body. IPv4 hoarding is counter-productive. It keeps organizations from moving to v6 in a timely fashion and over-powers organizations that ran quickly during the IP goldrush way back when. Its not merit based and its just dirty politics as far as I'm concerned. We have v6 now and setting up v6 to v4 gateways is trivial for v4-only destinations. If anything if you love hacking around and setting up boxen then you should be thrilled at what v6 is offering and the amount of addresses you can trivially get, not the opposite. Its legitimately democratizing due to the lack of scarcity while v4 allocation is nothing but representative of the dirty politics and dirty economics of scarcity. I doubt Vint Cerf is crying in his cornflakes about MIT giving up v4 addresses, and I would assume he's thrilled to hear about v6 getting more traction: Some researchers wanted a 128-bit space for the binary address, Cerf (recalled) ... But others said, "That's crazy," because it's far larger than necessary, and they suggested a much smaller space. Cerf finally settled on a 32-bit space that was incorporated into IPv4 and provided a respectable 4.3 billion separate addresses. "It's enough to do an experiment," he said. "The problem is the experiment never ended." http://www.networkworld.com/article/2227543/software/software-why-ipv6-vint-cerf-keeps-blaming-himself.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2227543/software/softwar... [1] MIT is only giving up half of this mother lode, so each student merely is allocated ~700 each. MIT also claims 14m of those IPs have never been used in internet history. https://gist.github.com/simonster/e22e50cd52b7dffcf5a4db2b8ea4cce0 https://gist.github.com/simonster/e22e50cd52b7dffcf5a4db2b8e...
- gpvos 10y ago
  MIT keeping their /8 would actually make IPv4 addresses more scarce and thus encourage other organizations to migrate to IPv6 faster. But on the other hand, they would be crazy not to do anything with that money.
sallyfour 10y ago
CMU does still provide a public ip over wifi. You can even specify if you want a static one for a given mac address.
tanderson92 10y ago
Many universities still own generous blocks, though historically there were possibly many more[1]. My university, Caltech, still has the 131.215.0.0 - 131.215.255.255 block and has student dorms, graduate student housing, and office buildings wired up exactly as you describe. They also happen to own the 134.4.0.0 - 134.4.255.255 block, though I have never seen an actual server used there linked externally or internally. [1] http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=339445 http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=339445
- notyourwork 10y ago
  131.215.0.0/16 134.4.0.0/16
  - tanderson92 10y ago
    I don't follow.
    - RyJones 10y ago
      More compact notation for the address blocks
    - p4lindromica 10y ago
      contiguous IP blocks are typically denoted in CIDR notation
corford 10y ago
Given ipv4 exhaustion I'm not sure the pros outweigh the cons but your post just triggered some happy long forgotten memories. Manchester Uni (circa ~2001) as part of JANET (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET) had unmetered, unfiltered 100Mbit ethernet ports straight into all the dorm rooms, each with a dynamic public IP on the end. A publicly routable 100MBit line back then was a big deal (the fastest connection I could get at my parents was a bonded ISDN line). It was thanks to that that I first started playing around with linux (RedHat 5 or 6 back then iirc). I remember assembling a server box with cheap PC parts, hosting an FTP (...posting the Dyn domain for it to alt.2600 and later getting in trouble after the uni received a letter from Universal :), running audiogalaxy satellite 24/7, setting up an IRC server for me and my friends to co-ordinate Quake 2 games (or counter strike - can't remember), trying (and failing) to do my own email with qmail and all sorts of other fun stuff I've forgotten. Good times.
driverdan 10y ago
Are there schools that NAT student computers? That would be pretty shitty.
rlyshw 10y ago
I'm the VP of the Linux users group at the University of Delaware and we have several servers in the central data center connected to the university's subnet(128.4.0.0/16) with unfettered access to the general internet. No NAT, and limited firewall. Our Webserver is on a subdomain of the .edu(lug.udel.edu) and is totally accessible from the internet. It even listens for incoming connections. We run a mail server, a mirror, and an IRC server on there. It's great because even alumni can connect from wherever. I think there is a central firewall for every connection coming in, but I haven't run into problems for my uses. In fact, every system registered for an IP on the UD intranet is assigned a public, world-accessible IP on the 128.4.0.0/16 subnet and can listen for incoming connections. Even wireless devices.
ShirleyMarquez 10y ago
MIT had about 700 IPv4 addresses for every human being involved with the Institute - students, faculty, and staff. They're only putting half of them on the market, so they will still have 350 per person. I don't think it's going to compromise the quality of their network services or the availability of IP addresses for people who want them. Like most large institutions, MIT doesn't give public IP addresses to most client devices (desktops, laptops, phones, and tablets); they get DHCP address in the 10.x.x.x range behind a NAT because it's a bit easier to firewall them that way. But real IP addresses are available if you need them to run services.

dangero 10y ago

IPV6 solves this, plus even without you don't need anything close to this amount of IPs to do what you're describing. It's a fairly niche case to need that many public IPs and it seems a little crazy to hold that many just in case some researcher might want to use them. Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind a NAT since most people are behind one these days.

flyinghamster 10y ago
I've tried to run IPv6 on my Comcast connection. Unsurprisingly, Comcast doesn't get the point of IPv6. They allocate one single IPv6 address to my router. That's right, ONE. LOUSY. ADDRESS. This seems to be a "feature" of owning your own modem rather than renting one of theirs. I hesitate to even try to get this fixed via their tech support. I guess if I want IPv6 connectivity, I'm either going to have to get a tunnel from Hurricane Electric (SIXXS is shutting down), or carve out some IPv6 space from my Linode and tunnel it to my home network.
- jagger27 10y ago
  Rogers in Canada gives /64, which is lovely.
  - lokedhs 10y ago
    My old ISP gave me a /64 and it was anything but lovely. It's too small to break up into subnets, and they were unable to give anything larger. This caused me to switch ISP's and now I have a static /48. That's much nicer.
- buzer 10y ago
  That doesn't sound correct. Are you absolutely sure you aren't also getting a prefix delegation thru DHCPv6? That's currently the common way to provide IPv6 connectivity currently for residential users. From what I remember hearing, Comcast was giving /60s thru PD.
  - flyinghamster 10y ago
    No, I don't get a prefix. No /60, no /64, not even a /120, just one single address. A /128. Maybe I should jump on their forums and raise a fuss. I'm not at all confident that calling tech support would get me to someone who even had a clue what IPv6 is.
    - kiallmacinnes 10y ago
      Just to be sure, with a routed network being aimed at your house, you'll actually receive two subnets (well, a single address in one subnet, and a whole second subnet). You need to use DHCP-PD or similar to make use of it. The /128 sounds perfectly normal, and is used as a "point to point" link between the ISP and your modem. Over this, DHCP prefix delegation typically gives you a whole second subnet of /60 or so. If your modem isn't handling DHCP-PD, then all your see is 1 measly address even though they've likely allocated and pushed 295,147,905,179,352,825,856 addresses to you.
      - 10y ago
mickrussom 10y ago
IPv6 solves mAAAAny issues. DNS issues causes MAAAAny more. I dAAAAbble in v6 here AAAAnd there AAAAnd the situAAAAtion is still pretty dire.
- runjake 10y ago
  Guy who manages a two-dozen site v6 network with tens of thousands of clients here. What issues are you referring to?
  - knd775 10y ago
    They answered that question 6 times in their comment.
    - mortehu 10y ago
      If you can't access IPv6 enabled sites, you can't access Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, or Netflix, who all enabled IPv6 permanently in 2012[1]. According to [2], around a third of US has IPv6 connectivity. If AAAA records constitute some big problem, it's not well known. 1. http://www.worldipv6launch.org/participants/?q=1 http://www.worldipv6launch.org/participants/?q=1 2. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption&tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
      - throwaway2048 10y ago
        Thats not how it works, if you only have IPv4, AAAA records have no effect. Google et all continue to work via IPv4.
        mortehu 10y ago
        I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say "Thats not how it works". I was referring to people with broken IPv6 setups, mostly Teredo and 6to4 (old Mac OS X versions), for whom IPv4 worked but IPv6 was not actually routable. At the time, publishing AAAA records would lock out all of those users.
apostacy 10y ago
IPV6 is all well and good, but I am not optimistic about it. Why should a university deploy it, and introduce all sorts of new problems? Mine hasn't. And I don't blame them. No, I think that our future is isolated carrier-grade NAT, connecting to cloud services exclusively. And that makes me sad. I had to disable ipv6 on my Linode, because Clouldflare, Google, and Facebook do not seem to trust any ipv6 traffic coming from Linode. Only using ipv4 has fixed everything. And, as for ip4 blocks being obsolete, I still think it's wrong to sell them off. Universities were endowed with these. If they don't have a use for them, they should make them available for someone who does. Not just sell them to be used for some corporation's infrastructure. I hate how so many people on hackernews seem to think that not selling these ipv4 addresses is a "waste". People are only looking at this in purely financial terms. I consider it to be wasteful to sell them to Microsoft or Amazon or whatever. No matter how much money they offer. Universities are supposed to use the gifts they are given to try to better society. Aren't these ip addresses going to just be used for things like NAT traversal? Why doesn't MIT make them available for some non profit to offer that service as a public utility? If a flight school has an operating runway and hanger, should they just make all their students use flight simulators and demolish their runway? Should an agricultural school sell off their farmland to real estate developers? If their students really weren't benefiting from their property, then they should donate it to some organization that could carry on the spirit of what they were supposed to be doing with it.
- lamontcg 10y ago
  We really need to just pick a date and turn off ipv4 because its the only way to make this guy change.
  - apostacy 10y ago
    It's not me that's fixated on ipv4. I would love ipv6. But why aren't ISPs providing it? Why aren't universities and other large organizations switching to it by default? ISPs don't care. They would rather everyone just use carrier-grade NAT.
    - 10y ago
apostacy 10y ago
> Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind a NAT since most people are behind one these days. If I tried streaming a conference on youtube, facebook, or periscope, my stream could be muted or stopped because someone plays copyrighted music or something.

apostacy 10y ago

A student ran an IRC server (necromancy.poly.edu) that anyone could connect to from outside the network, if they used their student VPN. I love that that was possible. There were so many cool projects that their network facilitated. I went to this exhibition, after the network "upgrade", and spoke to a student who's wearable device gets sensor readings from itself using HTTP to a node.js server hosted on a VPS. He was having latency issues.

cperciva 10y ago

That's too bad. I think universities should make these resources that they've been granted available to students and researchers. They are... indirectly. MIT can do far more to assist students and researchers using the money they raise by selling off IP addresses than they can by holding on to the addresses in case 16 million students all decide that they want to host their own podcasts.

apostacy 10y ago
I don't think MIT needs any more money. Universities are often endowed with special assets that others organizations are not. Yes, universities should dole out as many IP addresses as students want. Where else will students get an opportunity to build something with that infrastructure? Maybe the university could use their infrastructure to create a non-profit ISP that serves some underutilized market. If I were endowing land to a university, I would want them to use it, or make it available for the public good. Not just sell it off.
- johncolanduoni 10y ago
  MIT may not need more money, but I guarantee you there are people there who could do something productive with a grant. Many more than can do something productive with 1000 public IP addresses anyway.
- klodolph 10y ago
  How many IP addresses do the roughly 12,000 students, 1,000 faculty, and 8,600 staff at MIT use? Do they use an average of 800 publicly-routable IPv4 addresses per person? Do they need that many? Do they want that many? Do they have projects that would actually use those IP addresses? Mind you, an /8 block might sell for maybe $3-$7 per address, or $50M on the conservative side.
  - apostacy 10y ago
    If the ip addresses really aren't useful to them, they can provide them to someone who could carry on their spirit of improving society. How about providing services to the general public in some way, then? Transfer them to a non-profit trust that will allocate them to anyone who would do something important with them. If a university had extra land, I would argue that they provide it to someone who could give it back to the public in some way. It is because universities are supposed to do this in the first place, that they are endowed with things.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

>I think universities should make these resources that they've been granted available to students and researchers. MIT student body size: ~11,200 Unique IPs on this block: ~16.7 MILLION. That's ~1500 unique IPs per student.[1] >Students ran servers in their dorms. Clubs ran servers. Some professors ran servers. Well, they're still keeping a whole boatload and IPv6 is here, so you're lamenting a scenario that isn't actually happening. MIT students will not have a shortage of IPs for such activities. Sorry, but we're way past the point of any rational argument to reserve 16 million ipv4 IPs for such a tiny student body. IPv4 hoarding is counter-productive. It keeps organizations from moving to v6 in a timely fashion and over-powers organizations that ran quickly during the IP goldrush way back when. Its not merit based and its just dirty politics as far as I'm concerned. We have v6 now and setting up v6 to v4 gateways is trivial for v4-only destinations. If anything if you love hacking around and setting up boxen then you should be thrilled at what v6 is offering and the amount of addresses you can trivially get, not the opposite. Its legitimately democratizing due to the lack of scarcity while v4 allocation is nothing but representative of the dirty politics and dirty economics of scarcity. I doubt Vint Cerf is crying in his cornflakes about MIT giving up v4 addresses, and I would assume he's thrilled to hear about v6 getting more traction: Some researchers wanted a 128-bit space for the binary address, Cerf (recalled) ... But others said, "That's crazy," because it's far larger than necessary, and they suggested a much smaller space. Cerf finally settled on a 32-bit space that was incorporated into IPv4 and provided a respectable 4.3 billion separate addresses. "It's enough to do an experiment," he said. "The problem is the experiment never ended." http://www.networkworld.com/article/2227543/software/software-why-ipv6-vint-cerf-keeps-blaming-himself.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2227543/software/softwar... [1] MIT is only giving up half of this mother lode, so each student merely is allocated ~700 each. MIT also claims 14m of those IPs have never been used in internet history. https://gist.github.com/simonster/e22e50cd52b7dffcf5a4db2b8ea4cce0 https://gist.github.com/simonster/e22e50cd52b7dffcf5a4db2b8e...

gpvos 10y ago
MIT keeping their /8 would actually make IPv4 addresses more scarce and thus encourage other organizations to migrate to IPv6 faster. But on the other hand, they would be crazy not to do anything with that money.

sallyfour 10y ago

CMU does still provide a public ip over wifi. You can even specify if you want a static one for a given mac address.

tanderson92 10y ago

Many universities still own generous blocks, though historically there were possibly many more[1]. My university, Caltech, still has the 131.215.0.0 - 131.215.255.255 block and has student dorms, graduate student housing, and office buildings wired up exactly as you describe. They also happen to own the 134.4.0.0 - 134.4.255.255 block, though I have never seen an actual server used there linked externally or internally. [1] http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=339445 http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=339445

notyourwork 10y ago
131.215.0.0/16 134.4.0.0/16
- tanderson92 10y ago
  I don't follow.
  - RyJones 10y ago
    More compact notation for the address blocks
  - p4lindromica 10y ago
    contiguous IP blocks are typically denoted in CIDR notation

corford 10y ago

Given ipv4 exhaustion I'm not sure the pros outweigh the cons but your post just triggered some happy long forgotten memories. Manchester Uni (circa ~2001) as part of JANET (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET) had unmetered, unfiltered 100Mbit ethernet ports straight into all the dorm rooms, each with a dynamic public IP on the end. A publicly routable 100MBit line back then was a big deal (the fastest connection I could get at my parents was a bonded ISDN line). It was thanks to that that I first started playing around with linux (RedHat 5 or 6 back then iirc). I remember assembling a server box with cheap PC parts, hosting an FTP (...posting the Dyn domain for it to alt.2600 and later getting in trouble after the uni received a letter from Universal :), running audiogalaxy satellite 24/7, setting up an IRC server for me and my friends to co-ordinate Quake 2 games (or counter strike - can't remember), trying (and failing) to do my own email with qmail and all sorts of other fun stuff I've forgotten. Good times.

driverdan 10y ago

Are there schools that NAT student computers? That would be pretty shitty.

rlyshw 10y ago

I'm the VP of the Linux users group at the University of Delaware and we have several servers in the central data center connected to the university's subnet(128.4.0.0/16) with unfettered access to the general internet. No NAT, and limited firewall. Our Webserver is on a subdomain of the .edu(lug.udel.edu) and is totally accessible from the internet. It even listens for incoming connections. We run a mail server, a mirror, and an IRC server on there. It's great because even alumni can connect from wherever. I think there is a central firewall for every connection coming in, but I haven't run into problems for my uses. In fact, every system registered for an IP on the UD intranet is assigned a public, world-accessible IP on the 128.4.0.0/16 subnet and can listen for incoming connections. Even wireless devices.

ShirleyMarquez 10y ago

MIT had about 700 IPv4 addresses for every human being involved with the Institute - students, faculty, and staff. They're only putting half of them on the market, so they will still have 350 per person. I don't think it's going to compromise the quality of their network services or the availability of IP addresses for people who want them. Like most large institutions, MIT doesn't give public IP addresses to most client devices (desktops, laptops, phones, and tablets); they get DHCP address in the 10.x.x.x range behind a NAT because it's a bit easier to firewall them that way. But real IP addresses are available if you need them to run services.