On Feb 5, 2009, at 8:24 AM, Roger Marquis wrote:
* NAT disadvantage #3: RFC1918 was created because people were afraid of running out of addresses. (in 1992?)
Yes. One of my colleague, who participated in development of RFC 1918 confirmed it.
Your colleague was wrong. I was one of several engineers who handed out "private" addresses back before RFC1918 even though we could get "public"
You are wrong.... Quoting from RFC 1597 (a precursor which was obsoleted by RFC 1918): 2. Motivation With the proliferation of TCP/IP technology worldwide, including outside the Internet itself, an increasing number of non-connected enterprises use this technology and its addressing capabilities for sole intra-enterprise communications, without any intention to ever directly connect to other enterprises or the Internet itself. The current practice is to assign globally unique addresses to all hosts that use TCP/IP. There is a growing concern that the finite IP address space might become exhausted. Therefore, the guidelines for assigning IP address space have been tightened in recent years [1]. These rules are often more conservative than enterprises would like, in order to implement and operate their networks. Note the specific reference in the second paragraph to address space exhaustion. Owen