At 11:59 AM 1/12/2011, Jim postulated wrote:
On 01/11/2011 01:31 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
It's not about the number of devices. That's IPv4-think. It's about the number of segments. I see a world where each home-entertainment cluster would be a separate segment (today, few things use IP, but, future HE solutions will include Monitors, Amps, Blu-Ray players, and other Media gateways that ALL have ethernet ports for control and software update).
Your future is now, Owen. I have four network devices at my primary television -- the TV itself, TiVo, PS3, and Wii (using the wired adapter). All told, I have seven networked home entertainment devices in my house, with another (Blu-Ray player) likely coming soon. I feel confident in saying that my use case isn't unusual these days.
While a lot of the scalability concerns are blown off as "not applying to typical consumers," we're quickly getting to the point where your average joe IS somewhat likely to have different classes of devices that might benefit from being on separate subnets.
Jima
I helped a friend setup his "home network" recently. He is using an old Linksys Router with no v6 support. I like to be conservative and only allocate what might be needed ... part of my "Defense in Depth" strategy to provide some layer of "security" with NAT (yes, I know - my security by obscurity is to use something from 172.16) and a limited amount of addresses to allocate (not to mention WPA2 - he had default no security when I first got there). Used to be a /29 would be sufficient for any home. But, before I knew it, he had a wireless printer, laptop, and 4 iPhones all needing the new wireless passphrase to connect, plus he was anticipating 2 more laptops (one each for his children - to whom 2 of the iPhones belonged), and addresses set aside for guests and the occasional business visitor (he works from home). I left him configured with a /28, and told him to call me if he anticipated more. As a side security note - we lost the laptop on the "new" secured network before I tracked down that it had automatically logged in to his neighbor's (also unprotected) network on reboot. Ted