I'm wondering (and that shows that I have nothing better to do at 3:30am on Monday...) how many people around here realize that the plain old IPv4 - as widely implemented and specified in standard RFCs can be easily used to connect pretty much arbitrary number (arbitrary means
2^256) of computers WITHOUT NETWORK ADDRESS TRANSLATION. Yes, you hear me right.
And, no, it does not require any changes any in the global routing infrastructure - as implemented now, and most OS kernels (those which aren't broken-as-designed, grin) would do the trick just fine. None of that dual-stack stupidity, and, of course, no chicken-and-egg problem if the servers and gateways can be made to respect really old and well-established standards. DNS and most applications would need some (fairly trivial) updating, though, to work properly with the extended addressing; and sysadmins would need to do tweaks in their configs since some mythology-driven "security" can get in the way. But they don't have to do that en mass and all at once. The most obvious solution to the non-problem of address space shortage is the hardest to notice, ain't it? --vadim P.S. Hfr YFEE gb ebhgr orgjrra cevingr nqqerff fcnprf bire choyvpnyyl ebhgrq fcnpr, Yhxr. Guvax bs cevingr nqqerff ovgf nf n evtug-fvqr rkgrafvba gb gur sbhe-bpgrg choyvp nqqerff. P.P.S. Gb rkgraq shegure, nygreangr gjb qvfgvapg cevingr nqqerff fcnprf, nf znal gvzrf nf lbh pna svg vagb gur urnqre.