On 20-Sep-12 20:51, George Herbert wrote:
On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 5:13 PM, Stephen Sprunk <stephen@sprunk.org> wrote:
Actually, they're not any different, aside from scale. Some private internets have hundreds to thousands of participants, and they often use obscure protocols on obscure systems that were killed off by their vendors (if the vendors even exist anymore) a decade or more ago, and no source code or upgrade path is available.
The "enterprise" networking world is just as ugly as, if not uglier than, the consumer one.
I haven't worked much on the commercial private internets, but I did work for someone who connected on the back end into numerous telco cellphone IP data networks.
For all of those who argue that these applications should use 1918 space, I give you those networks, where at one point I counted literally 8 different 10.200.x/16 nets I could talk to at different partners (scarily enough, 2 of those were "the same company"...). And hundreds and hundreds of other space conflicts.
That's all? I consulted for one customer that had several (six? eight?) instances of 10/8 within their own enterprise, simply because they needed that many addresses. That doesn't include the dozens of legacy /16s they used in their data centers--plus the hundreds of legacy /24s they used in double-sided NAT configurations between them and various business partners, COINs, etc. Yet all that was exposed to the consumer internet was a couple of /24s for their web servers, email servers and VPN concentrators.
Yes, you can NAT all of that, but if you get network issues where you need to know the phone end address and do end to end debugging on stuff, there are no curse words strong enough in the English language.
That's the truth. To get from a credit card terminal to the bank involved _at least_ three layers of NAT on our side, and I don't know how many layers of NAT there were in total on the bank's side, but it was at least two. S -- Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking