--On Tuesday, April 29, 2003 10:37 AM +0100 "Stephen J. Wilcox" <steve@telecomplete.co.uk> wrote:
Further to my earlier post.. a large global private network requiring unique space at many sites, they use 9/8 .. why not use 10/8 ??? (renumbering reasons aside that is!)
One reason apart from renumbering, before VPNs were a popular phrase, IBM had a large multinational secure private IP network that many IBM customers used to connect their various sites, and interconnect to vendors and such. Unsurprisingly, IBM also used this network to connect sites together (before they built a separate Intranet network) - and so globally uniqueness was needed.
Recall the counter argument from Stephen Sprunk was that it needed a per site allocation from a registry, and yet these guys are managing just fine without it!
There is a per-site allocation from a registry, just an IBM internal one. There is a vast difference between managing uniqueness within an organisation (however large and unwieldly), and managing uniqueness between organisations. (Yes, NAT, ipsec tunnels, ipv6 blah blah blah would be better, but why isn't everyone here completely switched over to ipv6?)