Thus spake "Stephen J. Wilcox" <steve@telecomplete.co.uk>
On Mon, 28 Apr 2003, Jack Bates wrote:
Actually, IBM confirmed that any announcements from 9/8 were guaranteed to be bogus. IBM uses 9/8 internally. They use NAT to convert 9/8 addresses back to routed addresses. One can imagine that IBM has a large internal network globally with interconnects to various partners. Yet many companies have found that utilization of NAT when communicating with the public networks is a sound addition to security.
Further to my earlier post.. a large global private network requiring uniquespace at many sites, they use 9/8 .. why not use 10/8 ??? (renumbering reasons aside that is!)
Because they expose subnets of 9/8 to customers of their data-processing services and assign 9/8 addresses to customers as well if needed. Those customers are likely to be using 10/8 themselves, so a different block is the only scalable solution not involving double NAT.
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!
Read my post again; IBM is a perfect example of using public addresses for private purposes, which I found to be the preferred option (vs NAT). 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