[Gllug] IPv6 allocation options

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 10:38:13AM +0000, John Hearns wrote:
> On 18 January 2011 10:04, Daniel P. Berrange <dan at berrange.com> wrote:
> > > What will happen is that most large ISPs will probably end up deploying
> > NAT in front of their ADSL users.
> 
> Given that corporate LANs already run in private address space, with
> proxies etc. to connect
> to the Internet, doing this for ADSL users means that in the end the
> Internet will be reduced to
> one router somewhere which connects up all the NAT gateways - it will
> be the only machine on the planet
> with some real IP addresses.

It'll nicely avoid the need for IPv6, but will mean we need to write
a TCP-NG, to increase the size of the port number field from 16 bits
to 128 bits, otherwise it'll run out of ports to NAT with ;-P

> (yes I KNOW there is a whole space out there for web servers which you
> need to use a real IP address to
> reach them - but hell the actual web servers are behind load
> balancers, so again we're really not sending traffic
> directly to that IP address. Also  academic institutions which use
> real namespaces)

More seriously though the ever increasing use of NAT is bad because
it strongly favours a client-server model and makes peer-2-peer
harder/less reliable. This is not good for resilience against government
and corporate censorship. Increasingly centralized hosting, under the
banner "cloud computing", is being pushed as the future of highly
flexible & reliable web hosting / publishing for everyone. The wikileaks
/ Amazon incident demonstrates this is a exceedingly fragile house of
cards as far as freedom from political or corporate decisions is concerned. 

To have robust web publishing framework, IMHO, we need to be able to
choose decreased centralization and distribution across as many different
nodes as possible. The ultimate level of distribution, is to distribute
across every single consumer/visitor of a site in a pure peer-2-peer
architecture. Bittorrent is great, but it doesn't fit in with normal
web browsing experiance since it is an out of band channel, typically for
downloading large objects which are opaque blobs as far as the tool is
concerned. I want to be able to navigate across web site(s) normally in
the browser, but have the content I'm viewing be seemlessly fetched &
distributed via a peer2peer protocol rather than rely on a centralized
service via HTTP. Widespread deployment of IPv6 enabling everyone to
have a routable/remote accessible public IP address, when combined with
consumer broadband that can have significantly improved uplink speeds,
are two factors that would be beneficial to large scale distributed
publishing in this manner.

Regards,
Daniel
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