Dave, On Aug 24, 2007, at 1:32 AM, Dave Cridland wrote:
I'm honestly struggling to see what the issue is here. I certainly agree that renumering is a pain, but I don't follow why renumbering is so significantly painful that it's worth breaking the network for. I'm not saying it isn't, I just can't see how it is, and would appreciate some enlightenment.
If you obtain address space from a service provider and you decide to change providers, you have (in most cases) two options: renumber or deploy NAT. It is a simple cost/benefit tradeoff, with the costs impacting software and protocol developers not really a consideration. From the perspective of the network administrator, which is easier? Going through every configuration file, network management program, firewall, router, etc. throughout their entire infrastructure and changing every reference to IP addresses or deploying a new box into the network infrastructure (and I'm not going to go into whether or not that box is deemed to have provide additional security)? Obviously, if you obtain provider independent address space, you don't need to renumber. Unfortunately, this doesn't scale.
Regards, -drc _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf