imjustapie

Yep, that's the way it's traditionally been at MIT as well. The DHCP hosts get things like DHCP-ipaddressspelledoutinenglish.mit.edu. The fear is that it's all going away.

By default the service max out at 512 MB of RAM (yes, the service was invented in a different decade, way before AWS was cool). So if I want anything more than that, I'm better off running my own server.

Also ironically, I can't reach any of the newly NAT'd networks from my XVM instance. I bet the XVM maintainers haven't been warned about the NAT.

It still makes no sense that forcing researchers and students at MIT to access the Internet through a NAT has anything to do with innovation in IPv6, though, unless you count all the innovative ways students are going to come up with getting around the IPv4 NAT... which is a pretty pointless exercise.

dheera really gets it! I can cruft decommissioned (but working) hardware from trash piles in loading docks; I cannot cruft AWS credit.

Yes! An average student can learn to host their server very easily with public addresses, and that was how I got started.

Even in the old approach, you get publicly routable addresses over DHCP. The approval was for static addresses only, and was very fast, because you're literally on the same network as the DHCP addresses.

If they detect bad activity, they blacklist your MAC address so you can't connect. This is no different under the new scheme, and has nothing to do with NAT.

Sure, but I'm just pointing out an example where MIT students get to be actors as well as playwrights, whereas now one must follow the prescribed lines and mustn't be too naughty.

You nailed it! Students love that they can just spin up a whole new web server, no questions asked. I certainly won't be where I am on sysadmin-type skills without the kind of tinkering that the un-NAT'd network affords.

Perhaps. I haven't seen public discussion on the plans to use the fund though, other than vague promise that it will be used on Internet things.

But that would just be ridiculous, considering that experimenting with Tor relays is like a favorite student passtime...

But why is MIT making money on those addresses more valuable than giving its students an opportunity to experiment and innovate? Why would selling those "unused" spaces to Amazon further the cause of IPv6?

Also MIT hasn't even rolled out IPv6 yet...

But it still just doesn't make any sense to me. They can just firewall the entire campus network, and firewalling can very well be done without NAT...

How can MIT people use IPv6 when it hasn't been rolled out on campus yet? How does it make any sense to put the campus (Ethernet) network behind a NAT, when MIT still has 18.0.0.0/9, half of what MIT has before but more than plenty to go around?

I think MIT is in the process of rolling out IPv6 officially. They only got an allocation early last year, and I think right now it is being used on the VPN network.

kudos to this well-researched post. As a student with a server in a dorm room, I really hope they don't take away my public IP address.