Reflecting on the 20th Anniversary of NSFnet, Internet Origins

The NYT and news.com have up an article looking back at the NSFnet's influence on the development of the internet. From the National Science Foundation's gamble came the TCP/IP standard we know and love today; when NSFnet was shut down in 1996 it was apparently connecting some 6 million computers. The piece also talks about the (sometimes tense) relationship between private and commercial interests. "The Internet 'was an alien concept to the communication industry when it began growing.' While there was no risk for MCI, which was then an upstart trying to gain ground on AT&T, that was not true of IBM. The company played a crucial role in the development of the Internet, and it did so despite the fact that the new network was a direct competitive threat to its multibillion-dollar communications networking business, based on a competing standard known as Systems Network Architecture, or SNA."

Re: Let's not forget also the TCP/IP unfixed flaws

[mikael_j]

4- Private vs public network - IP V4 took the assumption that every IP address was ment to be public (the famous end to end networking dogma). The use of NAT and private addresses has been seen as a hack. We now know that private network are here to stay and the example of the SS7 signaling where private network and the way to interconnect them together are normalized provide a clear way. I am not sure that IP V6 learned the lessons.

I really don't think that the idea of every computer having a unique public address as something bad. When I first started my university studies I attended a university where every machine on their network had a public IP address, and this was not a problem as the university also had all the machines firewalled off with different rules depending on what type of machine it was; most Windows boxes could only be pinged from the public internet while most Solaris and the few Linux boxes they had could be accessed using SSH and had a few other services accessible when connecting from certain subnets (such as the off-campus student apartments that were connected to the university but used a commercial ISP's IP addresses).

That said, I'm one of those graybeards who got to experience the "real" internet prior to widespread adoption of NAT and I really miss it, nowadays there are self-proclaimed experts running around saying IPv6 is horribly insecure because it does away with NAT and without NAT you can't have firewalls(!)..

/Mikael

Mod parent up.

[Anonymous Coward]

I cheat and use NAT to secure networks too, but he's right. The internet would be a better place if security models were built on best practices and not convenience, or laziness.