On 6 May 2020, at 17:13, Richard Halfpenny <richard.halfpe...@exa-networks.co.uk<mailto:richard.halfpe...@exa-networks.co.uk>> wrote:
On Wed, 6 May 2020 at 16:53, Rob Evans <r...@nosc.ja.net<mailto:r...@nosc.ja.net>> wrote: > Public IPv4 addresses direct on PCs, Mobile Devices on Guest Wifi Networks, > internal Printers.... I have seen this with my own eyes. Those sound like features, and how the Internet was supposed to work. The 6th form college I attended between '96-'98 had a /24 with all machines publicly addressed. I then went to Uni in '98 and all hosts addressed from a /16 didn't feel out of place. It was great - at both institutions you could happily run your own servers etc as there was NO packet filtering at all. Different days back then, mind. I remember the "Campus Firewall Project" at Bradford did kick up a bit of a stink - suddenly lots of freedoms were taken away on those public IPs. Much sadness amongst CompSci geeks but they did need to reign things in a bit - IIRC the student radio station famously racked up a rather large transatlantic bandwidth bill by running a RealAudio server and one show attracted a sizeable listenership from the USA! While at Southampton uni we did a writeup about our firewall deployment, back in around 1999 or so. At the time, you’re right, 10% of JANET-connected campuses had a default deny firewall. The surprising thing though was that we were able to deploy one, without too much grief from the academics and researchers, but that was by working closely with them to ensure that specific things they wanted to do were not impacted any more than necessary. Of course, it’s worth remembering the web didn’t exist back then, and our IPv6 (and our multicast) external connectivity was tunnelled not native. And that it was the universities who were heavily involved in bringing IP to the UK, not least Peter Kirstein at UCL, who was a close friend of Vint Perf and other Internet pioneers, and that’s why the universities have their own pre-RIR, pre-CIDR, IPv4 address space. Tim
