Have you thought about IPv6 implementation?

[chaz6]

My Understanding is that IPv6 is supported and used at ISP / telco level already alongside IPv4 but I can see no business case for going over to IPv6 in education not unless you get complete hardware support for it, this includes your LEA as I can bet if your LEA is anything like mine they could not support it anyways.

 

If your LEA does not support it, you can get a tunnel service from JANET. Before I left, JANET were still deciding whether to make IPv6 support a requirement for the regional networks.

 

Not to mention the complete nightmare it would be to implement across the whole site.

 

That was not my experience, and we had 3 sites and not far off 100 VLANs.

[srochford]

All personal devices shouldn't need public IP addresses, that's for sure. Neither should any devices such as bus stops, buses, etc... They are all private devices and as such should be using private address space. The latter group should not even be internet connected! The prior should use NAT'ing to connect (and indeed, many mobile providers do use private IP addresses for mobile handsets and then use proxies and NAT to connect out).

 

It may seem like '640kb RAM' thinking, but it really isn't. Private devices should not be routable to from the internet. This is exactly why private IP address space exists.

 

Just realised I didn't reply to this.

 

I think that this is one area where some people just work differently and organisations which started off using public IP have just stayed with that because it works and there's no need to change; changing to private IPs and NAT etc just makes work which doesn't need doing.

 

As an example, try doing an nslookup on machines in the range 155.198.x.y etc - I think the whole of that range belongs to Imperial and is used.

 

We only use private IPs for things like management interfaces on routers and for machines which aren't registered on our network - they can connect to a web site and register; at that point they get allocated a public IP.