Time for another IPv6 podcast! This time around myself and our esteemed TAB members Ed Horley and Scott Hogg discuss Carrier Grade Nat also known as CGN (or sometimes Large Scale NAT or LSN).
This is the technology that allows ISPs to extend the life of IPv4 by using NAT to allow many thousands of their subscribers provisioned with private addresses (because publicly routable IPv4 addresses are no longer available and/or affordable) to all use one or a few public IPv4 addresses when accessing the Internet.
You may have seen the recent announcement from Europol discouraging this practice for the reason that it makes law enforcement’s job in tracking malicious or criminal users of the Internet using endpoint information based on those users having public IP addresses much harder if not impossible.
We discuss this along with the other classic reasons why the IPv6 adoption community has generally discouraged CGN adoption over the years in favor of using IPv6 natively. So please give our latest podcast a listen to learn more about CGN, security, and the role that IPv6 plays in mediating its use.
And as always, your deployment experiences, questions, remarks, brickbats, and/or bouquets left in the comments area are highly encouraged and deeply appreciated. Thanks for listening!
Tom Coffeen (@ipv6tom) is a co-founder of HexaBuild, an IPv6 consulting and IPv6 training company. Tom is the author of IPv6 Address Planning on O’Reilly Media. You can follow HexaBuild on Twitter and LinkedIn.
