What a lovely idea! Stage 4: The entire meeting gets put behind a single IP address, and shares outgoing bandwidth with another meeting, also put behind a single IP address, which has another NAT gateway behind it. For that extra verisimillitude, NRM 2009/9/24 Shane Kerr <shane@time-travellers.org>
All,
Perhaps we should begin preparing ourselves for the future IPv4 world by simulating various levels of IPv4 exhaustion at future RIPE meetings?
I can imagine a few stages:
1. We can no longer give public IPv4 addresses to attendees. RFC 1918 for everyone, but with 1:1 mapping to public addresses. 2. The entire meeting gets NAT'ed to a single /24. 3. The entire meeting gets NAT'ed to a single IP address.
Of course, this is the easy side. People are already accustomed to living behind NAT with their laptops. (They might be a little more annoyed when Google Maps won't work because there aren't enough ports to handle all the simultaneous open connections.)
To be fair, we should also disable IPv4 for access to the meeting itself, as this is the first problem that new entrants to the Internet will have. But this is a huge burden on RIPE NCC staff and remote participants, so this will have to wait. :)
-- Shane