“ But this was only possible due to the history of Harvard within the advent of the internet and the fact that they had such an excess of addresses that Zuck could bind to a public IP address.”
This sounds interesting. Can you ELI5?
This sounds interesting. Can you ELI5?
Big research institutions that were present when IP addresses were being allocated got A LOT of IPs by simply asking for them. Apple has the entire 17.0.0.0/8 range. Ford Motor Company has one, the US Gov has a lot [0]. Up until recently MIT had all of 18. (they sold something like half to AWS for a hefty sum not too long ago).
As a student (or visitor), when you joined the network (wired or Wi-Fi) you weren’t allocated some internal IP behind a router but a PUBLIC 18.something that was in the global address space because they had so many IPs available. This meant you could literally host something on the public internet from your dorm room because every device on the network was publicly routable by a unique public IP address.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_add... (see the last section on the original allocation)
As an interesting detail, which seems alien today, is that this was also true at my various employers throughout the 90s. My desktops at work all had public IP addresses and were directly on the Internet, no firewall or anything.
I ran mail and web servers, fully internet accessible, on my work desktops (and lab machines). It was a natural thing to do.
This was awesome for about 3 hours until the worms showed up - because Win98 didn't come with a firewall.
What EvanAnderson said.
The office ethernet network just contained a router, which would be hooked up to the upstream (via multiple T1 lines, IIRC). So everything on the office network had a public IP and was directly on the internet.
The design works just like postal addressing. Your postal address contains the directions to your building from any location on earth. Even if you live in a dormitory building with many other residents, I can still send you a letter directly by adding "door number: 42" to your dorm's postal address.
IP addressing use numbers instead of English terms like "door" and "street". So I can't simply add "door number" to your building's IP address, your building has to be given enough addresses so each resident's computer can have their own. When your computer has a public IP address, I can send Internet packets directly to you.
Harvard was early to the slicing of the IPv4-address pie, so they had enough addresses each of their residents, including Zuck. Anyone with internet could put Zuck's IPv4 address on an Internet packet and it would end up on his computer. Most of these packets would be HTTP requests to facebook.com, to which his computer would reply with a page from the facebook website.
This is the internet working as intended.
But we ran out of IPv4 addresses in 2012, which has forced internet service providers to adopt an address-sharing scheme called network-address-translation (NAT) that makes it impossible to send letters directly to other people's computers. Imagine I wasn't allowed to put any room number or name on my letters. If I sent a letter to your dormitory, the staff there wouldn't know what to do with the letter and would be forced to return-to-sender or discard it. This is what NAT does, and it has turned the glory of the Internet into a centralized monster of control and censorship.
If you want to host a website with a public IPv4, only established cloud providers that obtained enough IPv4 addresses before it was too late can help you (primarily Amazon, Google and Microsoft).
The successor of IPv4, IPv6, brings enough address space for every person, their dog, their dog's fleas, and their dog's flea's microbes. We can go back to hosting websites from our dormitories, sending chat messages directly to our friends (not via Google, Facebook and Microsoft), and start new ISPs that missed out on the IPv4 pie that actually have a chance at competing with the likes of Comcast.
IPv6 reintroduces equity to the internet that facebook benefited from in it's inception.
Except for the fact nobody can type, much less remember any IPv6 address.
I'm looking forward to using `router.local` over `192.168.1.254`.
rfc1918 address space is easily remembered because people use mostly 192.168.xx.xx. but ipv6 has the same idea and when writing it shorthand isnt significantly larger.
Obviously doesn’t scale, but I would assume this was normal back when you only interacted with say <10 servers.
You basically just need a router and an OS from the last two decades and your machines to have a defined host name (which your OS installer takes care of).
I regularly run into instances where local hostname resolution is unreliable.
To improve reliability, I setup a local DNS server to hand out a domain name with the IP address. Even then, whether a client requires a hostname or FQDN to resolve a local address - that can vary over time.
the end-to-end principle is mostly undermined by stateful firewalls and a total lack of secure-by-design in software developement, this will not change with ipv6
There was a time when the Internet was not divided between producers and consumers of content, but everyone was an equal netizen with publishing capabilities. Then came asymmetric connections, and datacenters, and the modern hellhole we all know to well.
It's never too late to act: many "community networks" are doing an amazing job to promote selfhosting and hosting cooperatives.