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Dispelling the IPv4 Address Shortage Myth
Zocalo writes "While looking up some WHOIS information at RIPE just now I noticed a couple of articles about the IPv4 address space allocation status. IPv4 Address Space: October 2003 is a short summary by RIPE themselves, and IPv4 - How long have we got? is from July 2003, but has lots more detail and pretty graphs!
In short, the "Death of the Internet" due to lack of IP space is a myth, which doesn't bode well for getting IPv6 rolled out any time soon."
There is more to IPv6 than a larger address space. The address space issue is just what is commonly pushed, since it's something that's easily grasped even by non-techies.
The true benefits of IPv6 are things like; improved routing, multicasting scope, greater flexibility in what packets contain, flow labeling, privacy and authentication.
Especially flow labeling will be important if the net is going to be a source of media. Streams could get a higher priority, so low latency and glitch free audio and video can be possible. Makes me wonder if this couldn't be abused though.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
wouldn't you have to run some sort of firewall on each individual machine, rather than just the gateway/router?
No. The questions of whether computers on a LAN have their own IP addresses and whether they are firewalled by a dedicated box are independent. Even if each machine has an IP address by which it is publically addressable, you can still have a system which protects it by blocking known-dangerous ports.
The advantage of a situation like that, for instance, would be that you could have the firewall block file-sharing/RPC ports, while still allowing port 80 inbound so the individual machines can run webservers. With a NAT, only one local system could have a webserver, and you'd have to configure which one got it on the firewall.