i'm also curious about what issues having fewer IPv4 addresses causes for organizations, like I'm looking at how (if there aren't other ASNs I'm missing)
University of Toronto has 300,000+ IPv4 addresses while VietNam National University has 4,096
https://ipinfo.io/AS45542 https://ipinfo.io/AS239
or the other way around, I know MIT used to have 18.0.0.0/8, what kind of benefits were there to having a /8 for people at MIT? (presumably they were mostly unused)
@b0rk Oh man the MIT network has so many assumptions baked in that the whole thing is publicly addressable. Professors used to run servers on their desks. The whole organization had a very anarchic network, and then layers of administration on top to deal with _that_. @dentalflossbay might have more details of how it used to be and how it's changed, but that really is a shaping assumption that changed as we brought in NAT in organizations.
I started my career when NAT was new, and mostly symmetric, a tool for migrating between networks — you'd have a rule like "rewrite 1.2.3.x to 5.6.7.x" and apply it bidirectionally, without any of the state-tracking that modern NAT does.
@aredridel @b0rk Back in college, our institute's FTP server (a Pentium 90 with a VGA monitor) had researcher's files, early GNOME releases, and it was one of the machines we used to play Doom in the afternoons. I think it may have driven one of the shared printers there, too.
