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Lesson 1
Determining IP Addressing Requirements
2-5
Why Use Registered Addresses? If you have computers on your network that you
want to be accessible from the Internet (such as Web servers), you must
configure
them with IP addresses that the IANA has registered. This is because only
registered
addresses are visible from the Internet. For a user on the Internet to
access your com-
pany Web server, a client application, such as a Web browser, must initiate
communi-
cation by sending a request to the server. The browser can’t do that if it
doesn’t have
the server’s address. (Users on your network who want to access Internet
services do
not require registered addresses; this matter is covered later in this
lesson.)
Why Not Use Registered Addresses? Theoretically, you can use registered IP
addresses
for all the computers on your network, but this practice has two serious
drawbacks:
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It depletes the IP address space. If every device with an IP address today
(which
includes a great many mobile telephones, automobiles, and other devices, in
addi-
tion to computers) had a registered IP address, the pool of available
addresses
would be well on its way to depletion. Even now, a program to expand the IP
address space from 32 (called Internet Protocol Version 4 or IPv4) to 128
bits,
called IPv6, is currently under way to prevent the possibility of depleting
the
entire IP address space in the future.
See Also
For more information about IPv6, see Understanding IPv6 (Microsoft Press,
2003). Additionally, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has
published a number of pro-
posed Requests for Comments (RFC) standards that you can consult, such as
RFC 2464,
“Transmission of IPv6 Packets over Ethernet Networks.”
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Using registered IP addresses on a private network presents a serious
security haz-
ard. Not only can a computer with a registered IP address access systems on
the
Internet, the systems on the Internet can also access the computer.
Security Alert
You must set up some sort of firewall to protect Web servers and other com-
puters that must have registered addresses. For example, you can use packet
filtering to permit
only Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) traffic using port 80 to reach your
Web server from the
Internet. This means that Internet users can access the Web server using
only standard browser
requests. Other types of traffic—such as those used by Internet predators to
plant viruses, steal
data, and cause mayhem—are blocked. Without some protection, an intruder
will eventually target
a registered system, and the results can range from irritating to
catastrophic.
Protecting computers with registered addresses is a complex process that
requires con-
stant vigilance from the network’s administrators. If you configure all your
computers
with registered addresses, you compound this protection process
unnecessarily. You
can use several methods to assign unregistered IP addresses to your
network’s comput-
ers while still enabling them to access the Internet.
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