Addressing Scheme

netwicked

Hey everyone,

I'm sitting here on campus and just connected to my school network.

I'm studying for my ICND1 so I decided to check what IP Address was assigned to me.

I noticed it was a Class B Public Address with a /23 mask. From everything I have learned so far, I know that NAT Overload is helping us temporarily fix the IP Address depletion problem. So businesses and organizations are using Private IPs within the organization and NAT Overload when they want to get out to the Internet.

Seeing as how my school just assigned me a Class B Public Address, and seeing the hundreds and thousands of other kids around here on the Internet, I am wondering if this is a normal practice. Why is the school assigning everyone Public IPs instead of giving us Private IPs and implementing NAT Overload?

I went to www dot whatismyip dot com to verify that the outside world is seeing this Class B Public IP. The website confirmed me with the same Class B address assigned by school.

By assigning us all Public IPs, isn't that wasting addresses?

networker050184

Funny me and coworker were just having this discussion.

Schools and other large organizations were allocated huge IP blocks before the whole "address shortage" so a lot of these organizations have plenty of public IP addresses to assign to all their hosts. Is it wasting addresses? Well, what else are they going to do with them if they are assigned to them and nobody else can use them? I guess they could sell them back or something, but I'm not sure of how the politics of that works.