Comment on Phones have unique phone numbers, why dont computers have unique computer-numbers?
henfredemars@infosec.pub 2 months agoIP address is really the best comparison here. Some computers share an IP just like entire call centers may share the same phone number. And neither IP addresses and packets nor phone numbers are properly authenticated without additional enforcement systems.
Internal networks exist for computers and phones. It’s a nice parallel.
JesterIzDead@lemm.ee 2 months ago
No, computers can’t share IPs
lemmyng@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Sure they can. If you put a network behind a router they will share an egress/ingress IP. And there are certain high availability setups where computers share IPs in the same subnet for hot/standby failover.
JesterIzDead@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Yes, but no. The public IP is that of the router, which NATs packets to each host, each of which must have a unique private IP. The public IP does not reference or identity hosts behind the router. And that’s not how HA works. Only one host is assigned the active IP at one time.
lemmyng@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
When you do call routing with a PBX each phone has an unique extension, equivalent to the private IP of each host.
Oh, and there’s also anycast, which is literally multiple active devices sharing an IP.
IHateReddit@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They can share the same router and therefore have the same public IP.
JesterIzDead@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Yes, but no. The public IP is that of the router, which NATs packets to each host, each of which must have a unique private IP. The public IP does not reference or identity hosts behind the router.
lemmyng@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
A phone number does not uniquely identify a phone either.