Is the internet limitless or does it have a max capacity?

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"as good as" is not "actually"

the fact that you can send and receive packets of data means your as good as on the internet, for all practical purposes your computer is as good as if it was attached directly.

its the fact that its not ACTUALLY attached to the internet itself that is my point, the internet has a limit of the amount of things that can connect to it, the fact that each of them things could "middle man" for many other devices is irrelivant its still that one device that actually talks to the internet. The other devices are not the actual connection, only the middle man is.


practically it makes bugger all difference, but this is a theoretical situation

 

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But it is connected. It's connected to the internet through a translation device. If it was completely disconnected from the internet the computer couldn't communicate with other computers over the internet.

If I open up port forwarding and a couple of other technologies on my router my workstation will have all ports directly accessible from the internet, even though it's using a private IP address. I also gave the example of my https server being accessible directly from the internet even though it has a private IP address. In fact, many web and database servers that serve content daily are accessed using NAT one way or another. Are you saying they aren't really on the internet? How can that be as you're reaching them through url's that must be linked to public IP addresses through domain names. I'll soon have my site open like that. I'll have a public domain name and my site will be resolvable across the internet.

Where I work we do the same thing. Our servers sit on lans with private address blocks, yet serve public content accessible by anyone who wants to reach the sites we host. Are our web servers and email servers not really on the internet?

 

you can open every port available, but if i go across the planet and type in the computers IP address (192.168.x.x) i'm gonna get nothing, the computer itself is not using a valid internet IP address. The computers address is 192.168.x.x but i cant get hold of it on that address, its not logically connected to the network named "the internet", it WONT WORK. i have to ask someone else, (yoru NAT server) who does have an address on the internet, who is connected to the network that is the internet, to pass along a message. You have ACCESS TO AND FROM but NOT a DIRECT connection.

its like me and you, i cant talk directly to you, i have to ask the certforum server to store a meesage and pass it along to you when you come to have a look.

i can talk to you, its as good as if i was standing in front of you, but i'm not talking directly to you, i'm talking to cert forums and asking them to pass the message along. i'm not connected to you, i'm connected to cert forums and you are connected to cert forums thus we can speak. but i have no direct connection to you.


Please tell me you at least see what i'm saying here...

 

I do understand your point.

However, TCP/IP and all it's weird and wonderful oddities like NAT/PAT DNS, WINS, IP addresses are all irrelevant. That is purely a means for one computer to talk to another. Who cares whether the IP address is public or private, not I. The salient point is.. can they communicate using the Internet? Yes.. If i am sat at my PC here and can surf the Internet, i am on the Internet. it's as simple as that.

Now, if you are asking. Is my private IP reachable from other computers on the Internet? the answer is no. Internet routers do not route private addresses, for obvious reasons.

NAT is more intelligent than simple port forwarding. The NAT device keeps track of all Internet (external to your local LAN) destination packets from any computer and passes them to the next router in the chain (your ISP usually).. when a reply is recieved from the destination, the NAT device relays it to the appropriate computer on your LAN using it's private IP.

In essence, the Internet traffic transmitted and recieved by a node with a private IP address will be exactly the same as if it had it's own public IP address.

As Freddy is trying to point out, many web servers and mail servers are in DMZs they do not necessarily have reachable public IP addresses and yet they make up what we know as the 'Internet'.

Also many individual web servers can sit on the same IP address, they use host headers to channel the traffic to the correct web server.

The Internet is an Internetwork of computers that can communicate with each other.

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=define:+Internet&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

 

Oh, I get what you're saying, but your understanding of things is incomplete.

You're still not fully getting what I'm saying. NAT in combination with port forwarding allows a computer that has a private IP address to reached directly from a url that has a public domain name through dns.

If I gave you my public IP address you could type it into your browser like this: https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and you would make direct contact with my web server which has no public IP address. When I get a domain set up you'll be able to type a url in your browser and directly reach my web server. You could also ssh directly into my web server if I gave you the IP address, the port number, a password, and a certificate. From there you could ssh into my workstation. Now, if I'm not connected to the internet, just how could you do that? I do it routinely when I'm working out of town. So, when you start telling me I can't communicate directly with my own computers just because my LAN has private IP addresses, well, I just naturally have to disagree with you, because I do it all the time.....

 

ok, lets follow the data path, sending computer > [internet]router>router>router[/internet]>NAT SERVER > Your computer

Notice that every packet sent goes through the NAT server. please tell me you agree here....

next your nat server, decided what computer on yoru internal network to send the data to and sends it, during this stage the data is on yoru internal network, not the internet. do you agree?

thus, after the data passes through the nat server, it puts the data on your internal network, then the data is no longer "on the internet" agree?

Incorrect, if i type your PUBLIC IP address into my computer, i make contact with your NAT server, your nat server then sends you anything i sent to it, you send a reply to yoru NAT server, and yoru NAt server sends the information to me.

Your NAT server takes every bit of data, incoming and outgoing, reads it, decides where to send it, and sends it.

so you give me your Public IP address, i ping it, who responds? not yoru webserver, its whatever device actually has the connection to the internet, whatever device is assigned the public IP address.

or maybe if you read what i have said multiple times, i have NEVER said the transfer of data both ways is not avalible, what i have said is that all teh data moves through the NAT device and therefore after it leaves the nat device it INSIDE YOUR network and no longer on teh internet.

if you dont understand that your internet network, is not part of the internet but you can use a device to pass data in and out of your network onto the internet then we may have to agree to disagree....

 

ManicD,

I guess we just have different definitions of what it means to be on the internet. If my server can be pinged, tracerouted, hacked, and serve content to the internet without it initiating the connection, it's on the internet. If I can ssh into my server directly while on the internet, that ssh server is on the internet. There is no difference in any practical aspect. It's no different than if it was simply behind a firewall.

But, then I suppose you assert that any computer behind a firewall, in a DMZ, behind a load balancer that does NAT, etc... isn't on the internet because when you access them the traffic goes through an intermediary system or two before it reaches the server itself.

Did you know you can't access most web sites directly? They are sitting behind firewalls, behind load balancers, etc.... According to your definition of "on the internet" Google isn't even "on the internet" because they put they put their web servers behind other systems, have their own internal network that their clusters reside on, and you most likely don't really access the machine that actually puts the page you're served together, or feeds you a Google app. There's almost always some intermediary system between you and what generates your content.

Don't know if you've ever seen a BigIP machine but most large sites use something similar to them. They take a request from the internet, translate the IP address using NAT, decide which server is the one that should be used, and send the request to it. You're not even coming close to directly accessing one of the web servers, even though it is serving you content. Like I said, by your definition most sites aren't really on the internet.

 

Freddy's right... if you think a device has to have a public IP address to be "on the Internet", then a majority of Internet sites are not "on the Internet"... nor are the hosts accessing those sites.

 

Remember: The world wide web, is NOT the internet

stop thinking about web sites and document/file access, and think of the network itself. who cares if you can access websites etc, think about what devices are physically attached to what network.

 

Really.... Ignore all the content on the internet and what do you have? Absolutely nothing that more than 99% of internet users would want. That's what makes the internet thrive. It's useless to the general public and most businesses without content. You and I certainly wouldn't be using this site arguing about this if the "internet" wasn't made up of content.

I really don't get your argument. It's made up some kind of semantics which eliminates the entire reason the vast majority of the internet even exists. I guess you have some reason for making such an argument, but I can't see what it is, or that it even makes sense to argue it. If content and usage don't matter, neither the world wide web or the internet, by whatever definition you seem to use to describe it, would exist for anything other than academic institutions and governments. It wouldn't be anything other than it was back in the 70's and very early 80's.

So, keep your private definitions, and the rest of us will use the common definition of what the internet is, and what it consists of.

 

Dude... my computer, which has a private IP address, can connect to the World Wide Web (via HTTP)... AND it can connect to FTP sites, Telnet to routers, use SMTP and POP3 for e-mail, use ICQ for chat, and countless other resources... NONE of which are WWW resources, and ALL of which are "on the Internet".

I can have several segmented private networks on a work network. Does that mean they're not connected? On the contrary, they're quite connected. Sure, they need a router to communicate... but what Internet resource doesn't? You know how many routers (and, for the record, private networks over MPLS) that you're passing through to reach the site you're getting to, even if you have a public IP address?

 

My point was to bring back the original topic of the limits of teh Internet itself, the internet being the main network, not teh documents on it. the network structure of the internet has limits, the world wide web can transfer documents/data(and yes, i know some forms of data exceed this defiition of the www, but in the end its still the content and not the structure) across, into and out of the internet, but it does not change that the internet as a network stops at the device holding the public IP

 

Sorry to throw a potential spanner in the works but what about the physical MAC addresses of the devices. The IP is a logical address really, the MAC is the true address of the device?

Or am I wrong?

 

yes, but the MAC Address has little relevance when talking about the internet as a network.

 

There are plenty of links that work just fine in the Internet world that don't have MAC addresses!

While Ethernet and its siblings are very pervasive not *everything* uses them as the data-link layer!

Harry.

 

Ok in an attempt to stem this a little (or at least make some sense of whats going on) heres my view of your conversation.

If you consider the internet in its basic networking sense then yes you are not connected to the internet from your own pc directly.

The internet is really a group of backbone servers with extremely high speed connections between them (or root servers) these make up the basic frame and supply the first level of communications. These are the first and true internet machines. your own pc is on its internal network and can communicate to each other within thier little world.

Connected to the backbone network would be the service providers that we all love/hate, these provide a connection path from the backbone network to your Nat/firewall/proxy/whatever you use.

You connect your little network to your Nat....(etc).., from there you translate requests and data to the ISP's and then onto the backbone network to another ISP and then onto the target network (be it work, google or whatever - they all still need ISP's in one form or another)

Looked at it this way you can see how the internet is only in essence a connection of networks linked together by a string of ISp's and the backbone (yes im aware it is not quite as simple as this).

However during the internets development and lifecycle our understanding of what we call the internet has changed. Nowadays most people will ignore the fact that it is a backbone - ISP - NAt - Internal network and simply say the internet is whatever you can connect to. In that respect you are also correct in saying that because you can access your home pc (behind your firewall/etc..) from across the world somewhere else it is on the internet.

This is life, things change our understanding and definitions change, both of you are correct in what your are saying and both of you are slightly wrong

Well that was a waffle wasnt it, hopefully that helps a little or at least provides a talking point
Me personally i take both views and can see both argumetns (no im not deliberatly sitting on the fence) and i think of the internet in both ways, simply because thats the way my head works. I look at the basic low level connectivity and then addon the higher level application (OSI anyone?)factors.

 

I do feel like noting, i have been trying to say EXACTLY this all a long!!!!!

 

I know im not having a go or putting you down but i was simply trying to put both side of the argument into a single post.

 

Ask anyone what the internet is, and they will say the WWW or e-mail or online shopping, or any other services they access such as VPN access to a work network. This is the internet. Just like it was in the early days of the US military network, when it consisted of those establishments' networks along with the networks of associated universities where military research was carried out.

This is because the word 'internet' is short for 'internetwork', which means a collection of computer networks which are themselves connected together, via routers (originally known as 'intermediate systems'). In order for computers to communicate within an internetwork a protocol is needed which can identify uniquely any computer in the internetwork, and this means identifying both the network it resides on, and the particular computer within that network, and this is what the IP protocol achieves. It is not the ONLY protocol which is used in an internetwork - many others are vitally important too, such as Ethernet, DHCP, DNS, ARP, and all the various application layer protocols such as HTTP, POP3, SMTP, and Telnet.

There are in fact a myriad of protocols and technologies that together provide what people regard as being the 'internet' and IP is just one of those.

In your orginal post you have described the limits of the address spaces provided by IPv4 and IPv6, drawing some interesting comparisons with the number of stars in the universe and so on. However you cannot just quantify the internet in such simple terms, nor delineate its boundaries in such a simplistic fashion, as the reality is that it is a good deal more complicated than a mere global addressing scheme.

As has already been said, if someone types in a web URL and accesses a web server on private network which is behind a NAT/PAT router, then this web server IS on the internet, even though it has no public IP address. To say it isn't is to just play around with words and semantics.

Re the original question you were asked, I think that what people were interested in was the information storage capacity of the internet. For example the British Library in London stores so many books, but how much more can the internet store by comparison - a million times more, or a billion times more, or even more than this ?

And bandwidth DOES matter, as insufficient bandwidth renders the information inaccessible, and therefore of no use to anyone.

The internet does NOT stop there, but public IPv4 addresses DO. If you do a search and replace of the word 'internet' with the words 'public IPv4 address space' in what you are saying, then it may begin to make more sense!