IPv4 Address Crunch In 2 Years, IPv6 Not Ready

An anonymous reader writes "We've known for ages that IPv4 was going to run out of addresses — now, it's happening. IPv6 was going to save us — it isn't. The upcoming crisis will hit, perhaps as soon as 2010, but nobody can agree on what to do. The three options are all pretty scary. This article covers the background, and links to a presentation by Randy Bush (PDF) that shows the reality of the problem in stark detail."

Well duh

It's not hard to figure out why we haven't solved this problem. It costs MORE to fix it now than it does to wait.

So just wait until it costs more to live with IPv4 than to migrate to new systems. Then EVERYONE will be working on a solution.

Re:Well duh

It's not hard to figure out why we haven't solved this problem. It costs MORE to fix it now than it does to wait.

So just wait until it costs more to live with IPv4 than to migrate to new systems. Then EVERYONE will be working on a solution.

This is true of technology in general. Government and industry debate global warming and peak oil but do very little to actually address the issue since it costs so much to implement solutions. The IPv4 issue is daunting to be sure, so it's no surprise that IPv6 progressed so slowly. I did a quick search back to 2000 on Google News and industry and tech journals were shouting warnings even back then. So eight years later there is no solution.

The problem will be fixed when the p0rn sites can't get new IP addresses. The adult entertainment industry has driven many of the Internet and web innovations in the past (streaming video, credit card processing) and they'll likely lead us into a bright new future of unlimited Internet addresses. :)

Re:Well duh

This is true of technology in general. Government and industry debate global warming and peak oil but do very little to actually address the issue since it costs so much to implement solutions.

Society is not an amorphous blob with a clear will and an appreciation of its own good. Society is made up by people, and what the decision makers think is "good" is not necessarily good for society; both because the decision makers might be wrong, and because their own interests may be different from those of society (you don't get to be president because you're Joe Average from Missouri).

In the case of Ipv4, as in the one of energy, the interest of society is to fix the problem. The interest of the decision makers, however, is not to fix it, because they are now sitting on a critical asset that is always in demand and that is getting increasingly scarce, and therefore more expensive. The near-disaster scenario is in their interest, because that way they will maximise their returns. It's like the owner of an oasis in the Sahara: rain and rivers would be bad for business, drought is more people depending on you.

I would expect China or India to come up with a solution first: they don't have many IP addresses to begin with, they have growing economies that will sooner or later require more IP addresses, and they have the means to kickstart a major project.

Re:Well duh

That sounds like an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" argument to me. Which in fine and good for simpler technologies, but can be disastrous for more modern technologies. Just think what would happen if you didn't change your car's oil until the car simply refused to run. What would happen if we all decided not to curb our oil consumption habits until we either ran completely out of oil reserves. You see its the shortsightedness that in the long run costs you WAY MORE than if you simply keep the options in mind and work towards a solution.

So in two years when they can't add any more addresses, the only ones to blame will be those who stuck they feet in the mud and wouldn't budge. Besides, they can always just start taking away all those spam sites that offer no real content and just distribute those to other who actually need them, I'm sure there's at least another 2 years worth of those.

Re:Well duh

Besides, they can always just start taking away all those spam sites that offer no real content and just distribute those to other

Actually, the spammers/phishers are already doing their utmost to stop eating new IPv4 addresses, and conserve them by using existing IPs of random Windows boxes. See, who's the bad guys now?

Re:Well duh

It's not hard to figure out why we haven't solved this problem. It costs MORE to fix it now than it does to wait. So just wait until it costs more to live with IPv4 than to migrate to new systems. Then EVERYONE will be working on a solution.

On the other hand, some people will wait until the last minute and then spend time and energy towards solutions that might have spent towards other things had a more gradual migration takes place.

In fact, the looming IPv4 address crunch reminds me a little bit of the Y2K issue. Maybe some journalists will start presenting it to the public as a countdown to doomsday? We could have manuals like Hyatt's old The Y2K Personal Survival Guide [amazon.com] telling us how to stock up on food and generator fuel for when civilization ends due to the sudden lack of new IP addresses. There would be religious figures and conspiracy theorists claiming that the Antichrist/UN/black helicopters/NWO will take advance of the chaos surrounding the IPv4 address crunch to institute their reign of fear. It'll be like 1999 all over again.

Re:Well duh

The problem is that Y2K was handled so well, and as a result the consequences of it were so ridiculously minor, that most people in the general public feel that it was all overblown hype. Yes, there was a lot of hype, but the fact is a lot of programmers worked a long time to make sure things that needed to be fixed got fixed.

However, since most people feel that Y2K was overblown and the money spent on it was wasted, they're unlikely to take seriously any new "crisis" in IT, and will simply refuse to spend any money on it.

Re:Well duh

Absolutely, reminds me of an old joke:

• Visitor: If there's quicksand in this part near the town why don't you put up a sign?!
• Man: We did, but nobody was falling in so we thought it was useless.

Ha ha.

Re:Well duh

It's time for a new breed of man. One who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty, but can also wash them when it's time to meet the management. Someone who can make time to shower and shave every morning. Someone who's novelty geek mug will be understood by even those who think that having spyware makes them a secret agent. Ladies and - oh wait, scratch that. *ahem* Gentlemen! Today I introduce a new template class - the Geexecutive! Get implementing!

Dupe

Here is the story from a few weeks ago [slashdot.org]

And as I said before, the solution is to take back some of those huge class A blocks from companies like HP, Ford and GE, which are not using all the space. That would buy a few years.

Re:Dupe

RTFA - which says

... there are ideas for managing the address space more efficiently by introducing auction and other pricing mechanisms to encourage better use (people who don't need their allocation will flog them off rather than hoarding them, while new uses will be parsimonious in their approach), but the developing world sees this as unfair in the extreme. You can see their point.

There are other problems: how do you route IP addresses when the existing hierarchy breaks down due to address spaces moving through the network? Who's responsible for managing an increasingly incoherent network? Who foots the bill when your address space is sold from underneath you? In any case, it doesn't solve the basic problem - it merely makes it increasingly expensive to innovate.

so it's not quite that easy...

Re:Dupe

And we need to retrieve some from the Vatican as well!

Looking at the information here [modernlife...bish.co.uk] then the Vatican has far too many IPs per capita. Ditto for the other tiny nations of Gibralta and Monaco. I'm sure it'll buy us at least a week!

And for anyone geeky enough to care (who isn't geeky enough to have it bookmarked already) here [iana.org] is the assignment list. Each of the companies mentioned owns an entire top level block (e.g. Ford own 19.xxx.xxx.xxx) and some like the Defense Information Systems Agency (whoever they are) own multiple blocks! That's an awful lot of addresses.

Re:Dupe

This [xkcd.com] is a much prettier depiction

And?

That is one way to do it, keep patching it up and hope it becomes somebodies elses problem.

The problem is simple, the way we want to use the internet means we are getting more and more devices which desire their own internet adress. Some people suggest solutions like NAT but these only have so many uses especially when mobile phones become internet capable. If you want your internet node to be independent then you need an ip adress.

Don't believe me? Fine, give up your internet connection with its own IP and use the NAT solution of your ISP. Good luck running a torrent.

We could easily solve the entire problem if we just used NAT for every major ISP. It would free up countless adresses and keep IP4 usuable for decades rather then years.

So who is first? Who is going to give up their IP for their home for the greater good?

Thought as much, absolutly nobody.

It is the problem with humans, we don't want new power installations, we don't want to use less power and we refuse to switch to more economical appliances. Something has to give, but goverment or business is NOT going to do it. Sooner or later it just breaks down (see the LA brownouts) and finally a decission will have to be made.

Same with a solution to IP4 limited adress space. We will keep coming up with patches and ignore the problem until finally it can no longer be ignored and then we will have to really bite down to implement it at great cost and inconvenience when we could have solved it easily right now.

Because lets be honest, it ain't all that much of a problem. In the EU we switched currencies. A hell of a job but because it became accepted that it had to be done, it just happened.

We could easily do a switch to IP6 but only when the majority just accepts that it has to be done, and bites the bullet.

Analog mobile phones no longer work in the US, holland no longer airs analog tv signals, switches happen all the time. It is nothing special, but in each case somebody just had to say "we are switching and if you are not ready, though".

So what if countless devices will no longer work, at a given point you just have to be able to say "upgrade or be left behind" or you will be forced to increasinly bend over backwards to accomadate out of date tech.

simple: ip cohabitation

i'm sharing my blog ip address with a porn site dedicated to a fetish for women with moustaches, some guy's home security system in hong kong, a government bureaucrat's cell phone in helsinki, and an email server for a truck dispatching company waco texas

i think it's also a pretty good premise for a reality show or situation comedy

Just buy a cheap SOHO router

And put China behind it. IPv4 addresses, plenty. Botnet problem, solved.

Time for the Government(s)?

One thing is rather clear to me: We won't run out of IPv4 addresses anytime soon, instead the price will increase more and more and thus people will end up behind ISP enforced NATs, because IPs are to expensive for the average consumer. This is after all already the case, at least in part, static IPs are a premium service, not something you get for free from most ISPs.

So how to fix this? How about some good old government regulation? If you want to provide a "Internet service", you have to provide IPv6 or you can't call it "Internet". With a little force it shouldn't take all that long till the switch to IPv6 is done. But unless that happens the rarity of IPv4 addresses will simply be seen as a nice way to make money, instead of a problem that needs to be fixed.

Re:Time for the Government(s)?

Or just ban porn sites from using IPv4. Everyone's happy then: Think of the Children types will have porn apparently banned, techies will see IPv6 adopted widely, and civil liberties types will have porn available if they want it.

America Will reign supreme!

America will then become the Saudi Arabia of ip addresses. Price of oil will drop to something 200,000,000 barrels for one address. Woot!

People are starting to work on solutions

The basic solution to this problem is to deploy IPv6 as soon as you can, figure out what problems remain to be solved before you can use IPv6 100% and then put pressure on your ISPs, vendors, etc. to solve these problems. That's how the Internet grew like topsy in the first place, and its not too late to get this going. Two to three years is enough time.

ARIN has published a web site which collects information about how to move to IPv6 here: http://www.getipv6.info/ [getipv6.info]
It's oriented towards the things that ISPs and other service providers (hosting centers, large IT depts) need to do to get IPv6 working in production.

Soon, the stock market analysts will be asking the big ISPs and telecom companies what actions they are taking to avoid going bankrupt in two years when the crunch hits. Any company that can't get new IPv4 addresses will have to stop growing their IPv4 networks. If they have an IPv6 network to take up the slack, no problem. If not, then customers will flock to the providers that have IPv6 ready to roll.

There was a network operator meeting at NANOG recently where they showed that it is almost possible to provide full Internet access, both IPv4 and IPV6, using an IPv6 connection. Yes, I know, "almost" means there were problems, but they were not massive problems. They were the kind of things that people were working on fixing with IPv4 networks back in the early 90's. And they did that because they went ahead and built IPv4 networks and tried to make them work for everything imaginable. When things broke, they fixed the bugs and moved on, eventually becoming the global Internet that we know today.

There is a way to avoid going bust when the address crunch hits in two-to-three years and that is: Get yourself IPv6 Ready!

Not compatible, not happening

DJB said it best at http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html [cr.yp.to] Why switch from an Internet with a billion people on it to one that has nobody on it that can't be reached by IPv4?

Three Things for Widespread IPV6 Acceptance:

1. Home routers that support IPV6 off the shelf.

2. Cable/DSL modems that support IPV6 off the shelf.

3. (The biggie) ISPs that hand out IPV6 addresses.

In a vain attempt to forestall the inevitable followups:

Yes, I am aware that I could install new software in my WRT-54G, and convert my home network to IPV6. But as long as my upstream connection is IPV4, this gains me NOTHING except a bunch of aggravation and downtime getting the thing set up. No thanks. When my ISP supports IPV6, then and only then will it make sense for me to convert.

Is this REALLY a problem?

Is this really a problem for most people? NAT really.

Re:Is this REALLY a problem?

Except you can't NAT a NATted connection.

Sure you can.

Re:Is this REALLY a problem?

Last I heard, two NATted clients can't talk to each other.

Unless you have port forwarding (or how do you kids call it these days)