IPv4 Unallocated Addresses Exhausted by 2010 419
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica is reporting on how the unallocated IPv4 address pool could run out as soon as 2010. The IPv4 Address Report gives details on just how fast the available pool of IPv4 addresses is diminishing. Will ISPs be moving towards IPv6 any time soon? Or will IPv4 exhaustion become the next Y2K?"
From TFA: free pr0n! (Score:5, Interesting)
Is IPv6 so unappealing that they've gotta bribe people with pr0n to use it?
Reshuffle existing IPv4 space (Score:5, Interesting)
this is like one of those end of the world..... (Score:1, Interesting)
every year there is a new nutter predicting the end of the world. Havent we heard of this argument before? Would it be a good idea to take ownership of those class A spaces that quite a few companies are hoarding??
Re:Why IP6? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why not just fix the problem outright if you are going to do that?
uh, what? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're going to force all that change, then change to something that isn't a silly half-arsed hackjob.
Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space (Score:5, Interesting)
Class A blocks were one of the benefits of being a Internet pioneer. Why should they give them up?
Re:From TFA: free pr0n! (Score:5, Interesting)
IPv6 doesn't force you to give up any privacy, and there's no 'user serialization' unless you buy into it voluntarily.
Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space (Score:5, Interesting)
Even as someone who doesn't think of Microsoft as an Internet pioneer, I'd rather MS owns this block than Halliburton.
Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't complain about Apple. HP has all of 15.x.x.x and all of 16.x.x.x, because they purchased DEC who also had a class-A.
Interestingly, HP is the only company that effectively has a
IPv6 is already here. Been here for awhile (Score:5, Interesting)
The advantage comes when you consider management. In order to have 20 SSH/FTP/etc accessible Internet servers, I'd either need 20 separate IPv4 addresses (getting a decent segment of a class C here is expensive), or I'd have to play fun games with ports. All our technicians have IPv6 on their laptops, and use tunnel brokers for access to the v6 network.
Most of our clients have IPv6 connectivity, though they don't notice it. When we put in a firewall, IPv6 comes default setup with tunnel brokers.
People keep asking, when's there gonna be v6 content? There is no v6 content (ok, their is full colour ascii starwars). Any content provider would be nuts to say "you have to have v6 to see our content" at this point (with the exception of mobile phones). IT Techs brought v4 to the public, we'll bring v6 to the public. Its technicians like myself who appreciate having an Internet accessible toaster (ok, so its not yet accessible) that have already started the ball rolling.
Before long you'll see hosting providers saying, you can have one web gateway shared v4 address and a
Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space (Score:4, Interesting)
Easy way to speed IPv6 Adoption (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I've worked with ARIN to get/manage/return blocks of IPs for years.
Re:IPv6 is already here. Been here for awhile (Score:3, Interesting)
The issue with this is that IP was designed so that each device has one IP address. When you visit google, you go to http://www.google.com/ [google.com], not http://www.google.com:81/ [google.com] (I tried to use :80 here, but slash removed it, so I'm using 81). So if I wanted my toaster and fridge to be accessible, to browser to their respective webpages, I'd have two choices; http://myhouse.example.com:81/ [example.com] http://myhouse.example.com:82/ [example.com] etc etc, or use a reverse proxy and use http://myhouse.example.com/toaster [example.com].
And how do you remember which port is the toaster, and which is the fridge? If you want to SSH into them, you can't even use a reverse web proxy. At that point, if I was forced to use IPv4, I'd setup a PPTP VPN and route it using 10.0.0.0/8 address range.
So no, I choose to make my toaster accessible via IPv6, and if you are forced to use v4, you can still access the basic webpage with http://myhouse.example.com/toaster [example.com]. Hmmm.. I'm hungry, I think I wanted slightly burnt bread.
This just in. (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously it's all just FUD, There's an expiration date, but 2010? What happens when we make a few Class As into Class Bs? oh that's right, more time. I think the key is to figure out how to make the best "IPv6" and a way to make it so my old commodore 64 is willing to work with it (whether that be ISP level conversion or a inexpensive hub, note INEXPENSIVE)
Do I have a commodore 64? Not any more but the point remains there's literally a million devices out there only able to communicate with IPv4. There's actually a million people out there not willing to go through the hassle of going to IPv6 (and probably about that many who are unwilling to change) and if the way they are pushing to get people to switch with FUD like this, I'm guessing it's more than a couple million who don't want IPv6, so it's time to ask ourselves, how can we make IPv6 more attractive than staying with IPv4, and implement these ideas. IPv6 will likely overtake v4 one day, but come on, let's find a way to make people switch rather then just wait for it to happen.
Its not addresses but routes thats the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Going to IPv6 doesn't fix the fact that routers are running out of routes. This problem will get plenty of attention in about 2 months when the big Cisco routers start to dump routes because they are too big and adding IPv6 only makes the problem much worse.
Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space (Score:3, Interesting)
This just goes to prove your ignorance. There were several times when routers were only _barely_ able to stay ahead of the table growth- and in many cases routers did have to be upgraded.
The routing table has been stable for a while and growth has been very small- mostly due to sensible allocation strategies. Suddenly splitting up existing allocations would cause far more harm than good- plain and simple.
At the time there was also serious concern that a million names in com would break the entire net. Now there's about, what 40 million com names? My email and webpages still seem to work.
I think you mean 70 million. That said- there was concern- questions about whether it could handle the growth- not widespread agreement that it wouldn't work. And the reason it does work is because of incredible infrastructure investments to allow it to work- money spent on GTLD servers, big pipes, multiple datacenters and large anycast groups, etc.
I'm supposed to sweat a 25% increase? What happened to the credo of scalability? 25% and it's the death of the net predicted? Please.
I don't care what you sweat- the recent router crashes in Japan were likely the result of insufficient capacity in the routers- and you want to just increase the table size by 25%? Get real.
ARIN gets paid for V6 allocations. I'd love to see the accounting for taking something from some company for free then resellng it for boucoup bucks.
ARIN gets paid for v6 and v4 allocations. A
Exactly how many routers do you run with a full table- and what models are they?
-sirket
No, it was about Music Piracy! (Score:5, Interesting)
But if you talked to @Home's people as individuals rather than Corporate Employees, almost all of them would say "Well, Duh! Napster is the reason that people are *buying* broadband internet connections, of *course* we like it."
And, ok, the paranoia about servers on home cable modems was partly because their early trial equipment didn't work very well and they had no way to regulate individual upstream bandwidth usage, and PacBell's dishonest "Cable Modem Web Hog" ads made them really worried about perceptions of slow performance, but they were worried that somebody would run a pr0n webserver from home, become Cool Site of the Day because doing that on cable modem would be cool, and trash their neighborhood's network performance while causing a lot of publicity. And unfortunately most of the cable companies have not only not recovered from that attitude, they've been propagating it to the DSL providers, and they've been learning other cluelessly paranoid attitudes from the Australian ex-monopoly who thinks you should cap the total monthly download of their users (since that used to be expensive in Oz), and cap it to a ridiculously low level like 1GB/month, which is like 1.5 days of continuous 56kbps usage.
But when I had my corporate hat on, especially if I was talking to non-California customers, it was certainly much more proper to talk about the big internet usage being for music piracy than for pr0n
Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why MIT, Apple, DEC, IBM, and lots of other big companies were given Class A's. It wasn't just a "thanks for playing" reward, it was because the original design for the IP system required Class A blocks if you wanted to run big networks: if you had a big organization, you needed a Class A, in order to do multiple levels of subnetting.
When you look at the IP allocations and see GE or DEC's Class A blocks, it seems ridiculous. But you have to understand that when those allocations were made, what they were looking at was less the number of actual host IPs in the block (which is what we care about now) but the number of Class B and C subnet blocks that were inside. Put yourself in the shoes of someone at a big company like IBM or GE, with lots of regional offices. Each region/office needs to have a network, with its own subnets (for each department or whatever). That's how they were laying things out. "IBM" as an organization gets a Class A. Each regional office or some other division, Class B. Each network or further subdivision, Class C. Yeah, you end up with a lot of wasted capacity, but this whole scheme was designed back when a "host" was a PDP or VAX; there just weren't enough of them for it to seem like a major issue.
The problem people sometimes refer to when they talk about "the last time we were running out of IPs" (back in the early 90s) wasn't really a shortage of IPs at all (well, at least not immediately, although people were definitely realizing it was going to be a problem), it was a shortage of Class B and C subnet blocks. (Particularly Class B's, since that's what medium-size businesses and
So that's when CIDR was introduced, and it ended the whole 'Classed Network' concept (A, B, and C classes) and replaced it with the now-familiar bitwise/subnet-mask format. (E.g., IBM's Class A block is 9.0.0.0/8, Apple's is 17.0.0.0/8, etc.) This, along with prefix aggregation, allowed more efficient address allocation, and kept the routing tables from growing out of control. Now that you can subnet at the bit level, rather than at the Class level, those A Blocks seem huge. But keep in mind that before CIDR, each of those A Blocks was looked at, not as 16M hosts, but as 254 subnetworks.
It's only in retrospect, with the help of a bunch of new technologies, that the allocations made back in the Internet's early years look ridiculous.
NetApp will confirm it (Score:1, Interesting)
For many (if not every) coredump, 90% of the web pages were porn. I kid you not. If you dont believe me, just go ask Guy Harris (yes, of Ethereal/Wireshark and other fame) as he was one of the top kernel debuggers back then.
This was truly depressing for someone who has spent much of his working life building up the Internet, from the protocols, to various UNIX OS's as well as other stuff. Yes folks, the major use of the Net is Porn. NetApp confirms it.
Sigh.
Re:From TFA: free pr0n! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:VoIp Everything (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:TCP/IP 101 (Score:2, Interesting)
Frankly, that sounds like more engineering work than switching to IPv6.
Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space (Score:3, Interesting)
Go into any Apple store and fire up your Wifi, and you'll get a non-NATed 17.x.x.x address. There is a firewall, but other than that, its exactly what the internet is supposed to be.
Since Apple has very little of their infrastructure behind NAT, they have very few problems with things like NAT traversal, or buggy VoIP systems.
the AC
Re:Easy way to speed IPv6 Adoption (Score:4, Interesting)
I know you came up with this on your own, because great minds think alike. This was my suggestion a few years ago in some other IPv6 thread. It was a good idea then, and still a good idea now. Maybe, once
The whole of the OSTG would gain a lot of knowledge in migrating servers to dual stack, which would give the programmers very valuable skills they could exploit for a few years.
the AC
Yes, I've been on IPv6 natively since 2000, isn't it obvious?
Why not just not create multiple internets (Score:3, Interesting)
create multiple internets, one per country lets say. Everyone
gets to keep their existing internet address. Its just encapsulated
within a country network.
In order to get to country A address B.B.B.B you have to use
a route. Each ISP would have a special router address that would
send packets to that country accross a "dedidcated" connection. Your
computer would know that when DNS assigns a "zip" for a particular
connection, it locks the routing for those packets to go out via
the local ISP dedicated router address.
Your computer knows what router to use because it got the "zip code"
for that route when it did the DNS lookup.
Yes, I realize there would be problems. But perhaps less problems then
with IPv6 adoption?
This is moving to a hierarchial model. And the extra address space
comes from the routing tables.
Its just an idea. Please be kind.