Microsoft Runs Out of US Address Space For Azure, Taps Its Global IPv4 Stock 250
alphadogg (971356) writes "Microsoft has been forced to start using its global stock of IPv4 addresses to keep its Azure cloud service afloat in the U.S., highlighting the growing importance of making the shift to IP version 6. The newer version of the Internet Protocol adds an almost inexhaustible number of addresses thanks to a 128-bit long address field, compared to the 32 bits used by version 4. The IPv4 address space has been fully assigned in the U.S., meaning there are no additional addresses available, Microsoft said in a blog post earlier this week. This requires the company to use the IPv4 address space available to it globally for new services, it said."
So after years of panic... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So after years of panic... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: So after years of panic... (Score:2)
Re:So after years of panic... (Score:5, Funny)
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While one IP address is all a house needs when NAT is available... you're essentially creating a 56-bit IP+NAT address for each device in your house. The IP address indicating which wire in the city the connection goes to, and the NAT address indicating which machine on the house needs.
But datacenter customers want their service to have an IP address that's strictly theirs... and if every person has an apartment and a server somewhere, you see where this is going.
Re:So after years of panic... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, having 2^128 addresses will make routing so much simpler.
Indeed, it will. All IPv6 addresses are regional. There won't be any subnets split across continents.
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By comparison, with IPv6 it's easy to get ONE large allocation to cover all the needs of an organization. It's not unusual for a small ISP to announce 10-15 IPv4 prefixes and just one IPv6 prefix.
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I say we adopt it now. And work out all the problems with IPv8.
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Re:So after years of panic... (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain
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I think IPv6 is pretty good, not perfect but not bad. We go back to a world where everyone has plenty of IPs and we design networks in a way which ties Level 3 and Level 2 closer together. Yeah I think we could consider those alternatives even if we weren't running out of IPs. The change would likely be too expensive which is why the emergency is driving the other useful features.
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That's a good point. Terrible policy IMHO. The first 64 bits of an IPv6 addresses should correspond to physical fiber and physical routers. Customers shouldn't have any right to IP continuity that should be under the control of carriers and ISP. DNS should be the lookup for customers.
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I'd drop the the "so it doesn't fit everyone". Devices shouldn't be reached by their IP address they should be registering their location as they move to a static device(s) if they need to get push information. If they don't need to get they they just conduct a transaction. The same way today that applications don't use ARP, even though ARP is part of the physica
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There are still plenty of IP, but so many companys just buy them up and sit on them like they are a old childrens toys that need to be preserved in a box to keep value.
Lets face it, these company's are hoping to make money on them when the demand is high, its just a typical move in a oligarchy
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Well 44.0.0.0/8 is entirely allocated for amateur radio use, so it's a slightly different situation. It was allocated back when IPs were given away willy-nilly and is so randomly utilized that condensing the space and recovering any of it would be an interesting proposition.
Packet radio is so niche that that particular subnet will probably never even get close to full, so there's no harm in you still having your chunk.
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Re:So after years of panic... (Score:5, Funny)
I think the headline was meant to point out that people are actually using azure...
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OR (Score:5, Interesting)
OR they could migrate those services to IPv6??
Considering how much bashing MS gets for not being a leader, this would have made a really good opportunity for them.
(I hate it when people say they're doing something because they were "forced" or "had no choice", when in reality, they had aa choice, they made a choice, and now don't want to take ownership of the outcome)
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OR they could migrate those services to IPv6??
No. Most of the world are not on IPv6 yet. My ISP has only started making it available, and the (global) company I work does not even have a plan for IPv6.
Re:OR (Score:5, Informative)
At the top level the major transit networks support IPv6 and most of them have for years.
At the bottom level the end devices mostly support IPv6 though XP systems (which are still scarilly common) have it disabled by default
The problem comes in the middle, access providers and corporate network operators need to do the work to give the IPv6 capable devices they and their customers own access to the IPv6 internet. Many of them don't see doing so as a priority.
MS implemented a protocol called teredo to work arround this but it's fragile because it fights nat rather than working with it. It's also disabled by default on networks where a domain controller is detected (presumablly because MS didn't want to be accused of subverting corporate firewalls).
Most operating systems will preffer IPv6 when a native v6 connection is available and yet the ipv6 traffic as reported by the likes of google is in the single digit percentages.
Unfortunately I'm struggling to find good stats on how many users can access v6 only resources even though they preffer v4. Test-ipv6 has some stats but I don't consider them representitive of normal users. I remember seeing some stats a while back that said it was about half but I don't remember where
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About 3.5% of Google's [google.com] traffic is IPv6. This is more than double what it was last year at this time. If the grow continues on this curve we will be at 10% within a year and a half. This sort of traffic is more than enough for sites to enable IPv6.
If you can enable IPv6 at home over 50% of typical home usage is IPv6 (Google and FaceBook). There is no reason for Consumer ISP's to not enable IPv6 as there is enough volume to make it worthwhile.
Mod parent up (Score:2)
Very interesting graph! The increase seems to be pretty exponential, though perhaps a bit more linear at the very end? As you say 3.5% is already a significant number, so hopefully this will put a damper on the sale of ipv4-only home routers.
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OR they could migrate those services to IPv6??
The last estimates I saw were that 50% of users were unable to access ipv6 only services. Many of the 50% who can will be using a fragile tunneling protocol that fights nat rather than working with it.
So services that need to be accessible to the general public need to be accessible on IPv4.
(I hate it when people say they're doing something because they were "forced" or "had no choice", when in reality, they had aa choice, they made a choice, and now don't want to take ownership of the outcome)
Of course sometimes there are no good choices, a growing hosting provider with an address shortage has to choose between grubbing together ipv4 addresses from whereever they can (causing routing table fragmentation, inna
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Yes, technically they could go v6 only and then listen to the crickets chirping because way too many potential users are v4 only, but that's not an especially good answer.
Can't migrate just yet (Score:2)
Migrating those services would mean shutting off IPv4.
That would mean that every customer that would want to access these services, would have to have IPv6 connectivity. If anything, MicroSoft should encourage their customers to get IPv6 connected, so they can eventually shut off the IPv4 connectivity for their services.
Given the time frame they'll have to observe for their Enterprise customers, an announcement to do the shut down would have to be at least 3 years prior to the shut down date. They can't g
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From an iPhone on AT&T IPv6 does not work. Neither does it work on my Uverse connection.
Hell from most ISP's in North America that test doesn't work, because ISP's are so blindingly slow at upgrading that it'll be 2020 before they get around to implementing it on the home end. My ISP is Teksavvy, they have ipv6 on DSL, and are still waiting for rogers, cogeco, videotron who they use for the last mile service to get their act together.
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It doesn't help that IPv6 doesn't play nicely with dynamic address assignment, which is of course how ISPs generally hand out addresses to home users. If you aren't using NAT (which has all the usual problems) then anytime your IP prefix changes all the devices in your house have to change addresses. So, no more mapping a network printer using just its IP, and I've yet to see a DNS implementation that easily handles IPv6 prefix changes.
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It doesn't help that IPv6 doesn't play nicely with dynamic address assignment ... So, no more mapping a network printer using just its IP
The prefixes won't change that often. (years.. decades?)
But if you're that paranoid, use the FE80 link-local address. That will never change.
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Alas, the site is down and whois shows that the registration has expired. However, test-ipv6.com [test-ipv6.com] is up and running if you need it.
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From an iPhone on AT&T IPv6 does not work. Neither does it work on my Uverse connection.
That's the fault of the connection, however, and not the iPhone. iOS if fully IPv6 compatible; I take advantage of it all the time. I even wrote an IPv6 test utility for iOS a few years ago. You just need a WiFi router with autoconf advertising IPv6 routes, an you're all set.
The fact that all too many North American ISPs still haven't got their IPv6 implementations in play is the real story here. Computers and most smart phones are ready to connect -- they just need the ISP support to do it.
Yaz
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You are right about last mile. The carriers are working on last mile issues. I suspect the scarcity will create the incentives as the carriers want to free up blocks to sell off addresses.
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Offer a discount for services that are willing to use v6-only. If you're hosting some back-end services in Azure, you can use v6. If it's something for only accessing within your organisation then you can possibly use v6, depending on your local connectivity. If it's something for the public then you can probably make a certain percentage of the servers v6-only and send customers with working v6 there (does Windows still set up v6 tunnels by default?).
If companies start to pay less for v6-only hosting
Move to IPv6? (Score:2)
or making certain features v6-only to penalise ISPs that don't provide v6 connectivity by making their customers complain.
"IPv6 is scheduled for testing in 2017. If you want it sooner, we don't have to care; we're the phone company." How many people are willing to move their family or their business from a city without an IPv6 capable cable, DSL or fiber ISP to one with one?
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As for taking back IPv4 addresses, that has to be the most ludicrous thing I have heard.
Personally, I think it is a great idea. Leave ISPs enough that all their static IP customers can have an IP address, but otherwise take away all dynamic IPv4 addresses. Leave IPv4 addresses for the server/commercial community for now, and make sure IPv6->IPv4 tunnelling is available. Once all the customers are on IPv6, then it makes economic sense for commercial users to switch/go dual stack.
Trying to get companies to shell out money for a service their customers can't even connect to is just going to
IP numbers are terrible (Score:2)
They're only really memorable to computers. Which is fine as far as it goes but IP4 addresses were something you could sorta remember if you dealt with the same number over and over again.
Obviously for internal networks there's no need for IP6. But even beyond that... I wonder if we couldn't improve on the DNS system so that we could assign names to IP addresses differently.
I don't know... something so we never have to work with the IP6 numbers which are so large and random that a human being really has no
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Work with them for a bit assign them in a sensible manner. Been using IPv6 for a long time you remember your prefix fairly easily. I've got the ipv4 address of all my servers coded into the ipv6 address in human readable format. So I just go 2001:abcd:1234:5678::10:10:20:53 for 10.10.20.53. I do not work with desktops or "random" dhcp everything has consistent IP's.
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Because, for 90% of business, the only guy who needs to care about the IP address is the IT department.
And they rarely deal with IP addresses and when they do it's mostly copy/paste from some spreadsheet or management program.
Nobody cares what the IP is, nobody memorises what the IP is (maybe fleetingly to type it in somewhere else, but pretty much that's a one-time thing. DHCP takes away all internal IP management apart from the occasional fixed static which is no worse than having asset numbers (which yo
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part of my sentiment is based on a long experience with automatic systems failing to find network assets unless they're set to static IPs. To that end, every time I run into this problem I just set the machine to static and then have every system that needs to find it link directly to that IP bypassing lookup.
I appreciate that the lookup works in many situations but often it does not.
The most consistent culprits are network printers. On initial installation they always work just fine. But give them a few mo
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How is it annoying. You have basically an address like
Your global location::printer identifier:printer number
Much easier than v4 if you want meaningful addresses. You have so much space you don't have to be random.
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If you control the network then one option is to use IPv6 addresess that are not so large and random. In particular avoiding autoconfiguration based on mac addresses or ramdom numbers and assigning addresses manually in the conventional way (possiblly to match the machines v4 address)
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I really don't get what your post is about. Only very specific situations require you to actually use IP (4 or 6) numbers. We've had DNS for decades and mDNS for a long time as well. You only need to work with dns when initially configuring network devices (eg: routers) or DNS servers themselves. No other scenario should require that you use IP numbers.
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I understand dynamic networking... what you don't understand is that those systems often don't work or develop bugs.
A static route bypasses the lookup routines. I can't tell you how many systems were set up to use dynamic lookups... worked just fine for a couple months... and then either became unreliable or stopped functioning altogether. The only thing that seems to work long term is a static route. When we do that... there are no problems basically ever again.
It's never... (Score:4, Funny)
It's never to late to procrastinate.
Global Warming and IP Address Exhaustion (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the deniers are the same people, with the same arguments.
It's easy to spot the people who don't know what they're talking about. Over the last few days:
1) Just re-assign multicast!
2) Hey, they don't appear to be using those addresses, let's take those!
3) Double/Triple-NAT is good enough for me and everyone else!
4) Let's give out one IP address to everyone and we'll be set for awhile!
5) Let's make a new protocol!
6) IPv6 addresses are too big to remember!
7) You just need to sell it better!
All of those show fundamental misunderstandings about networking. And that part is OK. The problem is that people think they know about flying a plane because they've flown a paper airplane.
Calm down people. Stop trying to barge into the cockpit.
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1) Just re-assign multicast!
Silly, and amusing, but possible. :)
2) Hey, they don't appear to be using those addresses, let's take those!
Very valid. There is a /8 assigned to packet radio operation... Not common, and not often connected to the actual Internet anymore. Oh, and not paid for at all.
3) Double/Triple-NAT is good enough for me and everyone else!
I am with you here. Especially that nasty NAT abomination in 2Wire routers "DMZ Plus Mode."
4) Let's give out one IP address to everyone and we'll be set for awhile!
Never heard that one...
5) Let's make a new protocol!
That is how IPv6 came about. But then again, look how it turned out...
6) IPv6 addresses are too big to remember!
Very valid point. Especially when your ISP DNS craps out and you can actually remember 4.2.2.2 or 8.8.8.8 or 198.6.1.1 without
That's going to screw up the map. (Score:5, Funny)
*** QUICK! Migrate to IPV6... (Score:2)
.... So I can get your IPV4 addresses!
IPV4 is like the fax machine... it will never go away :-D
If only Windows supported IPv6 (Score:2)
The sad part is, they can't really transition to IPv6 because their own OS doesn't really support it.
Sure, some groundwore is present, but there's something critical missing: Windows can't retrieve a DNS server over RA. That means, it can get an IP, but not DNS servers.
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Except it can, because it supports stateless DHCPv6 (unless you're on XP).
My grand conspiracy theory (Score:4, Insightful)
Many end users have IPv6 support. Many servers are capable of it. The issue is mostly the US ISPs and middle-tier transit providers dragging their feet. My systems all support IPv6, my m0n0wall box supports it, but neither of the two ISPs I can buy service from support it. In fact they won't sell it to me even if I offer to pay extra money for it!
My pet theory is that Verizon et al wants to convert IPv4 address space into a "resource" they can buy/sell/trade. A bunch of lawyers and MBAs are rubbing their greedy fingers together, hoping we stay in a "resource shortage" for as long as possible.
We could switch over, probably within a year or two, but it would take a government-imposed mandate to force people to stop screwing around and make the change.
Don't Panic! (Score:4, Informative)
Don't Panic, or be afraid of IPv6.
People often talk of "switching" to IPv6. One does not "switch". You simply deploy it alongside IPv4. Right now my home network is happily running IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time, called a "dual-stack" environment. This sort of set up will be common for decades until IPv4 use dwindles to nothing, and people start turning it off.
Nearly all operating systems and devices supporting IPv6 have it turned on by default, so you're already running IPv6. You just don't have globally routable addresses assigned (most likely). You could actually use ping (windows) and ping6 (*nix) to ping other hosts on your LAN using link local addresses, which have automatically been assigned (see those addresses starting with fe80 on all of your interfaces?), if you knew how, right now. :-)
If you know IPv4 routing and subnetting, you already know most of what you need to know about IPv6. Except that IPv6 is simpler since there's no need to NAT. Just set up your firewall exactly as you would under IPv4 (same security policy), minus the NAT. Subnetting is also simpler, with no need to fret over "right sizing" your subnets so they're "just big enough" and don't use too much of your precious IPv4 space. Just assign a /64 out of your /48 (businesses will be easily be able to request multiple /48s) and you're done. Never run out of host numbers, or subnets.
Some folks are frightened by the use of hexadecimal for IPv6 addresses. No need to fret. It makes sense, and would have made sense for IPv4 also. Hex for IPv6 not only makes the IPv6 addresses more compact., it's also far easier to translate hex into binary, and work with prefix-lengths than decimal IPv4 address are. I can do it in my head all day with no issue. All you have to do is memorize 16 bin patterns from 0000 to 1111, each represents a hex digit from 0 - F. Piece of cake. No more annoying math and base conversion to try to figure out which subnet some IPv6 address belongs to like with IPv4. No more subnet masks either (which are also decimal), instead, just prefix lengths (although this is also true of IPv4 with CIDR, adopted long ago, many user interfaces still require a netmask for IPv4 instead of just a /prefix-length, sigh).
Anyway. Go play with IPv6. It will be an essential skill to add to your Resume/CV, and will only take a short time to figure out. Go set up an tunnel with Hurricane Electric or some other tunnel broker to get some globally routable IPv6s. It's simple and you'll learn a lot and quickly! And best of all, you'll stop being afraid of IPv6! :-)
(apologies to those who already have adopted IPv6 and know all this already ... this isn't addressed to you!)
Re:Not sure what they mean... (Score:5, Interesting)
It means that when I deployed a new virtual desktop in Azure and specified "East US" as the data center location, services that looked at the IP address thought I was in Brazil or Germany. Which played hell with Google when I started Chrome because it customized the language for the area it thought I was in. That explains a lot.
Re:Not sure what they mean... (Score:5, Funny)
If you called MS support you would have learned that you should have used Internet Explorer, not Chrome!
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If I used IE, I'd have to approve every single page and web site I went to. Yuck.
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Turn that feature off it you dont need it, its there to specifically make web browsing hard on a server...
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Re:Not sure what they mean... (Score:5, Insightful)
That is one of Googles great stupidities.
Just because I log in I via a French public hotspot, or a Dutch customers WLAN, doesn't mean I now magically speak French or Dutch, so why does Google switch everything to French and Dutch, despite all my OS and Browser settings still indicating German as primary language, with English as fallback?
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Maybe Amazon would be a better example, since you'd normally want to go by default to that country's store regardless of language.
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Why the hell should the website guess where you want to go and what language you want to use?
If I want to go to the Swedish Amazon, I'll go to amazon.se, if I want to go to the Indian one, I'll go to the amazon.in.
This is already a solved problem.
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Go to ipv6.google.com (obviously, requires IPv6), it doesn't do that annoying geolocation.
Re:Not sure what they mean... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I imagine that Google thinks it far more common for one person with more than one of [ PC | laptop | phone | tablet ] to have the majority of same in the country they are in, than to only take one of the above to another country.
If you took your laptop, phone, and tablet with you, you'd be thinking that you should only have to change your location preference on one.
Really, I think changing my 'home' location exactly once for each time I stay somewhere new is pretty much exactly what I'm looking for.
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Except browsers can actually send a header that lists your preferred languages, in order. Chrome can actually does this, although it's buried away under "Advanced Settings". Google just don't pay any attention to it on their servers (apparently).
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Except browsers can actually send a header that lists your preferred languages, in order. Chrome can actually does this, although it's buried away under "Advanced Settings". Google just don't pay any attention to it on their servers (apparently).
If a lot of browsers are getting it wrong in what they send, the incentive to support it is not strong. Guess what? A quick test with Chrome, Safari and Firefox indicate that they all get it wrong by default. Safari doesn't provide an option to change it that I can find; the other two pick the wrong default for me, instead of using the system language settings (which are correct and available for software to read) even if those are imperfect for the task. (I'm on the wrong platform for testing IE and I don'
Not just Google (Score:2)
Oh boy! (Score:2)
Netflix is going to have fun with this!
"But I do live in the USA! Its not my fault I was issued an IP address out of a North Korean allocation block."
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Re:Not sure what they mean... (Score:5, Informative)
IP blocks are meant to be a drill-down system. For example, 128.230.x.x is indicates it's on the Syracuse University campus.... with the 16 bits worth of addresses being spread out so that a specific x in the third position would indicate what building to send the packet to.
Microsoft's problem here is that their Azure service has used every one of the IP addresses allocated to it... and Microsoft doesn't have any subnets remaining in the "USA Block" of their IP addresses... so they have to move IPs that would have been used overseas back into the Azure datacenter. As IPv4 continues to be used we're going to start to see more of these "we're running out!" stories.
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I tried to use Azure, but all of my EU-hosted virtual machines geolocated to US, and I wanted none of that.
Well, now you have a random chance of geolocating to the EU (or S America, or somewhere else)....
It would have made more sense for them to use the EU blocks they owned to host Azure EU services, but they just used their US Azure block until it was full.
One other thing this breaks, is that before you could set up a VPN service on local Azure and the world would think you were in the US. Now it's going to be the reverse. This will break any Azure services that are pulling data only allowed to those in the U
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Amazingly IPv6 will be sufficient for a long time:
2^128 IPv6 addresses * (1 atom / address) / (7*10^27 atoms/human) = 48 billion humans.
Actually, why not solve it for all time? Given the estimate of 10^80 particles in the universe, then moving to 266 bit addressing (i.e. 80/log(2)) would allow each particle to be addressed individually. Bumping to 512 bit addressing would accommodate the typical logical addressing inefficiencies.
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You can still get around the address space limitations of ipv6 with NAT... but unlike IPv4, with IPv6 it is possible to design a NAT system that you can route packets through via extension headers, so even on the other side of a ipv6 NAT (which acts technically more like an extra 128 bit prefix on the ip address than it does a conventional NAT, but it still essentially functions the same way in that it would still change ip address headers like current ipv4 nats do), a computer could still potentially dire
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I can't believe I haven't heard of this approach until now. That could really help to solve the problem with prefixes changing due to dynamic assignment. Basically each device can have both a globally routable address (which changes often), and a local address (which never changes).
Alas, this still means that I can't use the same DNS on the inside and outside of the network. It also means that I still have to deal with dynamic DNS updates for multiple hosts if I want them to have globally-reachable addre
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Actually, why not solve it for all time? Given the estimate of 10^80 particles in the universe, then moving to 266 bit addressing (i.e. 80/log(2)) would allow each particle to be addressed individually. Bumping to 512 bit addressing would accommodate the typical logical addressing inefficiencies.
Yeah, that'll work great, until we discover multiple universes...
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Yeah, that'll work great, until we discover multiple universes...
The question then becomes "if there is another universe we cannot communicate with, do we really need to be able to address their physical particles with our communication networks?"
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It is a sure bet that once it gets codified into a standard that we can only communicate with our universe and integrated into a host of products, we will discover that we can in fact communicate with multiple universes. Luckily, there is the likely possibility that there are a host of other universes won't make this mistake.
NAT. You know that would be the de facto solution, and I grin at the thought of future address space purists wringing their hands over the solution as much as their 21st century ancestors did...
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This will only solve it for people who think that addresses should be assigned to objects.
I don't know about you, but every time I am communicating with something or someone, I am communicating with something physical rather than a location.
Do you have a use case for why we should be communicating based on locations rather than physical objects? Relativity would make your idea a real bitch. Furthermore, I don't care where my server is located (and I don't want to have to care, either), but with your idea our communication would involve constantly changing IPs for every Planck time (because, no d
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I agree that relativity would fuck that up, but do you seriously doubt that people want to communicate based on locations?
"There's a supernova nearby! Look out!".
But a perhaps better argument is that just because you can address every object, doesn't mean you're using the best addressing. Maybe with twice the address space you could implement multiple different hierarchies for different purposes, enabling more efficient multicast scenarios at the expense of memory-per-address.
Which would in fact be a larg
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You are still always communicating to objects, never locations. You described a scenario where you want to talk to physical objects (people) who happen to be in a location.
Have you ever walked into an empty room with the intention to communicate with a location? Because that's what addressing based on location rather than objects implies. Normal communication would involve going into a room that wasn't empty and talking to a person or people. You aren't communicating to space itself, but rather with physica
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Yes and no.
Yes, you'll need to assign every one of your machines an address which is based on the prefix assigned to you by your ISP.
In the absence of NAT66, your computers will need these addresses to access the internet.
No, you can additionally assign your machines an address based on a unique local address prefix.
You should to use a randomly generated ULA prefix to avoid future conflicts (eg, you need to establish a VPN to another network also using ULA).
But otherwise, it's legal to use a trivial prefix
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By assign, I mean giving them an address.
Whether it's by static configuration, stateless auto-configuration or DHCP.
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Yes. There is no particular reason your first 64 bits would be dynamic at all. It is the same as in the v4 world the ISP can give you a dynamic address(es) or a static address(es). In v6 they can (and should) give you something like 8 subnets for your home (i.e. 8 64 bit addresses spaces) and those should be longish term.
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I don't use Skype, but I do use other things, such as SSH to my desktop from my laptop when I'm on the road, that need to connect to a specific machine. I do that by giving my desktop a fixed IP on the LAN and forwarding the appropriate ports to it, while allowing other machines, such as my laptop when I need it at home, to use DHCP. As long as Skype uses a consistent set of ports, there's no reason I can see that this wouldn't work, and
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It's not that hard, but it's not that easy either. It's far simpler without NAT, where you just connect to the machine.
Also it suddenly gets very, very hard when your ISP puts you behind their own NAT, so you don't even have a "public IP" for your laptop to connect to.
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No we won't. Anybody who thinks this doesn't understand how large 2^128 is.
(If you disagree with me, try to back it up with actual numbers.)
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That's an odd definition of "already", given that it came years and years after v4 was extended to 128 bits. Also the 128-bit version is actually big enough to handle the number of hosts we need it to handle, and it has far wider support and deployment than that 64-bit extension.
So really, there's no point in it.
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v6 doesn't require you to memorize 8 groups of 4 letters. You can put v6 addresses into /etc/hosts to avoid having to remember them... and if you find that syncing a huge /etc/hosts file around is a pain, then it also supports that newfangled "DNS" thing to save you the effort.
Plus you can set any bits in your allocation to zero, and your allocation should be at least /56 or so, which means the number of bits you actually have to remember is about the same as in the v4 case (where you have to remember a 32-
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Well, v4 doesn't require remembering IPv4 addresses either, but still it comes handy in a pinch to remember the gateway, the dns server, the WLAN access point, etc addresses. For some reason people really like to point out the Google's DNS server's IP, not its name.
Though remembering local gw and dns mostly comes to remembering the network prefix whcih won't be that large, assuming one has not used dynamic allocation for services in a network.
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Um, no. We're running out of addresses because we don't have enough addresses.
(And to address some of the other misunderstandings: ARIN still have a v6 printing press, v6 doesn't magically expose everything to the entire WWW, you can still run a central firewall in v6 (just without NAT, thankfully) and your IPs won't require memorizing 128 bits unless you're dumb enough to pick an address that uses all 128 bits, in which case you don't get to complain about it).