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A New Approach to IP Address Exhaustion
akkem writes "For a while now, we've been running out of IPv4 address space, resulting in more and more computers getting put behind NAT devices. That's fine for many computers, but what if you want that computer to be available as a server? As part of his PhD work, my friend Eugene has come up with a nifty solution, AVES, which enables any computer on the Internet to reach one or more servers placed behind a NAT. His approach is to give each server a unique name (via DNS), and to handle all the IP address translation automatically via an overlay network." This looks somewhat similiar to virtual DNS, but taking it another step, and having the server route the requests behind itself instead of just handling it a little differently.
Here are some stats from ARIN (unfortunatelly these are circa 1996...):
Right... so there are 127 institutions with class A's all to themselves. Now that's really efficient. Even a full class B (which 10000 organizations have been blessed with) is overkill.
Now, the offenders are here (this list _is_ up-to-date). Most notable class A assignments:
The rest goes to IP registries to dish out in comparatively puny class B and C chunks, and of course the US government.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
More security issues to contend with. Let's be honest here. How many servers do you really need? For crying out loud, you don't need 19 servers running web pages and DBs and god knows what anymore. Use yous allocated IP's wisely, Nat what can be natted, and let everything else reside peacefully behind that firewall. And wait for IPV6 already.
Short sightedness has caused the depletion problem (if you can call 160 million possibilities short sightedness)...but the issue is kind of moot right now.
IPv6 is coming...and we won't run out of addresses. We need creative ways to deal with problems that we have right now as we wait for IPv6.
The issue of NATed addresses is a real one and a barrier for peer-2-peer communications, not the hype, but true application-to- application communications that can allow networks to understand their state and topology to make intelligent routing and communications decisions. In order for this to occur the Internet needs to go back to its roots of true bi-directional communications. Publishers cannot simply view nodes as passive receivers of content...but as active participants on the network at large with important things to say and receive. The current trend for ISPs to provide asynchronous bandwidth is our next barrier and a trend that hopefully is reversed as more devices and home users demand to be publishers of content and information.