Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the ip-address-in-every-pot dept.
miladus writes "According to a story at Zdnet,
Asian countries are running out of IP addresses. China, for example,
was assigned 22 million IP addresses (for a population of 1.3 billion)
under IPv4. The US owns 70 percent of current IP addresses. Perhaps IPv6 will solve the problem."
Asia is one of the primary adopters of IPv6
by
illumin8
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I work for one of the largest Unix vendors out there (hint, we used to put the . in.bomb).
Anyway, I can tell you that in one of my many Unix classes when we were learning how to configure IPv6 the instructor mentioned that the reason why IPv6 had been added by default to our new versions of Unix was that we were getting a tremendous amount of pressure from our customers overseas, primarily in Asian markets, who were unable to get IPv4 address blocks from their ISPs, and were therefore deploying IPv6 exclusively.
I believe currently a lot of Asia is running IPv6 with IPv4 gateways at main NAPs.
-obdisclaimer, the opinions expressed are not those of my employer.
-- "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Re:Corporations are at fault?
by
agentZ
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
And ditto for some class A networks. I know that MIT does a LOT of computer research, but do they really need an entire class A? Did you know that each fraternity at MIT has their own class B? Really! For an example, try looking the hostnames for the routers in some of the frat houses. $ host 18.[231-238].0.1
30% of ipv4 space still unallocated
by
ruud
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Crazy size of the IPv6 address space...
by
patniemeyer
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I did the following fun calculations once for a book I was working on (let me know if they're wrong):
There are about six billion people on earth and each person's body consists of about 100 trillion cells. With 128 bit addressing each individual cell in every human being could have 100 trillion addresses. I believe that is on par with 1 address per molecule.
To put it another way we cannot, with current technology, use all of these addresses in any physical way. We can't even count them (literally). Suppose you have a machine that can do a trillion operations per second; then suppose that you have a billion such machines connected via the Internet and we ask each one to simply start counting through part of the address space. I believe it will take about 3 billion years for them to finish.
Pat Niemeyer Author of Learning Java, O'Reilly & Associates and the BeanShell Java scripting language.
Re:Crazy size of the IPv6 address space...
by
spaceyhackerlady
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
There are about six billion people on earth and each person's body consists of about 100 trillion cells. With 128 bit addressing each individual cell
in every human being could have 100 trillion addresses. I believe that is on par with 1 address per molecule.
A necessary number: number of IPV6 addresses
is 2**128 = 3.4E38.
Hmmm...lessee now, 6E9 people, 1E14 cells per person, that makes 6E23 cells. That's about 5E14 IPV6 addresses (five hundred trillion) per cell.
Per molecule? Let's assume an average person's mass is 60 kg, and that the average molecular weight of the human body is 25 (we are mostly water). That makes (60 * 1000) / 25 * 6.02E23 = 1.4E27 molecules per person.
Total Earth population is then 6E9 * 1.4E27 = 8.4E36 molecules. Actually about 40 addresses per molecule.
My other favourite number is how many IPV6 addresses each
square micron of the Earth's surface could have:
Earth's surface area in square microns =
4 pi (6378 * 1000 * 1000000) ** 2 = 5.1E26
3.4E38 / 5.1E26 = 6.6E11
A big number!
...laura
Re:Is this...
by
HiThere
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
No. It's that when they first started handing out TCP addresses it didn't ever seem possible that everyone would want, not just one, but several. So they handed them out in big blocks to make administration easier.
The people who were in at the start all ended up with huge domains that they didn't expect to fill, but then they didn't expect that the address range would "ever" fill up. So why be picky.
Countries weren't really thought of during the first round of allocations. Or even companies. Or most government departments. Except for a few who were a part of the process. The second round, all those were assigned "fair" chunks. But they didn't think of ISPs, or such. That was the third round, which added in ISPs and a few involved techie users (who now wanted an address at home that didn't depend on where they worked).
I don't know which round of assignments we are now. Must be around the sixth or seventh. (A round comes to an end when people figure out that they are running out of addresses, so they revamp the rules of how they are allocated.) Somewhere in there DHCP and bootp started being used so that people didn't get "permanent" addresses anymore.
--
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The migration path, in general, is to use DNS proxies and NATPT to make the transition appear to IPv6 users to be instantaneous.
I did this a while ago at my house. My network actually had no IPv4 on it at all for a few weeks. I stopped because a couple of applications didn't support IPv6 and because the KAME NATPT I grafted into my FreeBSD source tree broke. I did it sort of as a proof of concept, and it succeeded sufficiently for me to propose that IPv6-only ISPs could easily use the technique.
You first set up a DNS proxy. totd (Trick or Treat Daemon) is a good one. Its job is to turn requests for AAAA records into requests for AAAA or A records, and to translate A record replies into AAAA records with a special prefix tacked on to the high bits. This will make it look as though the whole IPv4 Internet is hidden inside of a special/96 prefix.
Coincidently, you route that/96 prefix into a NATPT. IPv6 packets go in, IPv4 packets come out and are sent to the IPv4 Internet as if they had gone through a NAT.
Having done this, all of the ISPs customers would see a complete IPv6-only Inernet, but they could still interact with legacy (IPv4) sites as if they were IPv6. As more and more ISPs convert over, the IPv4 network will simply shrink slowly until it's gone, but in the meantime remain as accessable as it currently is.
With such a transition plan in place, the more people who move to IPv6, the emptier the IPv4 Internet experience becomes (however, folks trapped with IPv4 only providers could use techniques like 6to4 to escape the legacy network), which in turn becomes the driving force for transition.
So, Enough stories are turning up... When is/. going to support IPv6?
Re:This is a good thing
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
On the other hand blindingly portscanning IP ranges is infeasible. Can you imagine scanning a/64? That's like 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IP. If you could scan at a rate of 1 Million IP per second it would take over 584,942 years. And with the minimum packet size of 576 bytes it would take a 9,2 Gbps of bandwidth just to ping 1 Million IPs in a second.
Re:ISPs to lose source of revenue with IPv6
by
xchino
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
No ISP worth their salt would. I work for an ISP, and I can confirm that it does cost us money to give you an IP, so it's going to cost you money too. When IPv6 is implemented it won't cost us anything, so it won't cost you anything. I've seen both our cost and our customers cost for IP addresses/ranges so much that it amazes me IPv6 isn't being implemented by every ISP already. It's just the chicken and the egg problem.
-- Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem?
by
hesiod
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
> How soon, who knows...but saying that it won't happen is like saying no one will ever need more then 640k of memory..
Considering the scale of this issue, it seems more like a homo erectus saying "No one need fire. Too hot and not portable, like Linux." Well, except for the Linux thing.
But seriously, I think the planet itself would be long gone before that many IP addresses was even close to being used. Until, of course, nanobots start self-replicating and join the Internet Continuum & start taking IPs (those dirty bastards).
IPv6 is fundamentally broken ... wait for IPv7
by
Skapare
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
IPv6 is fundamentally broken. The routing system for it does not scale to the same level the address space does. There are enough addresses for everyone to have their own portable/64 assignment (if not larger), but IPv6 can't handle the routing. The routing technology was not improved to scale up, even though it could have been done (although I don't know if it can be done with the way IPv6 was designed). But that's not a valid excuse for not having scalable routing as the IP layer structure could have been designed to allow for it. Wedging another layer in below IP for IPv6 might also work, but I think we would be better off waiting for a clean re-design, perhaps to be called IPv7 (and pushing them to hurry up with it).
If you don't believe me, just post a call for portable address assignments in IPv6 for everyone. You're get plenty of responses saying that the routing can't handle it. And that is the problem.
-- now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Re:Corporations are at fault?
by
bob
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
At my suggestion, a few years ago my employer tried to give back a class B because we didn't really need it, asking only for a handful of class C numbers in return. Turned out to be harder than you might think, and it never happened. Now, since we never got the class C nets either, parts of the class B are in use and it would be a huge PITA to rip it out, so most of it's pretty much lost address space. So don't put all the blame on the holders of those nets -- a lot of the problem stems from mis-managment of the resource.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for one of the largest Unix vendors out there (hint, we used to put the . in .bomb).
Anyway, I can tell you that in one of my many Unix classes when we were learning how to configure IPv6 the instructor mentioned that the reason why IPv6 had been added by default to our new versions of Unix was that we were getting a tremendous amount of pressure from our customers overseas, primarily in Asian markets, who were unable to get IPv4 address blocks from their ISPs, and were therefore deploying IPv6 exclusively.
I believe currently a lot of Asia is running IPv6 with IPv4 gateways at main NAPs.
-obdisclaimer, the opinions expressed are not those of my employer.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
And ditto for some class A networks. I know that MIT does a LOT of computer research, but do they really need an entire class A? Did you know that each fraternity at MIT has their own class B? Really! For an example, try looking the hostnames for the routers in some of the frat houses.
$ host 18.[231-238].0.1
roughly 30 percent of the available ipv4 space has not been allocated to anyone yet. every now and then, iana allocates a /8 block to apnic. so even if apnic is running out of space in the currently assigned addresses, there is still quite a lot of space available that could be allocated to them.
bgphints - internet routing news, hints and ti
I did the following fun calculations once for a book I was working on (let me know if they're wrong):
There are about six billion people on earth and each person's body consists of about 100 trillion cells. With 128 bit addressing each individual cell in every human being could have 100 trillion addresses. I believe that is on par with 1 address per molecule.
To put it another way we cannot, with current technology, use all of these addresses in any physical way. We can't even count them (literally). Suppose you have a machine that can do a trillion operations per second; then suppose that you have a billion such machines connected via the Internet and we ask each one to simply start counting through part of the address space. I believe it will take about 3 billion years for them to finish.
Pat Niemeyer
Author of Learning Java, O'Reilly & Associates and the BeanShell Java scripting language.
No. It's that when they first started handing out TCP addresses it didn't ever seem possible that everyone would want, not just one, but several. So they handed them out in big blocks to make administration easier.
The people who were in at the start all ended up with huge domains that they didn't expect to fill, but then they didn't expect that the address range would "ever" fill up. So why be picky.
Countries weren't really thought of during the first round of allocations. Or even companies. Or most government departments. Except for a few who were a part of the process. The second round, all those were assigned "fair" chunks. But they didn't think of ISPs, or such. That was the third round, which added in ISPs and a few involved techie users (who now wanted an address at home that didn't depend on where they worked).
I don't know which round of assignments we are now. Must be around the sixth or seventh. (A round comes to an end when people figure out that they are running out of addresses, so they revamp the rules of how they are allocated.) Somewhere in there DHCP and bootp started being used so that people didn't get "permanent" addresses anymore.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I did this a while ago at my house. My network actually had no IPv4 on it at all for a few weeks. I stopped because a couple of applications didn't support IPv6 and because the KAME NATPT I grafted into my FreeBSD source tree broke. I did it sort of as a proof of concept, and it succeeded sufficiently for me to propose that IPv6-only ISPs could easily use the technique.
You first set up a DNS proxy. totd (Trick or Treat Daemon) is a good one. Its job is to turn requests for AAAA records into requests for AAAA or A records, and to translate A record replies into AAAA records with a special prefix tacked on to the high bits. This will make it look as though the whole IPv4 Internet is hidden inside of a special /96 prefix.
Coincidently, you route that /96 prefix into a NATPT. IPv6 packets go in, IPv4 packets come out and are sent to the IPv4 Internet as if they had gone through a NAT.
Having done this, all of the ISPs customers would see a complete IPv6-only Inernet, but they could still interact with legacy (IPv4) sites as if they were IPv6. As more and more ISPs convert over, the IPv4 network will simply shrink slowly until it's gone, but in the meantime remain as accessable as it currently is.
With such a transition plan in place, the more people who move to IPv6, the emptier the IPv4 Internet experience becomes (however, folks trapped with IPv4 only providers could use techniques like 6to4 to escape the legacy network), which in turn becomes the driving force for transition.
So, Enough stories are turning up... When is /. going to support IPv6?
On the other hand blindingly portscanning IP ranges is infeasible. Can you imagine scanning a /64? That's like 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IP. If you could scan at a rate of 1 Million IP per second it would take over 584,942 years. And with the minimum packet size of 576 bytes it would take a 9,2 Gbps of bandwidth just to ping 1 Million IPs in a second.
No ISP worth their salt would. I work for an ISP, and I can confirm that it does cost us money to give you an IP, so it's going to cost you money too. When IPv6 is implemented it won't cost us anything, so it won't cost you anything. I've seen both our cost and our customers cost for IP addresses/ranges so much that it amazes me IPv6 isn't being implemented by every ISP already. It's just the chicken and the egg problem.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
> How soon, who knows...but saying that it won't happen is like saying no one will ever need more then 640k of memory..
Considering the scale of this issue, it seems more like a homo erectus saying "No one need fire. Too hot and not portable, like Linux." Well, except for the Linux thing.
But seriously, I think the planet itself would be long gone before that many IP addresses was even close to being used. Until, of course, nanobots start self-replicating and join the Internet Continuum & start taking IPs (those dirty bastards).
IPv6 is fundamentally broken. The routing system for it does not scale to the same level the address space does. There are enough addresses for everyone to have their own portable /64 assignment (if not larger), but IPv6 can't handle the routing. The routing technology was not improved to scale up, even though it could have been done (although I don't know if it can be done with the way IPv6 was designed). But that's not a valid excuse for not having scalable routing as the IP layer structure could have been designed to allow for it. Wedging another layer in below IP for IPv6 might also work, but I think we would be better off waiting for a clean re-design, perhaps to be called IPv7 (and pushing them to hurry up with it).
If you don't believe me, just post a call for portable address assignments in IPv6 for everyone. You're get plenty of responses saying that the routing can't handle it. And that is the problem.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
At my suggestion, a few years ago my employer tried to give back a class B because we didn't really need it, asking only for a handful of class C numbers in return. Turned out to be harder than you might think, and it never happened. Now, since we never got the class C nets either, parts of the class B are in use and it would be a huge PITA to rip it out, so most of it's pretty much lost address space. So don't put all the blame on the holders of those nets -- a lot of the problem stems from mis-managment of the resource.