Asia Running Out Of IP Addresses

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."

Comments

IPv6 soon?

[zoloto]

I'm still waiting for duke nukem forever!

This again?

[FatSean]

The world has been running out of IP addresses, and suffering from global warming for as long as I can remember...

Re:This again?

[TopShelf]

yeah, next thing you know they'll be carping about us running out of fossil fuels...

Re:This again?

[theedge318]

Now if only we could figure out how to use NAT's to solve the global warming problem or the fossil fuel shortage.

Re:This again?

[jtn]

But NAT hasn't solved any "IP shortage" problem, either. It has merely postponed the inevitable and at the same time completely broken the end-to-end nature of the Internet. Think of how many applications are broken and require twisted special cases to be handled by a NAT gateway..

Re:This again?

[Deanasc]

Didn't they start running out of addresses the minute the first address was issued?

Re:This again?

[puppet10]

and fusion power is 40 years away from commercial practicality...

Re:This again?

[operagost]

Where's my flying car?

At least we do have handheld video phones now (sort of).

Re:70% Seems fair

[Anonymous Coward]

Give em a few of those linksys routers...

Re:70% Seems fair

[agentZ]

It means that all of your IP addresses are belong to us. Wait a second--

Corporations are at fault?

[sinergy]

I personally know of many large corporations that have several Class-B networks that they use for non-accessible internal routing. I'm sure their numbers are much higher than just the one's I've come across. Couldn't somebody review who has all of those assigned addresses and help(force) them to migrate to private ranges?

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[agentZ]

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

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[tomhudson]

... and some of them have class A addresses that they cannot possibly fill. IANA Address assignments

003/8 May 94 General Electric Company
004/8 Dec 92 Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.
005/8 Jul 95 IANA - Reserved
006/8 Feb 94 Army Information Systems Center
007/8 Apr 95 IANA - Reserved
008/8 Dec 92 Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.
009/8 Aug 92 IBM
010/8 Jun 95 IANA - Private Use See [RFC1918]
011/8 May 93 DoD Intel Information Systems
012/8 Jun 95 AT&T Bell Laboratories
013/8 Sep 91 Xerox Corporation
014/8 Jun 91 IANA - Public Data Network
015/8 Jul 94 Hewlett-Packard Company
016/8 Nov 94 Digital Equipment Corporation
017/8 Jul 92 Apple Computer Inc.
018/8 Jan 94 MIT
019/8 May 95 Ford Motor Company

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[swb]

I know for a fact this is true.

One company that I've worked with uses a routable /16 (same size as a class B) externally and a routable /16 internally and NATs between the two of them.

What's super annoying is that we have some permanent connectivity to them and they give out different IPs depending on the source of the DNS query. We're not fully integrated with them, so it makes for loads of fun trying to do resolution correctly.

I think it's a waste of addresses. Give back the public-facing /16 they use, use the private /16 globally and use some other NAT scheme or other RFC1918 addressing internally where needed.

But even RFC1918 is a problem as everybody thinks that 10.0.0.0/8 is "theirs" and then you do NAT-NAT, which breaks most troubleshooting tools.

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[PD]

So you're saying that it is incorrect of me to number my home network that uses NAT? I use 10.1.1.1, 10.1.1.2, and so on for my network. I picked it just because 192.168.1.1 was a little harder to type. Also, from the RFC: "If a suitable subnetting scheme can be designed and is supported by the equipment concerned, it is advisable to use the 24-bit block."

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Some of those have been sold/reassigned/leased. I know, your source ought to have a current list. For instance, I recently setup a customer who has an address in the 4.0.0.0 network, and they definately aren't Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., they just had a Class C or smaller in that block.

Interesting to see the first five: IANA, Xerox, Apple, IBM, Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.

"Which one of these things is not like the other one?"... or "Which one of these really doesn't need 32 Million IP addresses". [unicode music note code here]

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[LinuxHam]

Think about manufacturing.. how many devices are IP-enabled nowadays.. now go through your list and think about companies that produce no less than millions of parts per year, and therefore have tremendous manufacturing facilities that have ip-enabled sh*t all over the place..

General Electric Company - Massive production lines
Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. - They (not Gore) invented the 'Net
Army Information Systems Center - um, the **ARMY**
Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. - again
IBM - (my employer) HUGE MANUFACTURER and 300k+ (technical) employees
DoD Intel Information Systems - The Dept. of Defense
AT&T Bell Laboratories - AT&T fer chrissakes, IP *everywhere*
Xerox Corporation - Another big mfgr and computing co.
Hewlett-Packard Company - Even bigger now with Compaq
Digital Equipment Corporation - Also HPaq, ok 32 million IPs is a bit much
Apple Computer Inc. - They'll never need 16m addys :)
MIT - your point.. a bit much
Ford Motor Company - Back to massive manufacturing facilities worldwide

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[mattsouthworth]

Who is this 'someone'? And how can they take something that another entity owns? These class A assignments came well before IANA and whoever doled out /24s to whoever could figure out a SWIP.

Class A and B owners shouldn't have to move to 'private' (RFC1918) address space. 1918 space used in a one-to-many NAT is a hack that breaks end-to-end. IPv6 maintains e2e and is preferable. I'm sitting on a huge network numbered out of RFC1918 right now, which is a pain in the balls.

And while I'm soapboxing, although 'security' (broken e2e) is a side-effect of NAT it's not a reason for NAT. One could be just as secure with a properly configured firewall, and (all together now) not break e2e.

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[spif]

actually, they're not /16s

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[tomhudson]

<qoute> Think about manufacturing.. how many devices are IP-enabled nowadays.. now go through your list and think about companies that produce no less than millions of parts per year, and therefore have tremendous manufacturing facilities that have ip-enabled sh*t all over the place..</quote>

There's no reason why these devices should have externally-visible IP addresses (and a lot of good reasons why they shouldn't). if you think about it. Imagine what would happen if you could hack into the welding robots on Ford's assembly lines, or GE's, or "War Games" the AISC., DoD, etc.

That's the reason for 10.n.n.n, 192.n.n.n, etc. Private networks. :-)

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[b1t r0t]

BBN, better known as Genuity. It's great that they're actually using their ancient Class A allocation.

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[Mr. McGibby]

That's the reason for 10.n.n.n, 192.n.n.n, etc. Private networks

No it's not. It's for people who can't or don't want to get real IPs.

There are a lot of reasons why so-called private devices would want a real IP address. First and foremost is so that they can send out requests to the Internet and the receiver of requests will know where to send the response. Firewall all you want, but two-way communication is still important.

NAT is a hack.

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[bob]

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.

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[leviramsey]

Verizon's also part of that (Verizon having been formed by the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE (which owned Genuity)).

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every fraternity has their own class B? That seems odd. If I recall, that's what my entire college runs on (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). And my fraternity doesn't get any of it. We have 30 guys running through a single linksys router hooked up to a cable modem, and we're thankful for that. We also have to walk to class uphill both ways, in the snow.

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[Mr. McGibby]

Ummm... why would anyone want to their welding robots to accessible over the internet.

They wouldn't, but they might want that welding robot to be able to communicate with a supplier's server. While you could do this with NAT and other such hacks, why not do it the proper way with a real IP address?

32 bits ought to be enough

[D0wnsp0ut]

Perhaps IPv6 will solve the problem.

Perhaps this could signal a limit on the amount of spam coming from China?

time to give split up some class A's ?

[i.r.id10t]

Perhaps it is time to split up some class A networks so that more could be released for other users... for example, I'm sure that even MIT isn't using all 16.something million addresses their 18.foo class A allows for...

That, or one heck of a NAT is needed.

Re:time to give split up some class A's ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a guy at MIT, he's personally using 3 million addresses, just by himself.

Re:time to give split up some class A's ?

[Tim Macinta]

I'm sure that even MIT isn't using all 16.something million addresses their 18.foo class A allows for.

How would anybody know when their laundry is done then? And what exactly are they supposed to do when using the bathroom? Why don't we all just go back to using slide rules while we're at it?

Re:time to give split up some class A's ?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what exactly are they supposed to do when using the bathroom?

That brings new meaning to the term "IP" address.

Non-routable addresses

[Mistah Blue]

I wonder why they don't use the non-routable address spaces and NAT.

Let's also remember (since I detected some trolling in the article) that Asia was a backwater for the Internet 20 years ago when address blocks started to be doled out, so naturally the U.S. and to a lesser extent Europe got the bulk of the blocks.

They could always NAT

[krisp]

Let the other billion or so people NAT the remaining ip addresses! 10.x.x.x adds another 16M, and they can 192.168.x.x behind those :)

Re:They could always NAT

[wronskyMan]

Unless the MPAA (or its Asian equivalent) bribes all the governments to ban NAT boxen (so they can be hotbeds of technological innovation, like the People's Republic of Illinois :-) )

This only means

[earthforce_1]

That they will be the first on the block to adopt IPV6 of course. Being late to the party usually means you get the chance to base your infrastucture on superior technology. Both the first celluar service and the first HD television was analog based, and the early adopters wound up with inferior technology.

SCO SAYS...

[crazyphilman]

All your IP are belong to us!!!

Re:They should really swap to IPV6 then..

[Sexy Commando]

China and Japan will invest millions to develop IPv6. For example, June last year, both governments pledged US$32 million into network construction and testing, system development, application technology development and standardization, she said

RTFA

Asia is one of the primary adopters of IPv6

[illumin8]

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.

Re:2 solutions

[rabtech]

Is it fair to yank addresses out from under those who are already using them? I don't think so.

If we want to go by the countries that will most utilize IPs, then the USA and Japan probably top the list.

The bottom line is that IPv4 doesn't have enough addresses. We need to transition to IPv6. I suggest the all-powerful, all-loving, wonderful and joyous Chinese government, greatest in all the world bringing happiness and prosperity to all its people, concentrate on transitioning its backbones and systems to IPv6, and just gateway IPv4 to the rest of the world.

Asia

[caluml]

But I thought the Internet was "America Online"?

IPv6 adoption

[Vector7]

Is it just me, or does no one really seem to care about adopting IPv6? The free software community has done a pretty admirable job implementing IPv6 and modifying things to work with it. If the world switched tomorrow, linux users would probably be the first ones up and running. Meanwhile, people like Microsoft sit on their asses until all the IP addresses run out and a real crisis develops.

So, maybe it will be the Asian countries that finally push IPv6 toward being adopted. OTOH, in countries like China, maybe the government would be happier if 1+ billion people were forced behind NAT and a handful of filtering proxies due to lack of free addresses. =p

Re:IPv6 adoption

[caluml]

I agree with you. I work pretty much purely over IPv6 now. I can administer our entire network with IPv6.
I keep banging the IPv6 drum, but people are naturally lazy, and don't want to change unless they have to. It explains the Microsoft/Linux thing too - people can't be bothered to try it, as MS works, to a fashion.

Unfortunately, this lack of IPv6 adoption is due to Microsoft. As 90% of the online-population can't use it, the people running the services can't be bothered to support it. And while there aren't any decent services on IPv6, the impetus to upgrade it is low.

Windows XP users: ipv6 install
RedHat: http://gk.umtstrial.co.uk/~calum/ipv6-intro/

I think it can be all summed up by asking: Why don't you make all the sites you administer IPv6 only? Because then most of your audience wouldn't be able to see it.

Re:IPv6 adoption

[garcia]

of course not. Home owners want to use their routers and router manus have no desire to support IPv6 (as it would be nearly pointless to have NAT routers).

ISPs really don't want to support IPv6 because then they can't charge for additional IPs or blocks of IPs. They also can't force you not to have your own reverse DNS (as ALL the ISPs I have ever used have denied me).

I am currently using Comcast cable. I have an IPv6 address space through he.net. I have my own reverse DNS and I can actually show off my leet vanity hosts on IRC.

Win9x doesn't support IPv6 except through a PAYFOR version of Winsock (what home user is going to do that and when is MS going to add support, yeah, never.)

So if Win9x isn't supported, ISPs don't want it supported, home networking devices aren't going to support it (most home routers just drop the packets, I had to go back to using Linux as my NAT in order to enable IPv6), how is it going to get adopted?

Re:IPv6 adoption

[rplacd]

If the world switched tomorrow, linux users would probably be the first ones up and running.

Wrong. Linux is nowhere near as IPv6-friendly as the *BSDs. To enable IPv6 in FreeBSD, for example, put 'ipv6_enable="YES"' in /etc/rc.conf and reboot. It'll autoconfig based on router advertisements, etc. You also have the option of enabling it at install time, so you can install over IPv6.

Each FreeBSD CD comes with a bunch prebuilt IPv6-ready apps, like apache, wget, etc -- apps that don't have native IPv6 support. Linux distributions are way behind when it comes to IPv6 adoption.

AEven Microsoft is on the bandwagon here. XP shipped with a "dev release" of their IPv6 code, and service pack 1 upgraded that to a production-ready release. To enable it, type "ipv6 install" at a command prompt, and you're set (no need to reboot!). The new 2003 server release comes with production quality IPv6 code as well.

Re:IPv6 adoption

[Daniel Phillips]

Unfortunately, this lack of IPv6 adoption is due to Microsoft.

Actually, it's more due to the monumentally stupid design decision of not making IPv4 addresses a strict subset of IPv6 addresses, with the result that you have to have tunnels etc to communicate between an IPv6 host or client and an IPv4 host or client.

Re:IPv6 adoption

[Jordy]

Let's take Redhat 9; to enable IPv6 you have to go into /etc/sysconfig/network and stick the line 'NETWORKING_IPV6="yes"' in, then restart networking with 'service network restart.'

This same config file also will set auto tunneling 6to4, forwarding, router setup, etc. It is about as easy as you can get.

The Redhat CDs have IPv6 enabled applications and many patched apps as well. It even installs ping6, traceroute6, etc. by default for goodness sakes.

There are some pieces of IPv6 Linux is missing, but don't make it seem like there isn't any support. Linux currently is missing 6over4 (different from 6to4), proper TOS bit handling, IPsec ESP transport and AH tunneling modes (AH transport works), full mobility support (supposedly almost there) and a couple other minor things.

china only needs one

[ashultz]

China wants to filter the entire internet anyway, so they might as well only use one and point it at the Great Firewall of China.

I'm envisioning a billion little linksys router boxes glued together like bricks.

To put things inter perspective..

[BillYak]

MIT has its own Class A subnet, which is 16 million (!) IPs. (Compared to 22mil of all of China.)

As does Microsoft, Cisco, and Apple. And I'm sure a lot of other big names.

Do all of those organizations use all of their IPs? Of course not. Relatively, probably more along the lines of "very few" or "negligable."

Sure it is an incentive for IPv6 implementation, but that is not the point. America is wasting a whole lot of IPs, and other parts of the world are running out.

Re:2 solutions

[Zathrus]

Actually allocate the addresses in a way that has some semblance of fairness to it.

Ok... so define "fair". Sure, China has 1.1B people. How many of them have a computer? How many of them even have access to one? Not to mention the little niggling detail of the Great Firewall of China, which means that nearly every system is firewalled and NAT'd anyway.

India is a somewhat better scenario really, with nearly as many people but (on average) a much higher technology level. As I recall they have fewer IP addresses than China too.

But if you do it based on number of systems potentially needing an IP then the US will still be high up on the list... probably #1. Certainly not 70% of the IPs, but far more than the population would otherwise indicate.

The real question isn't whether or not to reallocate the existing IP structure (large portions of which have already been reallocated, which is convienently ignored), but whether we should move to IPv6 or more aggressive use of NAT and similar technologies.

No...

[weston]

If IPv6 is actually adopted before the heat-death of the universe, we'll probably be running out of IP addresses for Mars.

Maybe they should limit them!

[mhore]

Only 1 per family.

*ducks*

Re:IPv6?

[Sexy Commando]

NAT is simply not the long term solution, and it is going to cause headaches when dealing with wireless devices.

Japan can have some of our IP addresses...

[ibbie]

...when they start releasing their US-version video games and anime in a more timely manner. :D

Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem?

[emcron]

IPv6 will not run out of addresses - it will use 128-bit address space. This is 4 Billion times 4 Billion times 4 Billion times the size of the IPv4 address space. This works out to approximately 665,570,793,348,866,943,898,599 IP addresses per square meter of the surface of the planet Earth. Plenty of addresses for both your toaster and your waffle iron.

More here: http://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng/html/INET-IPng- Paper.html

Korea wasteful of IP addresses

[whoever57]

Of course, Asia's problem is entirely unrelated to Korea handing out blocks of 64 numbers to elementary schools, blocks of 128 to middle schools, etc.

Have they not heard of NAT?

Re:whats the ratio?

[phoenix_rizzen]

Ah, but it's not just computers that need IPs. There's all the embedded controllers that need IPs, and the phones, PDAs, pocket PCs, tablets, monitoring equipment, and so on. A single person could require half a dozen or more IPs.

And don't forget the public kiosks, the commercial networks, and so on. Not all of these can be placed on a private network (although most can).

Even with sensible NAT setups, it's very easy to run out of IPs before every person has a computer.

Re:IPv6?

[pVoid]

Yeah... NAT off the great firewall of China.

I can just see in the far far future, when there will be sentient computer programs, they will refer to China as "the anti-matter land"...

"Mother sentient program: In the anti-matter land, there is someone with the exact same IP address as yours son...

Child sentient program: Woooww..."

Re:IPv6? Yes because NAT is too limited

[jcdr]

NAT is pefect to extend the network of one single entity, but is a very limited solution to extend the network to several entity.

If you have only one public adresse you have a single port for each services. Despite the fact that most services can extended by virtual one this is not the case for all of them (think SSH, or IPSec for example) and this require a high degre of coordination between the entity.

So IPv6 could be the cheapest way to solve the problem. And this could provids a good boost to the network market...

Re:70% Seems fair

[Sexy Commando]

Aren't Linksys routers made in Taiwan?

Get with the times

[Royster]

Classless addressing is 10 years old. Go read about CIDR if you can still find any of theose ancient documents. There are no more class As. There haven't been for a decade. Any old Class As were chopped up into /9s, /10s ... , and /26s ages ago.

Re:Get with the times

[Skapare]

The legacy class A assignments just became /8 assignments. Not all of them have been chopped up (other than inside the companies with those assignments). Maybe those companies should be the first to go with IPv6.

Re:Article Text

[kiolbasa]

"Most vendors have worked to ensure their products have interoperability between IPv6 and IPv4 and because migration and deployment of IPv6 networks across the globe will be gradual, gradual as michael easing himself into taco's backside, the two standards will coexist for many years to come."

So, do you do this to subvert the moderators, or to catch logged-in karma whores who copy-paste AC posts of the article text into their own posts?

Re:2 solutions

[-brazil-]

The point is that they're not using them - there's a number of US companies (not ISPs) that have class A networks assigned to them, meaning they have a hundred or more times as many IP adresses as employees.

Re:They should really swap to IPV6 then..

[frisket]

Better, they should cut off all the Chinese spammers. You'd free up maybe half the 22M addresses that way.

I don't want to buy a goddamn bulldozer from Gung-Ho Province.

IP Evolution

[tarsi210]

It's just IP Evolution, folks.

Why hasn't IPv6 been adopted yet? Because it's expensive to switch, or a pain in the ass, or both, or people are stubborn, or....There's a million reasons, some better than others.

However, this is the sort of thing that you will see and will enable IPv6 to come into use. Necessity is the mother of invention, right? Well, we have the invention, now we just need the necessity. Running out of IP space? Sounds like a good necessity to me!

I'm not really worried about it. They'll either NAT it or they'll switch. If they switch (which I hope they do), it'll just encourage more of the world to do so. The market embraces the greater of a) what makes sense or b) what people are using. Evolution in action.

this newsbreak...

[Connie_Lingus]

has been sponsered by Cisco and Nortel, makers of fine routers and hubs since...well, for a couple of years now.

Re:IPv6?

[DJ Rubbie]

Nah, NAT will solve the problem - about a zillion times less expensive to implement.

Nope, absolutely wrong.

While all computers on the same NAT can directly connect to others, it cannot do so easily to others on another NAT, or other 'real' IP addresses. This effectively prevents anyone from running any server that can serve to networks outside the NAT, unless some ports are designated at the NAT router level specificly for that particular server. I don't see ISP's or network admins designating specific port ranges for every computer, as it takes work, and it could conflict with applications that uses specific port ranges (such as file transfers on MSN used by illiterate users who can't use ftp).

I would say using NAT to solve this problem is all but a cheap bandage that will cost more in the long run. IPv6 must be implemented soon to ensure the continue growth of the Internet.

Re:whats the ratio?

[EdgeShadow]

With IPv4, China has only 22 million IP addresses for its population of 1.3 billion people. Last year, it had about 17 million Internet subscribers, and the figure will hit 62.5 million in 2007. Japan and Korea will also run out of addresses soon, she said.

Regardless of ratios, the fact is that China, Japan, and Korea are simply running out of addresses. Though costly, implementing IPv6 is a necessity and will take care of the address shortage. Besides, most of the newer OS's (XP, Linux 2.2 or higher, OS/X) already have IPv6 built in.

good, less spam

[kevincw01]

And when they're forced to move to ipv6, ill be sure to take note of what they get so I can REJECT that in my /etc/mail/access.db too.

Re:good, less spam

[Tablizer]

It is all those spam servers over there that use it up :-)

Re:They should really swap to IPV6 then..

[cloudmaster]

That, or they should just take all of the addressess that are listed in all the RBLs and reassign them. Korea alone has several ranges that are being wasted... :)

What he said...

[randomErr]

Everyone is saying they should convert to IPv6.

We all know that Asian countries should convert to IPv6. The better question is will they?

The answer is and overwhelming No. Most organizations will convert to NAT and release some of thier B classes. Others will switch to pre-existing, non-IP based, protocals with cheap interfaces like token ring(Think Novell and IPX). A handful of companies will setup a IPv6 router that will tunnel thier IPv4 traffic.

With the recession no one, especially Asian countries, has the money or time to convert.

Re:What he said...

[Eric Smith]

Others will switch to pre-existing, non-IP based, protocals with cheap interfaces like token ring(Think Novell and IPX).

Surely you jest. No one in their right mind would switch from IP to non-IP protocols at this point, and even if they did, they certainly wouldn't need to switch to Token Ring to do it. Token Ring is dead, dead, dead! And good riddance!

As I see it...

[zipsonic]

THe majority of articles/posts/blogs re IPv6 say that it will change the world and solve all our problems, but everyone cites the chicken/egg example as to why it doesnt happen.

We know that we have a limited IP space. We know that IPv6 has better security features. We know that the US is very stingy on everything it does. Articles telling us all this wont change anything.

Not trying to diminish the fact that it needs to be fixed, but SOMEONE NEEDS TO START THE PROCESS AND FIX IT!

It will take big corporations and ISP's to finally say, You cant do business with us unless you move. We need a big change to happen like this or IPv6 will take 20 yrs to become a reality... and you think we have IP problems now?

Re:As I see it...

[TopShelf]

Then why don't they just try IPv5 as an interim step, so it wouldn't be so scary to take on???

Re:As I see it...

[amorsen]

Why don't you switch? What is stopping you?

And before you turn that one back on me: I am already dual-stack with NAT'd IPv4 and real IPv6 addresses for the hosts. So I am not holding things back. I love autoconfiguration by the way. No configuration on the hosts at all. IPv6 is so simple and easy compared to IPv4.

Re:As I see it...

[maxpublic]

I ignore AC's. Use your real name.

Your parents must've had a sick sense of humor. If your real name is 'dacarr', is your brother's name 'daplane! daplane!'?

Max

IPV6 won't happen...

[scovetta]

until a business need exists for it. Since US companies (ISPs, schools, etc) will have to back it first, and most won't make any extra money from Lao Po in Beijing having a class D instead of a NAT'ed single IP, I don't see this happening. And since US ISPs are now NAT'ing and giving people gateways like 255.255.255.254, they've delayed our running out of IPs for quite a while. And to the guy who mentioned that MIT probably isn't using their entire class A, I think they've given a unique IP to each student, book, pencil, and brick on campus.

APNIC

[mlyle]

One quibble-

Asia doesn't get numbering from the American Registry for Internet Numbers; they come from APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Center).

Otherwise, a good point.

Re:NO IP for YOU!!!

[irving47]

That's funny. We used to call our IP administrator the IP Nazi.

Of course, that changed when he was promoted and the new guy was German... Well, it changed out loud in public!

NAT China

[Nom du Keyboard]

China, for example, was assigned 22 million IP addresses (for a population of 1.3 billion)

Given that China has already firewalled the whole country, why don't they just NAT the whole country as well. Then, with a little cleverness, they can have the whole address space available to them alone.

30% of ipv4 space still unallocated

[ruud]

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.

Crazy size of the IPv6 address space...

[patniemeyer]

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...

[spaceyhackerlady]

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:Crazy size of the IPv6 address space...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh gawd yes. A geeky chick. It's a slashdot wet dream cum true!

Do some more math for us. You know how that turns us on!

Re:Crazy size of the IPv6 address space...

[apachetoolbox]

are you married? :)

Re:Crazy size of the IPv6 address space...

[Col Bat Guano]

Yes, but just wait until we get an Interplanetary Internet. Then you'll have to start mapping IP addresses to the surface area of all the other planets as well, and that's sure to thin things out a bit.

Re:They should really swap to IPV6 then..

[Anonymous Coward]

IPv6 doesn't really exist though, like santa, the tooth fairy and eskimos....

Re:Is this...

[HiThere]

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.

Me too...

[FuzzyDaddy]

The world has been running out of IP addresses, and suffering from global warming for as long as I can remember...

And people tell me I'm going to die some day for as long as I can remember... of all the crazy ideas...

Will IPV6 really solve this?

[moosesocks]

I'm not sure if IPv6 will solve anything. It seems to me that the whole concept of "IP addressing" seems quite archaic. The international telephone system doesn't need to 'dish out' phone numbers between countries - each country has its own country code, and everything else is handled wihin the country.

Hell. The whole concept of the 'internet' by means of Tcp/IP is becoming quite dated. Why can't we combine the domain naming system with the IP system. What I would propose is to give each computer on a given domain an alphanumeric name (can contain any type of characters, and is decided by the owner of the domain - basically the same as todays concept of a 'hostname'. The domains, in turn, are managed by an independent organization in each country, followed by a country code. For example, a sample address would be
Joe Smith@Earthlink@USA (users within the USA can leave the @USA blank)

this eliminates the need for a domain naming system. takes a lot of power away from ICANN, would help to solve cybersquatting, and provides an infinite number of computer addresses (at no point should the 'name' need to be translated into a numeric address.

Computers behind a router should be able to have their own address as well (multiple servers on one address without the mess of port forwarding! With many home users now running their own web/music servers, this could be a godsend. For example:
MediaServer@JohnSmith@Earthlink@USA

Anybody should be able to get their domain, but those who do not have their own should simply share one with their ISP.

Unix geeks will probably balk at my radical ideas. but it needs to be done. the numbered IP system was concieved when the only computers on the 'net were run by the people who wrote the protocols,. Nowindays, computers are used by everybody (and their grandmothers!). and it made sense too, as bandwidth was very limited, and the programmers never intended for so many computers to be on the net, and cut corners to gain a small speed advantage (a few bits per packet - which was a lot back then. now, it's nothing). IPv6 simply continued to use (longer) archaic addresses - the problem still exists; we need another layer for domain names, and it's confusing as hell to non-geeky types)

I know my ideas seem radical, and will probably never be accepted... but I certainly would hope that we fix some of this. IPv6 isn't a solution - it's avoiding the problem.

(yes, this was somewhat inspired by Apple's rendevous, which addresses many of my concerns, but is by no means acceptable for a worldwide scale. On a side note, I believe that in order for rendevous to succeed, Apple needs to open it up, and allow M$ and Linux to interoperate with it.)

IPv6 + NATPT

[nsayer]

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:IPv6 + NATPT

[Lxy]

When is /. going to support IPv6?

I love IPv6. I've played with it in the lab, and it's nifty! I'm in charge of restructuring my company's IP layout, guess what I suggested. Interestingly enough, when I proposed my plan on #ipv6 on freenode, the answer was a resounding DON'T DO IT. I have too much legacy stuff laying around that just won't support IPv6. Funny thing is, we are doing well on technology. I think of all the other businesses in worse shape than us, and I start to think. There is no way in hell IPv6 migration will happen any time soon. It's sometimes hard for us to see, especially when we do transparent stuff at home. What we forget is all the weird hardware that companies still depend on. There is some stuff that just won't go. We bought a Cisco router 3 years ago, its IOS won't support IPv6. That's only 3 years ago! Think of the legacy crap that was installed 10 years ago that still runs! NT servers that no one upgrades because they still work. We still have a Windows 3.1 machine that does its job, and in fact we broke trying to upgrade! Still works, it's easier to leave it alone. This kind of stuff happens everywhere, I've seen plenty of businesses with old hardware that's costly to upgrade and not broken.

IPv6 is great in the lab, and with brand new networks it's wonderful. Too much legacy hardware is going to keep it from being adopted on a large scale, and it won't happen anytime soon.

Well

[mindstrm]

Technically, nobody "OWNS" Ip addresses; it is a convention we all adhere to and everything works together.

If, say, China just took a few class A spaces belonging to companies they don't care about in the US, and started using them internally, and even if a few other countries started agreeing with them, there would be no problem. As long as you don't go announcing routes to others in violation of how they want to do things, you are fine.

Nothing at the IANA forces anyone to use a certain address; they don't controll routing.. they just say who owns what, and those with the power to route defer to that to decide if they should do something or not.

Perhaps NAT is a solution

[nurb432]

I dont see IP6 happening anytime soon, perhaps if they enforce NAT connections for everyone they can extend the lifetime a bit...

True it sucks to be stuck behind firewalls but its better then nothing..

Re:whats the ratio?

[GlassHeart]

How much of ther population have even seen a computer? How many can read?

The CIA factbook reports 81.5% who can read and write. That's roughly one billion people, about four times the total population of the US. As of 2002, there are some 45.8 million Internet users in China.

In comparison, the US has about 166 million Internet users.

think about the same ratios in the US.

Yeah, let's do that. 22 million IPs for some 46 million Internet users comes to just under 1 IP address every two people. Since the US has 70% of the 4 billion IP addresses, that comes to just over 18 IP addresses per Internet user. The US now holds 36 times more IP addresses per Internet user than China.

What do you think now?

Re:This is a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Those who do not learn from history....

[Orne]

Apparently 95% of the slashdot community consists of either clueless newbie programmers, or people with huge chips on their shoulders outside of the United States....

The internet was developed by the United States using US capital, both intellectual and financial. It was a military project, then academic, then commercial, so IP address space was doled out in that order, to .mil and .gov, then to .edu, then to .coms .orgs and .nets. And THEN they went international. So it should be no surprise to everyone that a majority of the address space is reserved for the United States governments and academia (it is already mentioned that MIT holds a class A node).

I'm sick and tired of people calling for such-and-such to be "fair", where their definition of "fair" involves taking something (that cost a lot of investment) from the creators and giving it out (for free) to their friends and nations. There's nothing fair about this, because there doesn't have to be! Its a freakin internet address, made to fit an international scheme that was designed after the fact... There was no design at the beginning that Country A would get everything with 0x01... Besides, anyone with skills understands there are ways to work with the system, as also mentioned above: NAT, firewalling, subnetting...

Is it "fair" that cell phone are being designed to consume addresses to do messaging, or is that a design flaw? IMO, it's the Latter; do the same thing with DHCP and recycled addresses like any ISP. Is the US greedy, or a big corporate conspiracy to keep the asian markets out of the internet? How about it's really a case where the other players entered the game twenty years behind the times, and that's all that was left. Build your own addressing, implement it, and enough with the complaining about how the USA chooses to do its business!

Re:ISPs to lose source of revenue with IPv6

[xchino]

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.

Re:70% Seems fair

[Xformer]

Should get them a shipping discount, if nothing else .

Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem?

[SeattleGameboy]

Are you an just ignorant idiot or IQ-challenged fool who refuses to learn ANY mathmatics? Dude! Read the post! It clearly states IPV6 will provide 665,570,793,348,866,943,898,599 per square meter of the planet earth!!! If you believe you will have 665,570,793,348,866,943,898,599 story tall building convering every square inch of this planet within next million billion years - you are an idiot. READ before you post... READ before you post... Keep repeating that yourself.... IDIOT!

Re:IANA

[tomhudson]

IANA - Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

But it does work with IANAPDN -Public Data Network, etc. Hadn't noticed that.

Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem?

[hesiod]

> 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).

Re:IPv6?

[York the Mysterious]

My old school district had a neat NAT setup. Every server in the district had the same NATed IP, but if you made a request for the DNS address of a server on a specific allowed port it wold forward it to the internal IP. Very smart NAT. It also makes a lot of port scanners that require IPs worthless.
mail.nths.nvusd.k12.ca.us request on port 80 go to 10.10.10.3:80
mail.nths.nvusd.k12.ca.us request on 25 goes to 10.10.10.3:25
nths.nvusd.k12.ca.us request on port 80 goes to 10.10.10.2
It was probably loads of fun to manually set this up, but it works

Re:They should really swap to IPV6 then..

[Fishstick]

Banky: Alright, now see this? This is a four-way road, OK? And dead in the center is a crisp, new, hundred dollar bill. Now, at the end of each of these streets are four people, OK? Are you following?

Holden: Yeah.

Banky: Good. Over here, we have a male-affectionate, easy to get along with, non-political agenda lesbian. Down here, we have a man-hating, angry as fuck, agenda of rage, bitter dyke. Over here, we got Santa Claus, and up here the Easter Bunny. Which one is going to get to the hundred dollar bill first?

Holden: What is this supposed to prove?

Banky: No, I'm serious. This is a serious exercise. It's like an SAT question. Which one is going to get to the hundred dollar bill first? The male-friendly lesbian, the man-hating dyke, Santa Claus, or the Easter bunny?

Holden: The man-hating dyke.

Banky: Good. Why?

Holden: I don't know.

Banky: Because the other three are figments of your fucking imagination!

Are you sure?

[dark-br]

IPv6 will not run out of addresses

Hum... till ppl start assigning one ip address per fridge, cooker, toaster, air cond., etc...

My fridge will have one for each drawer so i can have a shell script to check for lack of booze and order more online :)

Re:Are you sure?

[swillden]

Hum... till ppl start assigning one ip address per fridge, cooker, toaster, air cond., etc...

Umm... no.

2^128 addresses means that every one of the 7 billion people on the planet can have 48,611,766,702,991,209,066,196,372,490 addresses of their very own.

That's a lot of appliances.

Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem?

[Erisian Pope]

I live in the 3rd dimension, and have 2 families living directly below me. Also keep in mind that the population of humans is growing pretty fast...so it may be possible to run out of IPv6 addresses too.

Wow! You must live on a pretty big planet. The one I'm on couldn't possibly support enough people to run out of IPv6 addresses.

I did a little math. Turns out that with 2^128 addresses, 1000 addresses per person, it'd take 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211 people to use them all. Averaging that these people way around 90kg (180 lbs), they come to a mass of 3.0625e37 kg. For some comparison, the earth's mass is 5.972e24 kg, our sun is 1.989e30 kg. Thats more mass than is in my whole galaxy!

Greed is why we are short on addresses

[Halvard]

Yep, plain and simple. Why else would IBM and Harvard each still have a couple of class A's or somesuch. Inertia? Sure they were around early in the days of arpanet or near.net or fsf.net, etc., but they don't need that many addresses. Really, both could get away with private addresses on approximately (I'm making this number up arbitrarily) 90& of their networks and probably more. MIT's up there for address space as well.

Someone is going to chime in with I'm clearly wrong, not in an enterprise environment, or some such. Well I own and run an ISP. We light office buildings, no one has a public IP (well, some have static NAT'd addresses) so we can get away with using a fraction of the IP addresses we normally need. We are living proof that the number of addresses required really is a fraction of what most organizations use.

No one likes losing addresses from their netblock assignment. However, there is a greater good here. The technological haves or early adopters have grossly disproportionate assignments. Large numbers of organizations switching over to RFC 1918 blocks and NATing would solve much of the address shortage. It would have a side benefit of additional security as well.

Re:Greed is why we are short on addresses

[Halvard]

So, you pay for a house, and spend time fixing that house up to be the way you want it, but if you are one person with a house and there are 10 homeless familys outside, using your logic, the fact you paid for and put your own work into that hosue for you is totally irrelevant, you should be forced to share?

I think this is more akin to White colonial powers in Africa than buying a house. Seems to me it time for some land redistribution.

Maybe if asia had something to contribute or help with back in the day, they would have been given the IPs needed to do their work improving the internet. Unfortunatly that isnt what happened.

Of course, it largely was funded by the US government (they still pony up a chunk to run it today I know). But those days are over. It's a distributed system that now is used by people all over the world, with network portions owned by organizations all over the world.

Why doesnt asia convince IANA to allocate some of the unused IP space to them, instead of trying to bully space away from people that actually made the internet able to exist as it is today?

You don't own your netblock and neither do the organizations that were involved early on. There's power in inertia but that object is still moveable.

I think this is more akin to the US continuing to control things just like with naming and ICANN and all the secrecy. I'll leave bringing up previous ICANN related rants by others to the reader.

In other words, shortsighted...

[SuperKendall]

considering the size of our galaxy.

Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem?

[pclminion]

No one thought IP4 would run out either...

Even if there were a billion trillion people on Earth, each person would still have 340 thousand trillion addresses. Assuming you have about 50 trillion cells in your body, this means you can assign nearly 7000 IPv6 addresses to each cell in your body.

If you think that's limited, you seriously need your head checked out.

Oh shut it with the PC nonsense

[FallLine]

The fact is that the market penetration of PCs is China is less than 1%. That means that, in all likelyhood, less than 1M people even have the ability to use an IP concurrently (presuming 100% connectivity). The United States, for comparison's sake, has at least 50% market penetration in PCs and as many internet users (roughly 150m US citizens). Not to mention the HUGE disparities in even the most fundamental utilities like fixed-phone lines and power. Did you know that less than 12% of China has a fixed phoneline in the house? Contrast this with the United States that has roughly 99% of houses wired. China simply has VASTLY less ability to consume IP addresses. In fact, I would be SHOCKED if they're even using 1/2 of their current allocation. This isn't even mentioning US industry, academia, households with more than 1 computer, wireless data, and so on that is very substantial in the US. China may have a much bigger raw population count, but their wired population is certainly much smaller (especially if you look at real regularity as opposed to China's official stats) because most of them are poor, lack basic power, sanation, phone, etc. Please think before you speak. Thank you.

Oh btw, a couple links:

http://www.eb-asia.com/EBA/issues/0009/0009trend s. htm

http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/docu me nts/apcity/unpan001523.pdf

I'd love to some facts to backup your claim of 45.8m internet users in China (besides the usually inflated official stats that come out of their government)

Re:Oh shut it with the PC nonsense

[GlassHeart]

Please think before you speak. Thank you.

Please try to be polite, mainly because you could be wrong, but also if you're right.

Your fundamental mistake is thinking of China as a single country, and pretending that the percentages makes sense. You think that "12% phone penetration" means that ten people share one phone, which is completely wrong. The fact is probably that 10 of the 12% are owned by 5% of the people, and the 2% left are owned by 95% of the people. (I made up the actual numbers as an example.)

That is, it's infinitely more useful to think of China as two countries: one with a population of 65 million and two phones each, and another with a population of 1.2 billion and very few phones. The needs of "China One" are very different from the needs of "China Two".

Coming back specifically to this issue, the question is how we figure the demand per Internet user for an IP address. This involves direct needs (equipment owned by the user) and indirect needs (servers that were built to satisfy this user). All in all, the US now consumes some 3 billion IP addresses with about 160 million users, and "China One" consumes 22 million IP addresses with about 40 million users.

The ratio here is off by about 30x. That is, on average, US Internet users require 30x more IP addresses than a Chinese Internet user. The challenge here is to explain the discrepancy, and to determine if the US is wasteful. Beyond the population, there's also the question of "how much Internet" the user consumes. Somebody who just uses email obviously has a smaller need than somebody who downloads Linux ISOs.

Your task, should you wish to defend the discrepancy, is to show that "China One" really doesn't need that many IPs, rather than diluting the needs of "China One" with the sheer numbers of "China Two".

I'd love to some facts to backup your claim of 45.8m internet users in China

CIA World Factbook. It's probably your responsibility if they're lying again. :)

Re:Oh shut it with the PC nonsense

[GlassHeart]

Given that there are probably no more than, say, 10m PCs in all of China, please tell me why they need more than 2x as many IPs.

Try not to say "nonsense" and "inescapable logic" right before you start guessing.

This article states that PC sales exceeded 10.1 million units in 2002 alone. Assuming that people keep their PCs for 3 years (which is not unreasonable for a poorer country where a PC is a major investment), we should be talking about a population of over 20 million PCs. Even that conservative estimate is already twice your guess. In fact, if you believe this article, China overtook Japan as the second biggest PC market in the world last year.

Prove it. I think you mis-googled.

The CIA World Factbook China page, under "Communications", says "Internet Users: 45.8 million (2002)".

In any event though, even if they have 50m internet users, it doesn't mean there is a problem.

The trouble with Slashdot, and in particular with folks of "inescapable logic", is that you don't actually read. Where did I ever say there was a problem? I was answering somebody's question as to how many people in China can read or write, or have ever seen a computer, relative to the US. Later, I was correcting your apparent mental block with the low percentages of users from China.

Re:Oh shut it with the PC nonsense

[GlassHeart]

That stat came from China's state-run news agency which has been documented to inflate figures hundreds of times and even out right lie. Please get another source.

Sure. This quotes the IDC as expecting "China's PC sales to nearly double in a few years, from 11.3 million in 2002 to 21.1 million in 2006." Note that IDC's estimates are even higher than Xinhua's.

Furthermore, do not confuse current market share of NEW computers with the installed base of PCs as a whole.

Who's showing signs of confusion? I estimated conservatively (assuming people keep computers for 3 years), that there are 20 million PCs in use in China, based on sales figures in 2002. I further quoted that China now has the second largest PC market, which is not the same as installed base.

It is quite possible for China to have much millions more NEW sales than Japan because of their economic growth and still have fewer installed computers at the end of the year or even 5 years.

That's actually less likely. Poor countries are likely to hang on to PCs longer than rich countries. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a good number of 5-year old computers in use in China.

When, at last count, less than 1% of households have PCs and few people are likely to be able to afford or use multiple computers; it's basic math and a tiny amount of extropolation.

Your 1% figure is simply inaccurate. The 10.1 or 11.3 million PCs sold in 2002 already account for the 1%, and that's assuming nobody in this third world country throw away their computer after one year.

However, your meaning came across quite clearly on my end because of your insistance that the apparent disparity needs to be justified somehow.

Try to understand that some people don't give a damn one way or the other, except that people are arguing the right topics (in this case, actual users versus percentage of population), and are using the right numbers to back up their arguments.

Another sign of rock and roll excesses

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

Asia Running Out Of IP Addresses

What the hell is a prog-rock super-band from the 80's doing with 22 million IP addresses?

Do they give them away to groupies with the backstage passes? Did entire blocks come free with the purchase of an lp? Were they traded for drugs and amps that go up to "11"?

This kind of rock n' roll excess is just so sad.

IPv6 is fundamentally broken ... wait for IPv7

[Skapare]

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.

Re:IPv6 is fundamentally broken ... wait for IPv7

[Skapare]

I certainly don't want to run my DNS server's in someone else's address space. That space could die, too. If I host with someone else, what's to prevent their AS from being misrouted, and all their multi-homed connections to become useless? You can't run DNS on more IP addresses than you can put in the NS and A records, so the parallel multiple address methods are not workable. Instead, IPv6 just needs a decent highly scalable routing system that, unlike BGP, does follow the principle of keeping the end points smart and the network stupid.

Re:IPv6? Yes because NAT is too limited

[Skapare]

If your company thinks NAT is too limited, then it should have gotten, or be getting, its own IPv6 assignment. Cite the address. If it's a case of your management not understanding the problem and the solution, give me your CEO's home phone number and I'll given him a call at 3AM and whisper into his ear "IPv6 ... IPv6 ... you want IPv6 ... IPv6 will make your network better, faster, cheaper ... IPv6 ... do IPv6 now".

OK, a thought here

[dacarr]

Everybody is saying that IPv6 is gonna solve world hunger (at least, as far as IP addresses goes). But here's the thing - has Microsoft adopted it, and accordingly made Windoze whatever compatible? Last I checked, this wasn't the case.

Yes, I know, IPv6 is backward compatible, but let's not confuse the higher-ups with the facts. Just hear me out, 'k?

Microsoft enters the picture for one good reason: they are still the leading provider of operating systems. Most people still run Windows, and if indeed Microsoft is not IPv6 ready, you're going to alienate most of the users on the 'net.

OK, fine, blab all you want about the merits of Suzie Luser not being able to send emails full of run-on sentences, punctuation errors!!!!, and speling and errors grammatically to suzielusersmom13498572349657@aol.com, but consider this - ISPs such as AOL, Earthlink, Speakeasy, SBC, etc., etc., ad nauseam accordingly won't move to IPv6 when their primary customer base is still stuck in IPv4. There's just no need to make the expenditure right now because it doesn't affect them right now.

International as early as 1973

[Fzz]

Actually it went international long before IP was even in use. University College London joined the ARPAnet back in 1973. TCP and IP were only standardized in 1978.

strict requirements

[Tancred]

If any of you have been finding it a bit difficult to get space from ARIN, consider yourselves lucky. RIPE's tougher to get space from. And APNIC and JPNIC sometimes seem to guard their remaining IP space insanely. I hear about registries asking for receipts for all the supposed servers you've got installed as well as why you need so many. Sometimes they'll tour the facility to be sure you really need that large a netblock. This one's through the grapevine, but it's a usually reliable grapevine - one company was turned down and told to buy a certain type of hardware that would handle higher loads with fewer IP addresses.

It's a tough question - should early adopters with huge blocks of space be required to renumber (a very painful process) even though they're generally the ones that got the whole thing moving in the first place? Those early class A blocks don't even require annual payments. Go to an ARIN meeting sometime to hear some lively debate on that subject.

IPv6 is going to have to be pushed outside the U.S. None of the big backbones are rolling out anything substantial anytime soon. Nobody in the U.S. is feeling enough pain from IPv4 to need to do it. Besides, we'd really need some v6-optimized hardware too to get it going natively everywhere.

All of Pakistan was under ONE IP address

[mnmn]

Some time ago, PakNet was the biggest ISP in Pakistan serving hundereds of thousands under ONE ip address... interestingly using Linux kernel version 1.3.x. I also remember every user had a shell account from which we could cat the /etc/passwd, which was not surprisingly humungous. For a while, BrainNet and PakNet were the only ISPs in Pakistan, and later ISPs could only connect to Paknet, and their single monolithic IP address. I remembed always being banned from IRC servers which were blocking users by their IP addresses. Talk about one huge NAT and this is the biggest Muslim country in the world.

And on this side, here in Toronto, Bell assigns a subnet of 8 IPs to every customer, including ones who need just one. 3 of those IPs are gateway, broadcast and 00 host, which leaves 5 IPs. two of them are assigned to the on-site router and off-site routers which are connected via DSL. Its one of the best examples of IP address waste, while the Chinese crave a personal, their very own IP address!

Theoretically all of the more than 4 billon IP addresses can be used, and it is VERY unlikely that the whole worlds population would be online. But the imbalance remains with the US holdin on to all the Oil and IP addresses. At least we can do something about one of them.

They Really Have Plenty

[DaveAtFraud]

Its just that most of them are blocked/DNS blacklisted because of all the spam that gets sent from them. From my sendmail access source file:

...
cn.net REJECT
cn.com REJECT
com.cn REJECT
net.cn REJECT
fj.cn REJECT
sina.com REJECT
sh.cn REJECT
...

I gave up on specific senders. I'm guessing the spammers have run through quite a bit of the address block and that's why they're running out of addresses.

Certified FUD

[FunkyMarcus]

Fear.
Uncertainty.
Doubt.

The reality is that there's plenty of IPv4 space available and there will be for years to come. APNIC may be nearing the exhaustion of the address space currently assigned to that region of the world, but that doesn't mean that more space won't be assigned.

The Asia-Pacific region got additional IP address space in April 2003.
And February 2003.
And July 2002.
And December 2001, September 2001, and December 2000.
And so on.

And there's more space where that came from. Plenty of it. In fact, nearly half of IPv4's 32-bit address space is still up for grabs.

For more, see this and various other pages reachable by cutting-edge clickable links!

Mark

Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem?

[frovingslosh]

IPv6 will not run out of addresses - it will use 128-bit address space.

By my limited understanding of IPv6, this statement is rather false and misleading. Is the address space 128 bits? Yes, somewhat. But does that give a good account of the number of addresses available, NO. IPv6 has several different types of addresses, and the total number of actual addresses is far smaller that 2^128 would indicate.

Then

[geekoid]

why are vendors being pressured by Asian companies to supply IPv6 compatibility with new products?

Why is MS pushing the IPv6 compatibility of there new operating systems so hard in China?

Most new applicable hardware supports both IPv4 and 6

Don't underestimate the forward and long term planning of the Chinese.

NAT still useful

[That_Dan_Guy]

But you still have to admit NAT is useful in creating a poor man's firewall and helping to keep your private network private.

Re:NAT still useful

[dknj]

[firewall]
allow all outgoing connections
allow any established incoming connections
deny any incoming connections

[NAT box]
forward all outgoing connections
forward any established incoming connections
deny any incoming connections

hmm looks like nat boxes can be used as a poorman's firewall. now if you want to implement state based rules or other goodies, this is were the firewall steps ahead.

-dk

Connection to your toaster is not optized!

[SpaceForRent]

Just great!
Does that mean that we will see all these "connection to your toaster is not optimized" pop-up messages?

Try and get IPv6 support from your ISP

[jroysdon]

I called up my ADSL provider, SBC (formerly PacBell): Took 4 people before I finally had someone who know what the difference was between IPv4 and IPv6. No plans to offer it anytime soon. No demand, customers aren't asking for it (I was the first, they claimed).

I called up my T1 providers at work - MCI/UUNET and Sprint. Neither one offer production IPv6 services. Sprint was offering tunneling to a test-bed IPv6 network (on the 6BONE), but I've emailed the contact 3 times, no reply. Same with UUNET, I emailed the US-UUNET 6BONE contacts, no reply. I did actually get a reply from the South Africa UUNET contact (funny thing is I know him from Shadowfire IRC).

You simply cannot convert to IPv6 here in the US without using the private IPv6 ranges (akin to IPv4 RFC1918 address space). Why? Because only ISPs get IPv6 address space, and then they are to assign it to sub-ISPs and/or businesses.

Actually, I take that back, if you want to pay for a T1 all the way to one of Hurrican Electric's sites, you can get native IPv6:
ipv6.he.net.

I've been using he.net's IPv6 tunnels to them for about 6 months. Mainly though, I set up tunnels between my sites, so the traffic isn't really flowing to he.net's network. Think of it as a VPN, but with globally unique IPv6 addresses (which you can access from any host that can get on the IPv6 backbone or tunnel via IPv4 to an IPv6 backbone).

So, everyone, email or call your ISP and tell them you'd like to get IPv6 address space.

But here's a thought, why should they spend the time and money to upgrade their infrastructure when what they have "works just fine" right now? Are you willing to pay more per month for your own IPv6 address space? I currently pay $15 more per month for my 5 (technically 9) static IPs from SBC. I'd trade those statics for a single IPv4 address and a IPv6 /64. I wouldn't pay even more for just IPv6 so long as there are free IPv6 tunnel brokers and I've got static IPv4 addresses to tunnel with.

Slashdot asleep at the wheel again....

[/Idiot\]

My fav bit... "Perhaps IPv6 will solve the problem."

Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem?

[NotQuiteReal]

Put your money where your mouth is. I, too say we will NEVER run out of IPV6 addresses, and to prove it I will bet you $US1,000,000.00 straight, up.

All I as is that you send me 10% now to hold the bet. I will pay off 1,100,000.00 if I lose the bet.

Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem?

[mfrank]

Man, even with a Dyson sphere IPv6 is overkill. You still get over 10^15 (a million billion) IP addresses per square meter.

Now, if you put a Dyson sphere around every sun in the galaxy, then you'll get down to a few thousand IP addresses per square meter. *Then* we need to think about going to IPv8.