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."
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..
It means that all of your IP addresses are belong to us. Wait a second--
Corporations are at fault?
by
sinergy
·
· Score: 5, Informative
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?
by
agentZ
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· 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
Re:Corporations are at fault?
by
tomhudson
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· Score: 4, Informative
... 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?
by
tomhudson
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
<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?
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.
32 bits ought to be enough
by
D0wnsp0ut
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· Score: 5, Funny
Perhaps IPv6 will solve the problem.
Perhaps this could signal a limit on the amount of spam coming from China?
-- "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither!"
time to give split up some class A's ?
by
i.r.id10t
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· Score: 4, Insightful
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.
-- Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Re:time to give split up some class A's ?
by
Tim+Macinta
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· Score: 5, Funny
I'm sure that even MIT isn't using all 16.something million addresses their 18.foo class A allows for.
This only means
by
earthforce_1
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
-- My rights don't need management.
Re:They should really swap to IPV6 then..
by
Sexy+Commando
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· Score: 5, Informative
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
by
illumin8
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· 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
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:2 solutions
by
Zathrus
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· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
Maybe they should limit them!
by
mhore
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· Score: 5, Funny
Only 1 per family.
*ducks*
--
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem?
by
emcron
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· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
Korea wasteful of IP addresses
by
whoever57
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· Score: 4, Funny
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?
-- The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Re:IPv6? Yes because NAT is too limited
by
jcdr
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· Score: 5, Informative
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...
Get with the times
by
Royster
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· Score: 4, Insightful
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.
-- I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Re:2 solutions
by
-brazil-
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
--
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer. --Henry Kissinger
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.
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.
-- Please direct all bug reports to/dev/null
30% of ipv4 space still unallocated
by
ruud
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Crazy size of the IPv6 address space...
by
patniemeyer
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· 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
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· 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:Crazy size of the IPv6 address space...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Funny
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:Is this...
by
HiThere
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· 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?
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.
--
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda :wq
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.
Re:whats the ratio?
by
GlassHeart
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
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
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
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· 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
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· 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).
Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem?
by
pclminion
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· Score: 4, Insightful
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.
Another sign of rock and roll excesses
by
c13v3rm0nk3y
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· Score: 4, Funny
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.
-- --
clvrmnky
IPv6 is fundamentally broken ... wait for IPv7
by
Skapare
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· 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:Oh shut it with the PC nonsense
by
GlassHeart
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
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.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still waiting for duke nukem forever!
The world has been running out of IP addresses, and suffering from global warming for as long as I can remember...
Blar.
Give em a few of those linksys routers...
It means that all of your IP addresses are belong to us. Wait a second--
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?
...
Perhaps this could signal a limit on the amount of spam coming from China?
"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither!"
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.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
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.
My rights don't need management.
RTFA
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
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
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.
Only 1 per family.
*ducks*
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
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
Have they not heard of NAT?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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...
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.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
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.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Then why don't they just try IPv5 as an interim step, so it wouldn't be so scary to take on???
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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?
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
-- clvrmnky
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
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. :)