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IP Shortage In Asia Just Myth, Says APNIC
rekkanoryo writes "News.com is carrying a story in which the Director General of APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre) says that the "shortage" of IP addresses in Asia is a total myth. There's also some talk of IPv6 in this article."
Also, the Iraqi Information Minister has once again emphasized that there are NO American tanks or forces in the city of Baghdad.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
What type of myth are we talking about here? A myth in the way that cellphone cancer is a myth, or a myth in the way the moon is a myth?
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Asia should be disconnected from the web. Damn spammers.
However, there is an overabundance of users.
Exec: No shortage of Net addresses
/8, addresses are consumed worldwide each year. Each block allows for 16 million host addresses. There are 100 blocks still available in the current IPv4 (IP version 4) system--enough for 20 years, or perhaps fewer when 3G, or third-generation, phones take off, but certainly more than the two years predicted by doomsayers, he said.
By John Lui
Special to CNET News.com
June 24, 2003, 6:04 PM PT
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-1020653.html
The idea that there is an Internet address shortage looming in Asia or any part of the world is "misinformation," according to a senior executive at the body responsible for Internet addresses in the Asia-Pacific region.
Paul Wilson, director general of APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre), which distributes and registers Internet address resources in that region, denies the shortage, saying that it will take one or even two decades before the current address system runs out.
"The source of the rumor has been one I've been tackling for the last five years, since I started in this position at APNIC," he said.
APNIC is one of four regional Internet registries currently operating. It provides allocation and registration services that support the operation of the Internet globally. The registry gets blocks of addresses from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA, in the United States before allocating these to Asia-Pacific Internet service providers and other bodies that ask for them.
Some industry analysts have predicted that IP (Internet Protocol) addresses will run out in as little as two years, as more people get access. The experts also point to the historical imbalance in the way addresses have been issued, with the United States grabbing the most, leaving little for the burgeoning Internet masses of China.
The sums just don't add up, Wilson said.
He said that around five blocks of "slash eight," or
Wilson cites several reasons for the birth of the myth of the IP address shortage and the related idea that Asia is a latecomer to the IP address buffet.
"There is a lingering perception that maybe APNIC has been difficult to get addresses from in the past, and people will simply look at the number of addresses allocated in different parts of the world and conclude that somehow things are different in the Asia-Pacific (region). Historically, they were different, but in today's world, they are not," he said.
Today, any organization applying for addresses plays by the same rules, regardless of which country it is from, he said.
"The blocks are allocated as they are required. So we don't have a set of addresses earmarked for the Asia-Pacific. There is no pre-allocation for the region which can run out. When addresses are not available, there will be no more addresses left for the whole world," he said.
The shift to IPv6
There are several good reasons to adopt IPv6 worldwide, he said, but he also hoped that there would be less lobbying from parties with a vested interest in pushing rapid adoption.
He warned of the adverse effect that could occur if panicked companies spent large sums on IPv6 networking hardware.
"The danger of doing that--if you promote that IP addresses are going to run out in a few years, then two or three years will pass, there will be no address shortage. Then what will people think about it?" he said.
However, he added that in the last two years, due to the efforts of APNIC and other bodies, such messages of doom have grown fainter.
In the last few years, the governments of Korea, China and Japan have been strong supporters of IPv6, their efforts strongly backed by domestic network equipment manufacturers and bodies such as the IPv6 Forum.
Equipment makers naturally want ISPs and enterprises to spend money to upgrade to IPv6-compatible products, while Asian governments have felt the new numbering system, with its hugely expanded address space, gave them
"There is no IP addresses shortage. We have more than 300 spare class A networks." - Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Sometimes I think it is ok to exagerrate the urgency of a problem. People were predicting that Y2K would be the end of the world which was probably a little extreme (picture Simpsons episode with plains falling straight out of the sky). Did it help get stuff done, though? Definitely. So now you tell the executives that the world will end if we don't go to IPv6 and see what happens. Who cares if the truth is 2 or 10 years away.
The US has no shortage of IP. Perhaps they could borrow some from us...
Oh, wait - you meant *internet protocol* and not *intellectual property*...
Nevermind...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Most of it is just pirated. You can buy Windows XP for $5 in Hong Kong! God bless capitalism.
For once I thought this was about Intellectual Property.
I didn't want to have to block mail from even more tainted subnets. ^_^
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
No, it's the third sort - it's FUD being spread by $CO (no doubt in conjunction with Micro$oft), who are claiming ownership of Asia's IP ... address space.
Look, I spelt them with dollar signs, so it's satire!
There was a mixup. This stemmed from an article titled "IP Users in Asia are Short"
And they also claimed that SARS was not a problem in China until it blew up in their faces. They just refuse to admit that they have a problem.
How ya like dat?
I would certainly hope this is a myth, but this is seriously becoming a problem. With all those new wireless networks out there, I could imagine IP addresses drying up at a pretty incredible rate in the next few years. I dont like IPv6 either though, too many numbers to make it managable. The new network admins are going to have to carry around a phone book just to know where all the ip addresses are in their network. Speaking of phones, why can't we simply augment the current IP system with an Area code feature? Seems like it'd be a lot easier than adding a billion bits to the IP address and it'd be a whole lot more managable. Just my 2 cents... (under bush economics its not even that much :/)
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
You too can have more IP with a time honored system...
maybe lack of IP is a good thing, as in less spam opportunities.
I was so saddened by this story that I have started taking up a collection in the office. So far I've collected more than 500 IP addresses to send not counting an entire block of 10.100.x.x
Woverly Harris Gooch, IV CTO American Fire and Bomb, LLC
APNIC is just a letter switch away from PANIC. Not exactly an organization I'd put a lot of faith in... :)
The reality is that broadband adoption is slower than anticipated and not everybody in Asia wants or can afford a computer. Not everyone who gets a cell phone wants to surf on it.
The implementation of IPv6 is to prevent the problem before it occurred.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Asia is a hopeless lie made up by the governemnt to justify military spending. Have you notived that the majority of wars in the past 50 years have been fought in this mythological continent?
It's quite obvious that it doesn't exist! Has anyone ever been there? Of course not! Do people come from there? No. We're meant to assume that all these Asians come from Asia. Hence the name. Well, these people are Asian-Americans! They come from America! Ask one next time you meet him. Ask where he is from. He'll say America (Unless you live in Europe or something that is).
As soon as we accept that Asia doesn't exist, we'll be able to free up all the IP addresses that have been assigned for use by the part of the world that does exist.
that is the same as adding another digit to the 2-digit representation of years. yes, it will solve the problem at hand, but while you are at it, you might as well redo the system, since you are going to have to change anyway.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
100 Mobile Phones are now network and application enabled with Java. In Europe and Asia these users do want to access the network, and already interactive phone applications are being developed.
This is a problem, and ESPECIALLY in the Far East where mobile use and advanced mobile features is high. Broadband access is also higher in many countries in the Far East.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
. . . the patent and copyright lawyers have all the IP tied up in court in the US!
Surley the predictied shortage with 3G (and this would actually require a few million 3G susbscribers, like thats gonna happen any time soon) could be reduced by using NAT, even if every IP covers 8 phones instead of 1 lets say. I really can't see that very many people are going to need incoming connections to their 3G phones , ok a few might, and maybe make it available to them for a slight cost increase.
IPv6
Adding area code features means now you have relativity playing a part in addresses -- 5.5.5.5 would no longer be unique, it could mean any one of hundreds of computers, depending on the area code. So unless you explictly use the area code every time (which, would be the same as using longer network names, which you want to avoid) you're going to run into problems. IN the tradeoff of short network address vs unqiueness, I'd take uniqueness every time.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
China was about to impose a 1 IP address per married couple law.
You could argue there's a shortage of IPv4 addresses everywhere as long as it involves more than the most trivial amount of effort or any cost to get hold of them.
IPv6 is very easy to set up and run on top of ipv4. More and more people are doing it and the most effort you have to do it enable the option in your kernel.
Running ipv6 on top of your existing ipv4 address is as simple as these 5 shell commands
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+IPv6-HOWTO/configu ring-ipv6to4-tunnels.html
People in asia have NAT boxes too. That will keep them connected for a while, before the world moves to IPv6(if?). For phones and toasters with IPv6 addresses they can tunnel over IPv4 as I do today with my IPv6 network at home.
What people seem to be missing in this is that there's a lot of space still around (100 /8's if the Director is to be believed), which is not allocated to *anyone* right now. If Asias use of IP space grows more rapidly than the US', then APNIC will simply ask for new allocations more often than ARIN would.
I can see running out of space being a concern during the 'net boom, since routing tables and IP space requests were growing exponentially during that time. But, the growth of the routing table has slowed down from that rate (see http://bgp.potaroo.net/), so the time when we'll run out has moved much farther back. We'll need to move to v6 eventually, sure, but I don't think it'll happen for 10 or so years.
Asia has just been sued for 3e18 dollars by SCO for infringing on their IP.
"Here, in this remote village in China, some children only get 1 or 2 IP address. They can go hours without checking slashdot. The good news is, you can help, for as little as 1 or 2 IP address a week, this child could troll as often as any other child in the world."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wilson cites several reasons for the birth of the myth of the IP address shortage and the related idea that Asia is a latecomer to the IP address buffet.
I always thought of IP addresses as 'served' by waiters, not chosen from a smorgasboard by the people themselves.
We found them. They were under the box of rice!
If I surf from my cell phone, am I really needing an IP address, or it it mux'd through the cell carrier? If I do have an IP address, then its a waste - the cell carrier could mux several web sessions through the single address.
"Stop whining!" - Arnold, as Mr. Kimble
What I'm really waiting for is more widespread implementation of IPv6. I know that I don't need 1,000 ip adresses for my apartment, but thats not the point. From an article that I read before, IPv6 was supposed to support a better performance because of less complex routing (did I say that?)
.. enough talk .. gibber me standardised IPv6!
what I'm really curious is about, is when can I get an IPv6 protocol for my windows boxen at home. I haven't seen IPv6 protocols for end user.
or, is IPv6 intended to be used for only the 'internet' and use IPv4 for use on all the internal networks, seems a lot cheaper to be able to use existing hardware, assuming the end router can differintiate it.
bah
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
1. /8 IP addresses are allocated on global basis
2. If there is any shortage it is a global shortage
3. But certainly not an "Asian Problem"
or.
1. Fantasise that 'Asia' actually exists on the Internet
2. ???
3. Panic!!
Come on guys. The original stories were obviously completely brainless.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
So, since this IP shortage has turned out to be a canard, I can now IP freely?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Only on slashdot would the text of the article get modded as Offtopic. I love it.
(Note, I am not the poster of the article text, it was some AC.)
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
...the used-up IPs by getting rid of their spammers.
we need IPv6 so that
One day, every toaster, every toilet, wil have its own IP at last.
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
Tabasco Loving Gal Burps Real Fire!
... Sleep With The Boss' Wife!
Aliens Altered Our Genes 1,000 Years Ago!
Get A Raise The Easy Way
They aren't running out because they're NATting like fiends over there. If you don't mind not having a Real IP (tm) it isn't a problem.
...or was that the green cheese between your toes?
God damn it...I thought this was the one story that couldn't be turned into a SCO joke. :)
(Disclaimer: I'm not a networks person, just a frustrated end user)
This doesn't sound like the line APNIC peddles when people actually ask it for IP addresses. When I can get a real, routable IP for every computer on my home network, and my office network, without paying a notable sum per IP because otherwise my ISP wouldn't have any address space left .. then there will be enough IP addresses.
WAIX is possibly the largest peering point in the southern hemisphere .. pretty much every ISP in the state connects to it to exchange data with each other. Some people like to set up machines with IPs that will not be routed over anything but WAIX, for things like local mirrors where communication with the non-WAIX world would be an unwanted expense. WAIX has adopted the convention of using 172.16-31.* IPs (these are "local" addresses just like 10.* and 192.168.*) - my understanding is that they know this is an utterly broken approach, but the only way since APNIC won't give WAIX a "real" IP range to do it with!
Not giving out portable IP ranges willy-nilly is understandable, since otherwise routing tables would balloon out unreasonably. But when rules on handing out IPs to established networks are as anal as APNIC's, the only possible explanation is that they need to strictly ration the too-small supply of IP addresses.
China and Japan will invest millions to develop IPv6.
... ?
It will rely on Hitachi's own IPv6-enabled network equipment
Excuse me? Am I understanding this right - Japan has yet to develop IPv6 systems, but when they do eventually make them they will rely on Hitachi's IPv6 network
Ummm, Hitachi is a Japanese company. IPv6 is in wider use in Japan than anywhere else in the world.
Is this the same FUD that told us European WAP is much better than Japanese imode??
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
IPv4, because of the gluttonous mismanagement of IP use and poor network planning (now and in the past) there appears to be a shortage of available IP addresses.
/.
If all (Globally) Governments, Businesses, ⦠networks were private networks using proxy-servers (and/or firewalls) with NAT and the public/free domain (class A=10.x.x.x, Bâ¦, and Câ¦) IP addresses, then many private domain IP addresses would be freed up for distribution.
Example: The Mother of All Cable company using class-A public domain (10.x.x.x) (AKA: Private Network) IP addresses could create an unlimited number of 10.x.x.x large user networks ⦠have them all talk to each other across proxy-servers (and/or firewalls) with NAT using a few routable private IP addresses to identify a âoePublic Networkâ for the internet. Designing such TCP/IP networks for quality and speed would cost (a little) more and be (a little) more complex for management and configuration, but it would work and add a little overhead (packet/routing/â¦) burden to the available bandwidth.
This method could provide some additional (but minor) network security advantages â¦.
I liked the 10. and 127. humor being on
OldHawk777
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
My opinion is this:
start phasing out ipv4 addresses.
some EFnet IRC servers are IPv6 enabled. I find it disconcerting that some hostmasks look like line noise, especially when I'm on DSL.
however, I still want IPv4 backwards compatibility. imagine typing out a long ass IPv6 string in a console to play LAN games with your buddies...
Hell, make the entire IPv4 address space game-only and give it priority routing, or make an autorequest feature so that LAN gamers can have a single static IPv6 addy in a certain range, tied to CD-keys... can you say: instant stop to cheating, trolling, TKing, etc?
also, IPv6 had damned well be static-only, I'm tired of dynamic IPs. whatever lazy fucking penny pincher shought that up ought to be shot.
... they can track you!
"Stop whining!" - Arnold, as Mr. Kimble
I guess I'm dense but I don't see how IPv6 will ever take off. Who's going to switch first?
:^) .. if folks like us geeks need a "real" address, we can get one, but why does my MOM need a routable address??
Why didn't they just make an extension to to IPv4 that lets it route to private networks? For instance if you have a machine at 123.23.23.23 and you have a 10.2.2.* LAN behind it, there must be some way backward-compatible way to add some stuff to IPv4 that will let you make 123.23.23.23;10.2.2.* addresses or something.
Redoing IPv6 from scratch means that you can't use IPv6 until everybody else is. But everybody else isn't going to use it until YOU are. So when is it going to happen?
And why do ISPs still give out routable addresses? Why don't all ISPs use NAT and masquerading? (Yeah I know a lot of people think NAT is "broken" but these people are living in a fantasy land. Just make all your protocols NAT-compatible, and come up with a transparent port forwarding scheme for those that can't be fixed. And get rid of FTP altogether.
It seems to me the IPv6 changeover will never happen. We can NAT all of Asia behind one address before we'll all switch to IPv6.
Maybe if Microsoft comes out with a version of Windows that's only IPv6, maybe then people will switch... doubt it though..
Seriously, can anyone tell me how the IPv4->IPv6 changeover will happen? Encapsulating one inside the other doesn't cut it.... setting up your own internal LAN on IPv6 doesn't cut it.. it'll never happen!
> When that final address is used up in a couple of years, the online world will grind to a halt. And perhaps, so will the economies of the three North Asian nations.
I don't mean to downplay the seriousness of this situation, which I doubt, but the online world will not "grind to a halt." Will all of the existing servers fail when that happens? No way. The only thing that will stop is growth, which is still a problem, but won't bring down the 'Net.
I still contend that Asia only needs one 1 IP address... then, NAT the entire country. This solves many problems ...
1. They're all communists anyway and if all traffic went through one IP, they'd have better control over their people. Government wins.
2. No more problems with reaching the limit of ipv4. Millions of addresses would be free'd from Asia for the benefit of the rest of the world. The entire world wins.
3. Since most spam originates in China, and if they all go down to one big NAT box somewhere, then we'd be able to eliminate almost all spam by simply blocking Asia's IP address. We all win!
Looks like a win-win-win situation to me... Lets get onto these metrics, shift the paradigms, and leverage the synergy we are presented with.
Presented to you by psycho-babble 1.0.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Was I the only one who saw shortage and reach Pacific Asia Network Information Center (PANIC)? If only slashdot has DON'T PANIC on the inside front cover... I think it would make my life a lot easier, plus, it would sell better, despite being completely inaccurate.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
In a broader context of IP distribution, I'm still left wondering : "Is this all necessary?" With more people coming under the umbrella of cable broadband, the number of fixed IP addresses assigned to the public is, if anything, diminishing. And with the prevalence of NAT in the first place, why do we need to have a near-infinite # of IPs to begin with? Additionally, I'm lukewarm to the idea of the connected home or office, but even if every toaster, stapler or freezer were connected to a network, does it really to have a personalized, routable IP address? Hardly. If you need to have state information and control access to such devices, let them sit behind a gateway like any other current device and let NAT handle it.
Man, people like this seriously piss me off. No IP shortage eh? Even here in the US, where we have far more IP addresses at our disposal, and far fewer people, I can't get more than one IP address through a colo, and forget about getting a class C. As a result I have to jump through all kinds of hoops to pull of virtual hosting with services like SSL and FTP, putting domains on different ports, setting up a proxy, and all kinds of other tedius, time-consuming bullshit, when simply having a unique IP address for each domain would solve the problem instantly.
So fuck you APNIC. And a big fuck you to all the ISPs who refuse to migrate to IPv6. It's no accident that this is being delayed. It's a way for the big players in the ISP and hosting businesses to ensure that don't face any real competition from little guys who can do it cheaper, better, and faster.
Shitheads like this guy also profit from the artificial scarcity of IP addresses. If IP addresses were free and easily obtainable, he'd basically be out of a job.
IPv6 is coming, assholes. Delay it as long as you can, but the people will prevail. And I'll be the first to cheer as your sorry ass hits the unemployment line.
My company - you figure out who it is - now has two class A address, 15 and 16...
Semper ubi sub ubi
I think it's also used for port scanning my network.
Any story can be turned into an SCO joke. Just say "SCO did it" or something to that effect and you get modded +5 Funny.
The unofficial
"When addresses are not available, there will be no more addresses left for the whole world," he said." They have been stealing our IP in Asia!!!
...and thus do not require as many IP addresses.
No, only some NATs work in this way. Other NATs, on receiving a packet from outside, do examine the source (external) port and address and the destination source and port before deciding which internal host to route it to. While this could theoretically cause problems if ~2^16 people in China simulaneously attempt to access the same external IP/port, that is extremely unlikely. It is also theoretically possible for the NAT to monitor statefully monitor TCP connections and route accordingly (although I'm not aware of any such implementations--I'm not an expert though). Furthermore, do not forget that it is possible to put many NATs within NATs--so the effective number could be much larger than just the reserved space (yes, it can be a pain for UDP and other protocols, but this is China we are talking about here).
I'm not going to say this would be a practical solution, but it's not fundamentally impossible.
...crack up laughing when they read the title, and immediately picture the Iraqi Information Minister saying this? (And may our stomachs roast in hell for wasting so many IPs!)
________________________________________________
suwain_2
You can borrow IP addresses, but you can't borrow - the RIAA will hand you your ass.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Of course, now that I've said that, I think my DSL line actually _is_ giving me 4 static IP addresses out of a bigger block that's managed by some router, but it's been long enough since I looked that I'm not too sure.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
i would conquer a huge part of europe and make hexadecimal mandatory on every thing in my sphere of influence. there ipv4 becommes a lot bigger
Ths difference between business and dial and broadband home users is really critical here. Business users don't need a lot of IP address space - they're almost always behind firewalls, so a /29 group with 8 IP addresses can handle an office with thousands of people, using 1 address with NAT or proxy firewalls to initiate connections to the outside, and maybe another one or two for server DMZs. The only time most non-ISP businesses need more than that (per location) is if they're trying to do dual-homed access to multiple ISPs, which tends to need a /24 or sometimes a /20.
Dial users usually need real addresses, but they typically aren't full-time - industry ratios used to be about 10 users per modem, so you also get a lot of address concentration. That may be a bit different now that more people are using the web rather than email as their big application, but it can still handle a lot of users per address.
The big problem will be broadband home computers, because they need real IP addresses fulltime. For most users, 1 address is enough, whether it's static or dynamic, and some of these users can be bullied into using ISP NAT instead of real internet connectivity. (That's particularly likely in China, because of the Great Firewall of China censorship proxy stuff, and just switching to an IPv6-nat-IPv4 isn't enough to fix that.) There's more likely to be a lot of IP demand from Japan and Korea because of this - they've got enough money that a large fraction of households can afford computers or game consoles, and enough of the population is in concentrated urban centers where broadband is cost-effective.
Then there's the whole network-capable cellphone business. The early stuff didn't have problems with IP addresses, because most of it was proprietary walled-garden WAP stuff, so you were going to need to use a gateway to connect to the real world anyway. Some of the newer standards are supposed to provide real IP capabilities, and I suppose that if enough people actually buy them for the phone companies to make back some of the billions of dollars they've wasted on 3G upgrades and spectrum auctions, maybe it'll be a problem, but as a disgruntled stockholder of a wireless company, I don't see that happening soon :-(. In practice, I suspect that'll mostly be a NAT or IPv6 world, and it'll be the Japanese wireless folks who push us to using real IPv6.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The big difference between the 6-over-4 tunnelling world and RFC1918-tunnelled is that you _can_ interconnect different IPv6 islands into one big archipelago, if you're willing to run security methods that aren't bothered by this. And some ISPs are supporting this for IPv6 users to meet each other, as well as running it native. So if you're trying to talk to another IPv6 destination that's in the same archipelago, you can do it natively without NAT in the way, but if you're trying to talk to Native IPv4 users who don't also run compatible 6-over-4 tunnels, you're still using NAT or some kind of IPv4 in addition to your IPv6.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That doesn't mean they're all in the same 10.* network (they're not - one major point of NAT is that you don't need to expose your internal addresses to the outside world), or that you're funnelling all of China through one NAT box, or that you're even funnelling 2**16 users through one NAT box (depends on how much horsepower it's got.) The "collapse under load" question is really about how many users you can put behind one NAT box, because it's difficult to use a given real-side IP address on more than one NAT box without either major ugliness (like double-NAT) or really serious cleverness. If you can handle 256 users (with however many open ports they've each got) you've won. If you can only handle 16 users, then APNIC needs to haggle a few more Class As to cover everybody in China and India, but it's still managable, and by the time any appreciable fraction of those countries can afford broadband at home, handling lots of users on NAT will have moved from being a PC's job to being a small appliance's job, just as home NAT is today.
The big difference between doing this with IPv6 vs. RFC1918 on the private side is that you really *could* use a unique address space with IPv6 instead of duplication, which does have some advantages, and can let you use tunnelling instead of NAT.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
AT&T has a Class A network, 12.*.*.*. Now that we're an ISP, it's useful and reasonable to have it, but the origins were murkier. Apparently the Cray Supercomputer at the Murray Hill, NJ Bell Labs office had a Hyperchannel LAN connecting it to other computers, and the thing wanted to have a Class A address and didn't know how to subnet, and this was the old days before 10.x was available, when big companies could still get Class A addresses. So they did :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
CNN deliberatly slanted its coverage to be pro-Saddam so they could keep a "presence" in Baghdad.
As visible from the announced BGP routes:
t ml
.
http://www.apnic.net/stats/bgp/TOTAL/totaladd.h
Currently about 33% has been used, growing about two percentage points a year. We will run out in perhaps 30 years. Except that not many people will need IP anymore then. Plan 9 protocol 9P is a good example of a future protocol. It can of course use IP as a "data link layer", but it could also replace IP as the internetworking protocol (see http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/man/5/INDEX.html)
If 9P will not make it, I bet something will. Let's hope it is something better than IPv6, which gains us nothing more than more addresses (and a lot of work in the upgrade process: devices, application software, and the looooong transition phase with double work for maintenance of networks and systems!).
OK, I admit. The 9P protocol uses relative, local source routed addresses a la UUCP. So what? A modern version of "pathaliases" can easily be made to solve the problem the right way: having the routing intelligence in the end-points and applications, not in the networks!
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
Than reading a heated argument, complete with swearing and whatnot, about IP addresses.
IPv6 is and is not static, depending on how you use it. If you're using /64s per LAN, then you can use EUI's:
LAN segment:
2001:470:1f00:486::/64
My NIC:
::240:96ff:fe32:4aac
(My MAC address is 0040:9632:4aac, but the leading 00 is stripped and 02 added, and then fffe padded inbetween).
My IPv6 address:
2001:470:1f00:486:240:96ff:fe32:4aac
Anywhere I go that supports EUI, my address will always end in ::240:96ff:fe32:4aac
Let's just say you probably won't be memorizing IPv6 addresses anytime soon.
han.ipv6.freenet.artoo.net is just much easier to remember, right? ;-p
Yeah, like everybody is going to remember a nice little URL like that. Here's a much simpler solution, with a much simpler URL: http://www.naturalip.com