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The Impending IP Crisis
Factomatic writes "With the supply of IP addresses expected to run out by 2005 due to the popularity explosion of the Internet and the expectation that everything from your phone to your washing machine will soon have its own IP address, Alex Lightman, CEO of Charmed Technology and chairman of last month's North American IPv6 Global Summit tells the New York Times "we're going to need something like 100 IP addresses for each human being." IPv6 will increase the supply of addresses from 4 billion today to a number in excess of 35 trillion that is "so big that there's not a word for the number," says Cody Christman, director of product engineering for Verio, which offers IPv6 in San Francisco, Washington and elsewhere. The article is a good layman's backgrounder on the looming IP crisis."
Yeah, but those 100 IP addresses can be behind a household NAT and share a single IP address. With the way people use the internet today, I'm not sure the crisis is so serious...
As with everything like this, the powers-that-be (i.e., the telcos and ISPs) will drag their heels until they are either forced to change, or they are convinced it will increase profits. Expect the changeover to go extremely slowly. Expect providers to try every trick in the book to milk their existing network for every last day they can possibly profit from it. The fact that the economy is in the toilet doesn't help either.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
I'm sure I saw this exact same post on /. in 1998. Except then it said we'd run out of addresses by 2000.
Hello? There's this thing called NAT, you see, and in many ways it's preferable to not have every one of your 100 IP-enabled devices sitting there on the real internet just waiting to get hacked.
Cheers
-b
unless a new prognostication that 'the end is nigh, in 2005' passes as news. everyone knows it's gonna happen. just as we all know that with NAT and proxies, most of it can be safely delayed by tech companies until they have an outside fiscal force to upgrade.
and i doubt my fridge will have an IP address anytime -before- ipv6 starts to be rolled out en masse.
as with all pure tech - it needs that killer app. something needs to come out that is so fantastically great that everyone has to have it - and it needs to require ipv6. until then - at best we'll be going dual-mode.
good luck finding that app, and educating users what it is, and what it does.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Isn't this a little overdramatic? Crisis? Having to switch to an updated protocol is a crisis?
Why does every human need 100 IP addresses? Home routers seem to solve a lot of the problems. A simple IP Masq fix...
As for the days of every appliance in our homes having an IP... I think that dream of the late 90s has been shelved for a while. It'll probably be decades, if ever, before our fridges are calling up to get food delivered...
The average home generally has a couple PCs / laptops...maybe an XBox or PS2 connected to net.
IPv6 will increase the supply of addresses from 4 billion today to a number in excess of 35 trillion that is "so big that there's not a word for the number,"
how about "thirty six trillion" ?
I know. The whole statement is pointless. He may as well have said that IPv6 will increase the supply of addresses from 4 billion to a number in excess of 10 (...yada yada.) There are LOTS of numbers between 35 trillion and numbers that have no name.
My journal has hot
I want to see IP as more of a general resource like electricity or water. You just plug anything into your wires/pipes, and it gets full access to the resource. Want more things getting water such as a washing machine? Then just run another pipe to it and it's got access. The current hacks of NAT are equivalent to only being allowed to install one tap in your house, and "proxying" the rest with buckets. Why cant it be like a water or electricity supply?
Those saying 'we have plenty of space left' obviously dont realise that the reason for this is that the current allocation policies for IPv4 make it impossible to get space for arbitrary devices. Yes, if you only allocate one IP address per gateway, of course you wont run out for a while. But that then mandates the use of ugly hacks such as NAT. A single tap per house/organisation.
To make full use of the potential of the net, one must be able to freely allocate IP addresses to any devices that want them, no matter how trivial it may seem today. Back when IP was invented, it was never in anyones wildest dreams that there would be an address shortage. There were barely a hundred hosts yet 32 bits of space. Look at what's happened in 20-odd years!
Lets not make the same mistake today.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
These articles remind me of FOX news... total sensationalism to drive advertising & page views.
Whether you "approve" of NAT or not, the truth is that it is a very effective band-aid that has hindered the progress of IPv6 because it works so well. We'll be on IPv4 for at least another ten years.
One of the major contributing factors to problems such as spammers and crackers is that it's so darn easy to scan subnets in IPv4 for open hosts. It can take under a minute to scan a complete /24 for hosts with open ports.
Now with IPv6 this situation is different. Each subnet has 64 bits of address space. That is, 18446744073709551616 IP addresses per subnet. Now, if someone could portscan at the rate of 100 addresses per second (pretty impressive), then each subnet would take 5.8 billion years[0] to scan for hosts. For one subnet! And to put this in a wider context, each site in ipv6 has 65,000 subnets. Effectively making network scans a thing of the past, and massively increasing security of the 'net.
Of course, one can still scan known hosts (eg from web server logs), but doing that is a heck of a lot harder - you'd need to get them in the first place.
[0] Said with appropriate finger quotes.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
As a networking engineer, I am very concerned about the impending doom of IPv4 addresses running out.
But I am even more-so concerened about the sun burning out, because that would mean catastrophe for the human race! (not to mention it would mess up our nift wi-fi stuff!)
Seriously- with stop-gaps like NAT and ISP's recycling IPs from a pool for all users, its not gonna kill us.
Let cell phones work out this ipv6 thing, then tunnel, then upgrade piece by piece.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Because your other devices will want to keep their identity even when not at home. Imagine having an IP-based telephone as a (slightly contrived) example. You want to be able to route to it no matter what network it resides on at the moment.
I use my laptop in a number of places; home and at the department is the most common places but also others. Moving from place to place is a bit of a pain, though - I need to get a new IP address, change the SMTP server and so on, and setting up other stuff so I am allowed to access it no matter where I am is painful and error prone. If my laptop could keep its identity irrepsectively of where it is physically located on the net it would simplify life a whole lot for me.
NAT works pretty well for the stuff we do today, but it precludes a lot of interesting uses, and is actually quite painful compared to the possible alternative.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
No, we should withdraw all the A-class networks that are unnecessarily allocated to US companies.
OTH - I'd rather move to IPv6.
it's in my head
Backbones are already upgrading to IPv6 enabled software and hardware. My employer has plans to run dual-stack IPv4 IPv6 later this year which means that any existing IPv4 customer can give us a call saying "enable v6" and we can do it that day. (assuming they have their hardware/software in place). No tunneling, no 6to4 gateways, it'll just work. I see no long-term viability of the 6to4 gateways, in the same way that we didn't see caches go mainstream for every internet user. (yeah yeah, some of you will claim bittorrent is a large distributed cache, and while that might be the case, i'm talking about for most of the general public, the AOL/IE users that don't know how to spell IP).
If you also see one of my previous comments on IPv6 here about who is supporting it (note, what you might define as a backbone isn't what the rest of the network might..) and has existing routes in the tables, you'll get an idea of who is at least prepared for the new future of impossible to read ip addresses.
If everyone runs dual-stack v4v6, you'll see the ability to access your existing services while continuing to be able to gain access to the IPv6 content. Personally, I've seen that in cases like where a RedHat release comes out, I can get faster transfer rates going to the IPv6 mirror than the IPv4 mirror. Everyone is hammering the v4, which makes the v6 available for me :). I'm just waiting for Linksys (now cisco) and the other consumer product people to realize that they need to upgrade their devices so they can do IPv6 nat for those cablemodem routers, etc..
Here's where I think that the local loop (dsl, cable) providers can go and start to seriously make money and make IPv6 viable: IPv6 enable your network, then offer VoIP services over SIP enabled devices. This way you don't run out of numbering space (ip and pstn). (Trivia: how many ips would it take to convert the existing PSTN network to VoIP, if each phone number required an IP address).
I disagree. Using unique IP addresses whenever possible is the way the internet is supposed to work. This NAT stuff is just an awful, awful hideous hack. The correct solution is IPv6, not NAT ourselves forwards and backwards.
Of course we'll run out of IPv6 addresses.
... but surely something will be invented that calls for more addresses.
Not right away
For example, teleportation might require separate addressing for all possible energy states of all elementary particles in the teleported object.
Don't say it can't happen. Remember when 64k was all the memory anyone would ever need? and a megabyte hard drive was out of your price range?
-kgj
In a way, we're not talking about the Internet here. We're talking about a company's, or even an ISP's, private network which also has access to the Internet. Giving those machines puplic IPs is not only a waste of address space, but a security risk. Those that need to access the Internet don't need public IPs. Those that need the Internet to access them, do. Forcing the world into a MAJOR move to IP6 just because you consider NAT a "hack" is unreasonable. NAT works, and works well. There's nothing I can't do behind NAT that I can't do with a public IP (including VPN, that's just easier with a public). The correct solution is to not give Nancy-in-accounting's printer a public IP, or worse, have to force accounting to upgrade that printer because its hardware doesn't support IP6.
Shame on you for suggesting otherwise.
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
What? "broken"?? My god, referring to the correct, as-designed intended use of the protocol as BROKEN!
I know, let's just forget about Host Requirements, and about a richly-interconnected fully-reachable peer-to-peer network. That old Internet stuff is just "broken". Let's build us a hierarchical circuit-switched network, and then appoint a monopoly to manage it!
Sounds to me like one of many Mozilla standards zealot arguments.
A: Why doesn't Mozilla popup image ALT text as a tooltip?
B: Because it's not meant to do that, the standard says so.
A: But nearly every other browser does it!
B: But the standard doesn't say you should.
A: But many websites use this functionality anyway!
B: But the standard doesn't say you should.
A: These sites are *already using* this functionality! Why are you building a browser that doesn't work properly with a large number of websites, and when implementing this functionality wouldn't hurt anyone, and may even help accessibility??
B: Because the standard doesn't say you should.
ad infinitum...
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
NAT works okay when I'm controlling the box doing it. I can hack in special stuff to handle esoteric protocols which expect a public IP.
If my ISP runs the box doing NAT, there's suddenly a bunch of things I won't be able to do anymore, and I'll promptly switch ISPs to one which will let me use the Internet as it's intended.
I like the idea of lots of IPv6 addresses, enough to provide for ISPs to provide each subscriber with a static IP address.
Open relay? Source of spam?
Guess what? When re-connect you get that exact same address that is going to be at the receiving end of irate spam recipients!
No more evading consequences through the magic of DHCP.
And, for one-time lusers that change ISPs after each offense, the responsible ISP that has clear identifying information (I had to show a driver's license to get my account) about said spammer can post `em to a blacklist. Irresponsible ISPs can simply have themselves blacklisted wholescale.
"Provided by the management for your protection."