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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."
Sounds like a solution to me.
It's just going to be a pain in the ass to get every one switched over, though.
It's probably been mentioned, but what about companies that have a single or multiple CLass "A"s that could just NAT? I was at a Ford dealership recently and noticed that they had a printer on a public address. Now it was probably NAT'd behind a router, but 5h1t! NAT an RFC 1918 address, not a public one!
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Alright, so I'll have 100 devices that require an IP. I could see that, although I fully intend to become a luddite sometime after OS 10.5 comes out. My question is this: does each device that has internet connectivity NEED its own IP?
And of course, the NAT community says NYET.
The end user's desire for privacy and security combined with the world's ISPs' need to cut down on the number of machines running active web/ftp/samba/gopher/finger servers over their lines (and essentially bypassing their commercial services, which is where the real money is), will eventually mean that all consumers will be given a single IP, or less, from their provider. And you'll have to make do or pay a huge fee.
(What, you think just because IP banks are massive with IPv6 that your ISP is just going to give you a shitload of them? No dice, kid. They'll make you pay just like everything else, and try to tell you it's a deal.)
But this is not necessarily a bad thing. Most connection sharing devices -- routers, gateways, access points, etc -- also act as a pretty good form of security. They close devices off from the rest of the internet, unless you explicitly allow internet users in. I'm pretty much unworried about the threat of hackers getting into my printer; all i have to worry about is hackers getting into the router. And a single path of entry makes it easier to cut them off as well.
Sure, you can get a personal router with IPv6. But you don't HAVE to, and a lot of people won't. So the current scheme is forcing people to use slightly better security. And while roughly 4 billion addresses isn't enough for every widget on the planet, it's far more than the number of conceptual groups on the planet. One IP per organization or per household...should be enough for a LONNNNNG while.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I don't see this as being much of a crisis. I've worked for several companies that employ ~10,000 people, most of which have systems connected to the network.
I remember in 1995, every Windows box had it's own public facing IP. Then over the years, everyone who could use NAT was moved over to private IP space.
The 'crisis' is really another example of media fear-inducing hype. Worst case senario, your ISP will begin issuing private IPs for for customers with basic accounts.
Yes, some things will break. But there's not much out there that doesn't function in a NAT enviroment from a client standpoint.
It'd also save ISPs a lot of headache with customers running unauthorized services.
I can already see the call to tech support..
customer "My web server/P2P/Warez FTP/etc doesn't work now that you changed my account to use a private IP."
ISP "Well, sir. You can upgrade to a business class account and get a static, public IP address."
customer "DOH."
I don't know about restricting the usage of IPs in countries that the US has a political agenda against. That would seem to defeat the whole idea behind the Internet. At least, that idea that was lost when Ebay and Amazon started suing everyone under the sun. It would keeps us going for a while longer, but I can see the NAT thing happen before that.
Personally, I would like to see one of the educational networks grow to a decent size and allow commoners onto their network with the restriction of no commercial activity. How I miss visiting Usenet and content outnumbering SPAM.
Also, doesn't Mercedes and a bunch of other companies that don't need an excessive number of IPs still have their own Class A? I know when I worked at an ISP that gobbled up a bunch of other companies in the late 90's, they were forced to hand over tons and tons of IP addresses because they could not prove they were actually being used for anything useful. That's what I was told, mind you I could see something underhanded going on since public IPs are quite a commodity these days.
I'm not sure you know what you're talking about.
/64 link-local address, and pastes on a 64 bit length for routing, and gives you an IP. You get your autoconfiguration, and your routing, and it's nice and neat. 64 bits is a perfectly reasonable size of data to expect to deal with at any particular time; we're already moving into a 64-bit computing world.
1. Cisco routers suck at IPv6 because Cisco has been dragging its ass getting a production release of IOS which supports v6 out. That will be fixed this summer, I'm told. And considering the problems Cisco has been displaying in IOS, are you sure it handles IPv4 that much better?
Your points 2, 3, and 4 are just the same thing repeated: "IPv6 addresses are big".
2. IPv6 has ROOM TO GROW. It takes the
If you want an application that requires loads of addresses: cellphones. Pagers. PDAs. You can NOT use NAT for millions of remote communications devices trying to talk to *other* remote communication devices. NAT *breaks* things. Anyone who has tried to connect a machine behind a NAT to a remote machine which is also behind a NAT knows what this is about. (And if you have to manually configure a port forwarding, or designate a DMZ, then something is broken!)
I'm getting tired of the "IP-enabled fridge" remarks. Someone suggested something like that a long time ago as a "you possibly could", and people who don't understand the technology and don't want to understand the technology jumped on it as an example of pointless waste, as if such things were the driving force behind v6. It isn't.
3. You don't understand how IPv6 routing works. IPv6 does NOT take the IPv4 world of "a.b.0.0/16 is reachable via c.d.e.0/24 which is reachable via z.y.0.0/16 AND x.w.u.0/24 and..." IPv6 routing is a strict tree to explicitly combat that problem. How do you get to abcd::/32? You go through abc::/24.
*Reducing* the size of the core routing tables is an EXPLICIT DESIGN GOAL of IPv6.
4. Again, you haven't done any research. IPv4 networks have a minimum MTU of 576 octets. The minimum MTU for IPv6 is *1280* octets. Yes, the header is larger. But the payload capacity has risen to match it. Your transport efficiency has not decreased.
I think you need to do some more reading on this protocol. And try, if you can, to not fixate yourself on the size of the address. If that was all that mattered, we'd all be using Appletalk.
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
Some devices weren't meant to be remote-controlled. And by some, I mean most. And even if they need to be, they don't need separate global IP's. People seem to forget that each of these 4 billion ipv4's have 65535 TCP ports.
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
> Yes, some things will break. But there's not much out there that doesn't function in a NAT enviroment from a client standpoint.
> It'd also save ISPs a lot of headache with customers running unauthorized services.
*applause*
Port 25 filtering would finally make sense - no more luzers with open exploitable proxies spewing bilge from attbi.com, rr.com, pacbell.net, comcast.net, and so on.
Add to that the possibility of doing ingress filtering, and you've got something that wouldn't just be less expensive for tech support, but a little safer for Joe Luser, whose unpatched box would be on a private subnet.
If the skript kiddie can't talk to port 135, 137, 138, 139, 445, or 1900 of Joe's box, he's gonna have a harder time 0wning him.
I'm not an expert on IPv6 (nor IPv4 for that matter), but there is some practicality in question here.
Can you memorize 204.172.4.36? Maybe not at first glance, but after you type it in a few times, you probably will.
Can you memorize FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210? Definitely not at first glance, and very unlikely unless it is something which you must type every day.
Some people's jobs depend on entering IP addresses, and IPv6 addresses are just so unnecessarily long that typing them is a total drag.
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Here's my RFC. 40-bit addresses. That gives you roughly a trillion addresses (a bit more actually), which is more than we should ever need. And you can write them in dotted-decimal format.
Can you memorize 430.168.957.249? Probably.
Fast forward 50 or 100 years... Everyone has Internet-enabled tools, chairs, glasses... whatever, because everything has a RFID inside, because the TPAA (Things producers Ass. of A.) wants to track everything, because some geeks have found a use to a connection between my pen and my fridge, because it is so easy and cheap...
1) BUT this tendency to Internet-enable everything will expand to any file on my computer. A CD has a RFID/IP to connect it to the desk, why not every of my MP3? Why a book and not on e-book ? A computer will needs millions of IP addresses.
2) Worse: we'll finish as virtual beings in the in virtual words (think Ultima Online in 2100). And we'll want everything in this world to have Internet addresses too. I'll ask my little desktop computer to create my own little Matrix, for me alone... and everything there has an address of the IPv6 space (to help me interconnect the real and the virtual world).
And if it's not enough:
3) Cyber beings (a few billions humans, much much much virtual intelligent creatures) find the world rather small for so many entities. Not enough computers on this small planet to compute all the worlds that each entity wants created for itself (and to run the compilation of the 10^15 lines of the brand new Linux 2.80.0). So the Metamegamatrix expands to Jupiter, Saturn and creates a Dyson sphere aroud the Sun, converting every joule of energy into computational power for the simulation.
And in 2203, Slashdot makes headlines on IPv9 with 2048 bits addresses.
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).