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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."
Great, another "we're running out of IPs, really, for real this time guys we mean it" story. I mean, sure, IPv6 will eradicate this problem (while introducing a slew of new ones) but IPv4 is fine for a while. We should just revoke the IPs for China and other firewalled nations who dont' play nice with DARPAnet.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Who needs a new word to describe the number of possible addresses? It's just 1/2.9387358770557187699218413430556e+61st of a google.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
To quote the article "Such sensors could allow people to operate devices from anywhere there is an Internet connection." and "Now that the address space is available, the next step is figuring out how to use it."
I've got an idea, a internet connected toilet. "Using a cellphone in Los Angeles", I could flush the toilet at my home remotely and have the toilet seat drop down automatically (you know, to keep domestic tranquility). I could even call the toilet to see if anyone is using it.
I better go patent it...
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
Sounds like a solution to me.
It's just going to be a pain in the ass to get every one switched over, though.
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...
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" ?
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
I wonder how long it will be before we have a washing machine buffer overflow...
Apartment dwellers below the afflicted system should take precautions now....
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
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?
Or perhaps there should be just one IP address assigned to every person and then you can have a device ID for everything they own. Why does each device need a globally recognizable unique ID? It would seem to make much more sense to go the device ID route, since then if you know a person's individual IP, you can say that I want to send a message to "so and so's pager" or "so and so's home computer".
Making an allocation of 35 trillion addresses is all great and good, but the underlying question is... why?
KappaStone
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.
> "we're going to need something like 100 IP addresses for each human being."
We already have 65534 IP address for each human being. They are 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255.
Use NAT. Problem solved.
Enjoy the IPs. You can thank me later.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
While IPv6 fixes many problems in IPv4, the developed world will not embrace IPv6 until many shortcomings in the protocol are addressed.
1. Cisco routers suck at IPv6. Many of cisco's routers use the router's CPU to process IPv6 packets instead of the fast-path. The reasons for this are explained in the next few points. While Juniper's routers are substantially better at IPv6 than cisco's, IT managers are often restrained by insane corporate policy that dictactes the use of cisco.
2. There are too many addresses. There are 16.7 million addresses per square metre of the earth's surface, including the oceans. This is overkill. The world does not need more than the 4 billion addresses available with IPv4, and I challenge you to come up with an application that requires that many. Assuming that you can actually come up with one, it could easily be solved with Network Address
Translation, or NAT as it is commonly known.
3. IPv6 addresses are too large. An IPv6 address is 128 bits in size - 64 bits of which are reserved for addressing hosts, and 64 bits of which are reserved for routing. One thing that is cool with IPv6 is address autoconfiguration. Take your 56-bit MAC address on your ethernet card, ask for 64-bits of network prefix, bang it together with EUI-64 and you are set. The problem with a 64-bit network prefix is that routing tables become massive. Just do the math and you'll see that extreme amounts of memory are required to hold routing tables.
4. The IPv6 header is too large. An IPv4 header compact at 20 bytes in length, while the IPv6 is bloated at 40 bytes. That's right people, each one of your IP packets has twice as much overhead as before.
While this may not sound much, IP networks have a requirement that the minimum MTU supported must be 576 bytes. That means that where you might have got 556 bytes of data in your IP packets, you now get 536 bytes. This means that downloading stuff will take 3.4% longer.
Sure, IPv6 allows for nice hacks, but is it really ready for prime time?
I wonder if once the world goes to IPv6 the old IPv4 numbers would become more valuable, sort of like a low numbered /. account.......
Well yes and no.
NAT works fine for most things, ie. web browsing and the likes. Running services on machines behind NAT isn't difficult either. But wow does it ever become a nightmare if you try to play games behind NAT. Let's face it, the average user does not have the desire to play around with udp port forwards and transparent proxies and dum dum dum just to get starcraft to work.
And let's not forget broadband ISPs wanting you to pay for extra machines even when you're using NAT (and threatning you, too). So if they're going to make you pay for an extra IP or two, what's the point of doing NAT?
Why on earth would you need 100 addresses per human being? I can for see needing two at most, one for your home and one for your "mobile communication device". Your home would have a router and use private addresses for all your home devices. Your "mobile communication device" would have a router and use private address for all your other devices via bluetooth or whatever comes next. Does this not make sense, or I am being short sighted?
Later,
Phil
...simple info on IPv6: http:// www.internet2.edu/resources/infosheetIPv6.pdf
Do not read this sig.
...that IANA decided to hold onto 80 or so class A's. I doubt they could even allocate all that space by 2005.
Dont believe me? get it straight from the horses mouth
Perhaps if the organizations bemoaning the lack of IP space stopped hogging so much of it there wouldn't be such a shortage.
The number of IP addresses IP6 will allow is truely astronomical, 6.65x10^23 addresses for every square meter of the Earth's surface. More than enough for everyone to have an internet controlled Etch-A-Sketch
Free cell phone tracking
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
Could it be that people who have a vested interest in the adoption of ipv6 are more likely to try and alarm us about the impending IP crisis?
Here's an alternative view from Paul Wilson, director general of APNIC, which suggests that we have 20 years left at the current growth rate.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.
Maybe your brain is going to start identifying body parts by IP address. If you get a serious neck injury, your brain will start frantically pinging your feet to see if they still respond, stuff like that.
"Ask not for whom the bone bones. It bones for thee." --Bender
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
IPv6 is bad because Cisco routers suck. No, wait, "Many of Cisco's routers" suck. You can' be serious! Once IPv6 gets off the ground, IPv6 will become fast path and eventually IPv4 will be dropped to legacy mode.
... most of the internet protocols are very wasteful. On the other hand, they are easily debuggable with relatively simple tools. This is a trade-off, obviously, and IPv6's choice is not per se good or bad, it's just different. We will see whether it will have a significant overhead. I say getting rid of spam is a better way to reduce bandwidth requirements on the internet than talking about header sizes.
About your point 2: IPv6 does not actually give out all those 2^128 IPs. The first half is for the network part, the second 64 bits are for the host part. This is necessary because autoconfiguration (which is really great, by the way!) uses a 64-bit part. The IPv6 autoconfiguration is stateless, by the way, which means it will also work without a DHCP server and it won't need reboot if the routers were down when the autoconfiguration process started.
The point about having this many addresses is that you never ever want to have to come into the remote possibility to have to switch to IPv8 because IPv6 is too small. And when you rant about the IPv6 header being 20 bytes larger than the IPv4 header, consider that the overhead of the TCP header (20+ bytes), the HTTP header (300 bytes), the Email header (500 bytes?),
IPv6 is ready for prime time. People are using it (I, for example). You can buy access to IPv6-native backbones. All the major OSses support it. There is really no excuse not to be already using it.
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.
That'll be the average home out of the thin slice of humanity that can afford two PCs. I suspect, although have absolutely no evidence to support it, that the average is nearer 0.05 PCs per home.
Sorry, I didn't mean to be so annoyingly righteous :) You're right about the IP stuff.
NAT for your car?
NAT for your PAN?
NAT on a plane?
How many protocols have been kludged up because of having to get around NAT?
Easier VPN's and Voice/Video are two things I can think of.
On a slightly different note, anyone who says NAT's good for security...wow.
I see a lot of individuals saying, oh we can just NAT. Well thats not the point here. For many environments NAT is not a functioning option. Not to mention, until the ISP and providers are running IPv6, we are still forced to route at the gateway. It's not NAT, but it's also not truly IPv6 either (read: 6to4 host). This is all great planning for the future but right now IPv6 is simply something to play with and get used to for the future. I'm running it at home, have been for some time (using 6to4 unfortunately) and I've not really seen any great benefits. There will be great benefits in the future, but we are not really able to enjoy them yet. At least until the infrastructure that delivers my connectivity is upgraded I won't. Until then I'll have to enjoy the dancing turtles (kame) and hope it catches on soon.;p
"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs" - George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
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!
.sig
The shortage of IP addresses has been a "crisis" for over a decade now. CIDR and NAT have pretty much kept it under control, and could continue to do so for a while yet. As people have been pointing out, we only need a unique address for each personal accessory if we need end-to-end connectivity from my left shoe's inflation co-processor to every networked nipple ring in Norway.
Nonetheless, IPv6 is moving forward, and for a much simpler reason: money. The US military recently placed a deadline on IPv6 deployment, and they will no longer buy anything unless it's ready for IPv6 or its vendor promises it will be soon. Many of the key companies in the networking market need to sell to one part or another of the US DoD.
This requirement is putting IPv6 support on the development schedules of many companies that had been perpetually putting it off. Expect the US military and government to push ISPs for stronger IPv6 support so they can interoperate with their suppliers in their preferred fashion.
In other words, if you don't have a killer ap, get a killer user.
The killer app that you're looking for are 3G cell phones,
Every 3G cell phone has to have a IP address, and thats quite alot if you're talking about IPv4 addresses.. So a solution must be found, which people will find in IPv6.
I expect IPv6's rise to be concurrent with 3G's adoption.
IP Shortage In Asia Just Myth, Says APNIC
Which is: 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand, 456.
A far cry from "35 trillion". To give you an order to this magnitude, some Australian scientists recently announced that there are 70 sextillion stars (give or take) in the known universe.
It may be pedantic, but someone who is so blinded by their work that they make hysterical claims that there's no word for the number they're pushing doesn't make me want to buy into their idea so quickly.
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.
How about 1.1 mole
Cody Christman's high school science teacher must be very disappointed. :=)
...that they do not use. This is because they were one of the first companies on the scene when the Internet started. But we have TONS and TONS of IPs that are not in use. I bet that if companies like mine gave all the un-needed IP space back we'd be better off for a while.
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
Is that right? Lessee:
2^128 = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,45 6
A number which everyone knows should be verbally expressed in English as:
Three hundred forty undecillion two hundred eighty two decillion three hundred sixty six nonillion nine hundred twenty octillion nine hundred thirty eight septillion four hundred sixty three sextillion four hundred sixty three quintillion three hundred seventy four quadrillion six hundred seven trillion four hundred thirty one billion seven hundred sixy eight million two hundred eleven thousand four hundred fifty six.
That's in the American naming system, of course. In the British system, it would be:
Three hundred forty sexillion two hundred eight two thousand three hundred sixty six quintillion nine hundred twenty thousand nine hundred thirty eight quadrillion four hundred sixty three thousand four hundred sixty three trillion three hundred seventy four thousand six hundred seven billion four hundred thirty one thousand seven hundred sixty eight million two hundred eleven thousand four hundred fifty six.
(Interesting to note that the British version is nine characters shorter, plus has the capability to scale much higher without extension).
In the interest of brevity, I shall forgo the Spanish, Italian and French versions, and I regret to say that I can't count that high in any other languages, though I'm certain it's possible.
So, I think the number is *quite* adequately named, thank you. Now there's not a single word for it, but few numbers have single-word names, simply because there are too many numbers, too few phonemes and no real need. If you want a single-word approximation, "undecillion" should do nicely, or "340 undecillion", since Mr. Christman seems to find that form acceptable. The ideal expression is, of course, "two to the hundred twenty eighth", which is short, completely accurate and gives a strong hint as to the origin of the value (a string of 128 bits).
Yes, I *am* the guy everyone avoids at parties.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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
I don't think IPv4 addresses will run out by 2005, especially as more and more people/organizations implement more NAT. I work for a statewide ISP, and we've found that the new IP addresses we just got from ARIN a year ago are being returned to us in large numbers (thousands) by customers who are now persuing NAT solutions and using smaller subnets of 16 addresses or less.
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
try:
three hundred forty undecillion, two hundred eighty-two decillion, three hundred sixty-six nonillion, nine hundred twenty octillion, nine hundred thirty-eight septillion, four hundred sixty-three sextillion, four hundred sixty-three quintillion, three hundred seventy-four quadrillion, six hundred seven trillion, four hundred thirty-one billion, seven hundred sixty-eight million, two hundred eleven thousand, four hundred fifty-five.
I can't believe how many people have commented that there is no need for IPV6 because of NAT. Are you really willing to put up with the limits of NAT when you could give every computer its own routable address?
NAT does a decent job of allowing you to surf the web using a non-routable IP address. For anything more advanced it starts working less and less well.
I, personally have had many troubles with NAT:. Games which don't work properly unless they have huge ranges of ports exposed to the net. Instant messenger apps which fail in subtle ways. Brain-dead DHCP servers which don't properly pass on DNS settings, etc. Add to that the fact that the DHCP/NAT combination in most consumer boxes (like Liksys routers) is awful. You can port-forward from the router to a fixed IP address, but if you're using DHCP, you never know what machine will get that IP address! Even when it does work, there are far too many programs that don't work right when something is on a non-standard port.
In fact, I don't just want each of my machines to have its own routable IP address, I want some machines to have multiple addresses. That way I can host multiple domains on a single machine and truly administer them differently. Right now HTTP sends a host neader so that you can have multiple domains on a single IP and things just work. On the other hand, HTTPS doesn't work like this, so you need a work-around if you want to use HTTPS. The simple truth is that today if you want to have multiple domains using anything other than straight HTTP on a single machine you really do need multiple IPs.
For many people, NAT is a comfort thing. They think they don't have to worry about patching their systems because they're behind a dinky broadband router. Hint: that's security through obscurity. The devices you're buying aren't meant as firewalls, they're meant to let joe-consumer connect two computers to the Internet easily.
The main reason I want IPV6 now is so that my damn Internet provider can't get away with charging extra for extra IP addresses. At the moment they can because they're relatively scarce, but I can't see them getting away with that with IPV6.
If you're content with your buggy whip, that's great. But I personally have a use for at least 20 IPs that NAT won't solve. So don't make a blanket statement that IPV6 isn't necessary. Maybe not for you, but some of us can't wait to have it.
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.
---
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.
We're going to switch the entire world to an unproven, currently widely unsupported IP stack based on the idea that gamers are too stupid to forward a udp packet?
...or go spend $70 on an internet gateway router that you can fill in two boxes on (IP Address and port) to do port forwarding.
If you've got your machine running with a public address and your not behind a firewall you're an idiot and your input into the future of the internet shouldn't hold much weight.
If you are running a firewall it's one more minor step to forward a packet.
I run a home private network and a corporate network with 600+ nodes on it and I'm using 5 IP addresses.
Most ISP's that charge per machine are actually charging per routeable IP. I've had that conversation with Charter. They don't care how many machines you're running on your private network as long as they aren't nabbing IP's from the DHCP.
Perhaps it's time to find a new ISP?
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).
I could even call the toilet to see if anyone is using it.
MIT got there first: http, finger.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
I'm gonna subnet like it's 255.255.255.254.
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
Well let's take a look. IPv6 looks like this:
2001:0418:000C:0003:0000:CF00:C0A8:2E2E
So the highest number is 16^32, right? Which is roughly 3.4028 x 10^38.
Which is a little over 340 undecillion. Want it exact? It's 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand, 456.
Plenty for everybody!
Check out more names of big numbers.
.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
That would be us here at MIT. And you can pry it out of our cold dead hands.
>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,"
Said with the same confidence that Gates used when announcing that 640KB memory should be enough for anyone...
The number, 2^128, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,45 6, can be read as:
Three hundred forty undecillion,
two hundred eighty-two decillion,
three hundred sixty-six nonillion,
nine hundred twenty octillion,
nine hundred thirty-eight septillion,
four hundred sixty-three sextillion,
four hundred sixty-three quintillion,
three hundred seventy-four quadrillion,
six hundred seven trillion,
four hundred thirty-one billion,
seven hundred sixty-eight million,
two hundred eleven thousand,
four hundred fifty-six.
That's a lot of IP addresses.
How much does it cost me to get an IP address for a year? About $150 including server space.
Where I used to work (on-site gov't contractor) each machine had a "real IP". That's nothing 192.168.1.* can't fix. The issue is with the way people purchase huge blocks of IPs at once. If we'd stop selling 134.*.*.* to one entity, we'd be fine for a while longer.
From one of the linked articles:
In one solution, a single IP address is assigned to an entire network, which then gives out its own addresses to the devices attached to it.
But such approaches are not long-term solutions, said Alex Lightman, chairman of a conference... to discuss the next generation of IP addressing, known as Internet Protocol version 6, or IPv6.
I think Mr. Lightman is being a bit alarmist. There's no reason any ISP needs more than one IP.
At any rate, as long as any schmoe can go and purchase an IP at an ISP/web host for nuttin', I can't imagine we're even close to out and that there aren't millions of IPs that we can consolidate before we get so alarmist.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
When people are connected to the Internet, they usually obtain one public IP, usually not static. If the fridge, the DVD player, the printer, gets its own IP, it will be a private one, NAT-ed, and somewhat protected from the outside.
The IPv6 world won't know NAT, as its goal is somewhat to destroy it. Someone from Australia could connect to my fridge if everything in house becomes connected. It all becomes wireless, you'll even forget that your camera is on the net. Even with a much greater address space, we'll all need to firewall our connections.
I suppose that easy-to-use firewalls will be in every home in a few years. Still, any failure in programming them, any exploit in a well-known brand, could lead to a disaster for people much greater than having its computer hacked: fridge at 20C, heating at 40C, camera becoming a public webcam, TV and DVD giving back what you've seen yesterday, palm giving your agenda to the world...
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
A few years ago I worked for a business oriented web hosting company (which also disappeared a little later in the dot.bomb crisis.)
At the time, we were trying to buy up a considerable chunk of IP addresses from another company that had already gone tits-up. Due to bankruptcy courts, etc, the sale never went through.
My question is, how many IP ranges are still out there that were purchased up, but never accounted for, or added back to the available population?
If a company did fold, but held a chunk of IP addresses, how long can they sit in limbo before they are re-released back into "the wild"?
I guess my bottom line question is: Are we really running out in 2005 due to a lack of availability, or mismanagement?
How about an IP address for the RFID chips in your clothing?
That way your socks can tell your washing machine to ask the fridge to remind you to wash them whilst also emailing the NSA about you attending a meeting of [insert-fringe-organisation-currently-in-policial- disfavour-here] and your partner about the visit to the strip club afterwards. And obviously every CD (and CDplayer) will need it's own IP address so the embedded device (running WinCE) can connect back to the RIAA over the secret pervasive wireless network to tell them who's playing what as an antipiracy measure (the customer profiling use to allow them to send you even more junk mail is purely a side effect).
Anything I missed?
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall