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."

Comments

Jeez...

[TopShelf]

Who needs a new word to describe the number of possible addresses? It's just 1/2.9387358770557187699218413430556e+61st of a google.

Re:Jeez...

[Anonym1ty]

Isn't the number a googol? and the search engine google?

Imagine the uses

[zubernerd]

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...

Re:Imagine the uses

[General_Corto]

Fine, but I'm going to patent the Denial Of Sewage attack. Toilet blockages, here we come!

Re:Imagine the uses

[PhilHibbs]

Fine, but I'm going to patent the Denial Of Sewage attack.

Otherwise known as the Flushdot Effect

Re:Imagine the uses

[dasmegabyte]

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.

Not so much a crisis...

[Tom7]

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...

Re:Not so much a crisis...

[binaryDigit]

That's fine but unless you're talking about incoming originating comms. With NAT, you have to rely on ports instead of ips to address specific items. This means a mod to your dns (or whatever replaces it). You can't just assume that the cell phone port is port 32768, since the household may have several different cell phones (or toasters, or tv's, or whatever). Not a huge problem, but it does require more changes than would simply assigning everything it's own unique id.

Bigger numbers.

[Anonymous Coward]

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" ?

Re:Bigger numbers.

[leshert]

You forgot to put your pinky up to your lips.

Money talks

[Kombat]

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.

Duplicate story...

[brooks_talley]

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

Re:Duplicate story...

[inertia187]

The things we think of as futuristic always changes by the time that date gets here. "Where's my flying car?" I asked my grandmother what she thought was "futuristic" when she was a kid. She told me that everything would be attached to those scissors things that extend. She and I didn't know what they were called. Back then, some phones would be attached to the wall with this invention, and it was super high tech for the day. Her idea of futuristic was to have everything in the kitchen on this rig. Coffee maker, spice rack, everything.

Now, had they actually made a kitchen with this device, she would have seen how ridiculous it was.

Just because Bill Gates thought the idea of IP addresses assigned to everyone and everything doesn't mean it was a good idea.

Re:Duplicate story...

[Merk]

Say you have 5 servers behind a NAT box, all running SSHD. How are you going to set them all up so that they can have incoming connections? Sure, if your NAT box is a good one you can manually set up port forwarding, but that's a pain.

What about strange services like FTP that require 2 different connections? They're always a pain when using NAT, so you need to find some means of dealing with them.

What about games? Say 3 people behind one NAT box want to play the same online game at the same time? What about filesharing applications that want to allow incoming connections?

NAT != firewall. If you're using it like it is, expect to get hacked anyhow. Besides, if you don't want a particular device to be exposed to the IPV6 world, you are free to put it behind a NAT box or a firewall, it just means that the machines that you want to have routable addresses can have them.

I already want more IP addresses. I have a server which hosts websites for various domains, but only uses 1 IP address. That works for HTTP because it sends the hostname as part of the request, but nearly every other protocol doesn't. That means that I can't deal with HTTPS easily, and makes configuration of things like mail much harder. If each host could have its own IP then it would make management and configuration much easier. It would also make it possible to have much more fine-grained control over services and access to various IPs.

I can just picture you when they finally start selling flying cars: "Hello? I already have transportation, it's called a car. In many ways it's better to move slowly in gridlock. At least that way if you have an accident you're only moving 4 miles per hour!"

New security implications...

[southpolesammy]

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....

i'm missing what here is 'news'...

[*weasel]

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.

overdramatic

[sstory]

Isn't this a little overdramatic? Crisis? Having to switch to an updated protocol is a crisis?

IPv6: A Protocol of Failure

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:IPv6: A Protocol of Failure

[riflemann]

1. Cisco routers suck at IPv6.

Cisco is working on hardware support for IPv6 for most platforms. As it becomes more widespread, they will develop full hardware routing for all devices. It's a chicken and egg problem, but a lot of people have decided to start somewhere.From what I've seen, there has been more interest in getting IPv6 running in the last 6 months than there ever has been.

2. There are too many addresses.

NAT doesnt work when you have devices that need to be addresses externally. What NAT-Portfw port is your device 'X' listening on? Hmm?? IPv6 is designed such that address space is _not_ a resource, but a method of being able to access _any_ device attached to the net. I dont _want_ to have to explain to someone why I want an address. I just want the thing to work.
Another benefit is address management. With Ipv6, the days of deciding how big your subnets are will be numbered. Every subnet has trillions of addresses. Nowadays you have to wonder whether your subnet needs a /24, /25, /26, etc. Yuck! With Ipv6, you never have to worry - there's enough space in _one_ subnet to scale indefintely. No more subnet-resizing games.

3. IPv6 addresses are too large.

Ipv6 is designed to be very hierarchial. The top organisations get /32s, the next one down get smaller subnets (/48), etc. The routing table will no longer be populate with tiny piddly subnets (eg /24s today). Go into an aggregate and things will behave.
And as for the routing table size, modern routers have oodles of memory, on average 512Mb RAM. A full BGP table of 130k routes takes up around 64Mb of that at most. IPv6 will have better aggregation, so smaller numbers of routes, and my the time it gets large, standard memory on routers will not have a problem storing the table.

4. The IPv6 header is too large.

3.4% longer if you use a 576 MTU. Use a sensible 1500 byte MTU and your downloads will not be much slower at all. Anyway, the elimination of fragmenting, the simplification of subnetting, and the many other benefits will far outweigh your 20-byte concerns. See my other post on security too (no more network host scans).

IPv6 is not ready to fully replace IPv4 overnight now, sure. But it's gaining a heck of a lot of momentum and by the time your concerns will actually become enough to be worried about, they will have been either solved or rendered moot.

Another nice thing about IPv6 (at least now), is that it's a return to the good ol' days of the net when everyone was friendly with each other. 15 years ago you askes someone for addresses or transit and you were quite likely to get it for next to nothing. Ask for addresses or transit/peering with IPv6 today - you're likely to get it, with a friendly response. it's a great community.

Re:IPv6: A Protocol of Failure

[Brandon Hume]

I'm not sure you know what you're talking about.

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 /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.

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.

Re:What's wrong with IPv6

[sporty]

Not too hard.

Backbones should switch over first, proxying ipv4 over ipv6, then propogate downwards.

When it hits users, they'll have an ultimatum. Upgrade within the next 180 days, or j00 are fux0red.

As for the OS and device makers, simply make dhcp check ipv6 first, then fallback to ipv4. That'll be transparent for all the chuckleheads who would ignore the "switch" thing.

To those who say we have enough IPv4 space

[riflemann]

There are people who have stated that we've only used up around 60% of the IPv4 space and we have plenty more to last for a long time yet.

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.

Re:Oh Puleeeze!

[lfourrier]

rfc1918 says we have:
10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 (10/8 prefix)
172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255 (172.16/12 prefix)
192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 (192.168/16 prefix)

so you are very pessimistic

Re:more than 35 trillion per square meter of Earth

[Surak]

The number of IP addresses IP6 will allow is truely astronomical, 6.65x10^23 addresses for every square

Heh. Reminds of a REALLY old joke: For a good time call Avogadro 6.022*10^23!

Ha! I kill me! I'll be here all week.

Another advantage of IPv6

[riflemann]

IPv6 has a nice advantage over IPv4 that I havent seen mentioned many places before. This is one on security.

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.

Bullshit!

[Fefe]

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.

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?), ... 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.

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.

Impending?!

[mekkab]

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.

Re:100 addresses per human being?

[JanneM]

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.

Re:What's wrong with IPv6

[funkman]

Damn short sighted engineers! Who would have thought we'd have more than 4 billion networked devices over 20 years ago!

Re:Imminent death of IPv4 predicted!!

[Troed]

No, we should withdraw all the A-class networks that are unnecessarily allocated to US companies.

OTH - I'd rather move to IPv6.

Re:What's wrong with IPv6

[jaredmauch]

I don't mean to flame you, but I'd like to address the technical issues surrounding your statements.

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).

There is a word for the number

[adenied]

2^128 is: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,45 6

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.

A new form of the 'remote control' syndrome

[stuuf]

A similar revolution to what you are describing has already happenned in the audio/video/home theater industry. Remember when your VCR had that little door on the front that covered that huge array of tiny buttons for things like tracking, timers, tuning? Remember when you used a vcr? Now they have power, eject, channel, and transport controls. Everything else is on the remote that your universal unit can't emulate. Eventually the control panel on the washing machine will disappear in evolution, and you will have to run over to your pc, log into your washer, ener a password, start the cycle, etc. Or grab your cellphone and dial into your network's internet gateway (maybe dozens of routers away in timbuktu), connect to your home computer...

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.

Re:Imminent death of IPv4 predicted!!

[Tackhead]

> 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.

*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.

Re:Imminent death of IPv4 predicted!!

[AndroSyn]

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.

IPv6: The Coming Address Shortage

[handy_vandal]

Of course we'll run out of IPv6 addresses.

Not right away ... but surely something will be invented that calls for more addresses.

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?

Re:more than 35 trillion per square meter of Earth

[PKFC]

Pardon me. The ACTUAL number is:
Three hundred forty undecillion two hundred eight-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.

Or just: 340 282 366 920 938 463 463 374 607 431 768 211 456

I like my buggy whip just fine!

[Merk]

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.

Aren't IPv6 addresses a bit long?

[sabNetwork]

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.

Remote toilet interrogation

[marnanel]

I could even call the toilet to see if anyone is using it.

MIT got there first: http, finger.

Re:Imminent death of IPv4 predicted!!

[The Spoonman]

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.

Apologies to the artist formerly known as Prince..

[freeze128]

I'm gonna subnet like it's 255.255.255.254.

Re:Imminent death of IPv4 predicted!!

[peccary]

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!

Come and get it

[Anonymous Coward]

And EDU's too. There are many universities with many tens of thousands of IP addresses, most of which are unused. One I know of has at least one class A...

That would be us here at MIT. And you can pry it out of our cold dead hands.

There is a word for the number...

[ikewillis]

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.

Re:Imminent death of IPv4 predicted!!

[4of12]

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.

Re:Imminent death of IPv4 predicted!!

[tez_h]

As a CS professor of mine once said, "In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."

Abuse! Abuse!
I mean, this could go on forever:

Poster1(p1): "The word 'theory', in practice, has more meanings than in theory."

Poster2(p2): "Yes but theory and practice are closer in theory than in practice."

p1: "I don't want to read your theory about practice; practise your theories!"

p2: "Bah! Your theory and practice only hold together in theory, not practice."

p1: "What?! Shove this practice into your theory!"

p2: "Oh yeah, theory this!"

p1: "You short, mustachioed, german, national-socialist pig!"

p2: "Godwin's law! Godwin's law!"

etc, etc, etc.

<yawn>

-Tez