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US Shrugs Off World's IP Address Shortage
Clifton Griffin writes "C|Net has an article stating that the U.S. isn't making the push for IPv6 like others are even though the networking appliances and operating systems are ready for it. It goes on to explain that North America has 70% of the Internet address space and that there is a total of 1 billion IPs left, which may sound like a lot but considering we now have Internet-enabled cellphones and VoIP, it really isn't."
Americans Fear Change...
Have you ever actually seen an IPv6 Address?? No more memorizing IP addresses!
~.Evanrude
This was reported everywhere yesterday.
We all know that the government only cares about keeping big business happy and won't force them to spend money to change to a new system.
What needs to happen is let the rest of the world switch and then shut off access to IPv4 for the US to accept it.
Just realise the reality of the situation..... There is no reality.
I've decided to donate the ip range of 127.0.0.1/24 to everyone. By reading this message you'll automatically have the ip's installed for you.
Its the kind of good enough mentality. Well, I dont agree with that kind of mentality. Innovation and its implementation is stalled by this kind of mentality.
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
no u haf ip adrex shortg
BBQ Networking!
I wish I had a dime for every IP assigned to (and released from) my devices. God Bless America!/>
Wait a second, 1 billion is a lot of IPs. My web enabled phone has never been assigned an internet accessible IP address, it's on some kind of weird proxy service. My computers at work are on a NAT. So that leaves my computer at home, and it's had that "dynamic" IP assignment for months and months. No wonder we're shrugging it off. Get over it.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Until there is a benefit, why expend the resources.
If I have enough IP's why should I bother changing.
Actually the other people can take the risk, do the upgrade, solve the problems, then the cost to change is cheaper.
Once the benefit outweighs the cost, people will do it. It just doesn't make sense yet.
ipv6 (or a similar technology) will eliminate the demand for IPs (or the demand that ISPs claim there is).
Without demand for IP space there will be no longer a need to charge ridiculous amounts for IP blocks (or even single IPs). Hell, there won't be a need to bundle home routers with Internet service to give NAT capabilities to the home.
Looks like a lot of possible lost revenue. God forbid that happens.
$10 for an extra IP is the average cost for broadband (used to be about $5), most ISPs don't even want to give you a static IP (back in 1995 it cost $30/extra for a static IP on dialup!)
I have something like 1 million+ IPs assigned to me with IPv6 and I am using 10 (for what you ask? for vhosts because that's all IPv6 is useful for).
Would I be using more than the 1 IP I am "dynamically" assigned if it wasn't "free"? No.
That sounds plenty to me! Does anyone know why we need more?
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Just roll out IPv6 along with the metric system.
do cell phones, refirgerators, and other "appliances" really need a dedicated static i.p. address? why can't they use NAT and private addresses?
As 70% of the allocated space is in that specific region, as you can guess, it will cost 70% more (considering time spent on infrastructure such as router, switches etc upgrades).
;)
Of course, beeing a very technically forward place this should not be a problem, but some kind of a push is really needed. Especially for low-budget companies, instutions etc that make out a big part of the IP customers - they simply don't always have the "cash" for the migration. And "why migrate when this works fine for us" is another big catch.
Make the consumers start migrating and the rest will follow more quickly, the business will go where the consumers are... Now just how do we get the consumers to where there is no business?
(Please consider that this is from a very narrow point of view on the whole thing, it's just to put things in one perspective of many)
Canned response 2: NAT is only good for outgoing.
Canned response 3: NAT is an easy way to secure machines.
Canned response 4: NAT is an abomination in the eyes of the Internet gods.
Canned response 5: Even when we have IPv6, ISPs will charge huge amounts for IP addresses.
If you write P2P software you will know that NAT is a major pain in the ass and requires very bizarre architectures involving reflectors owned and run by third parties (or at least port forwarding). More IP addresses cannot be a bad thing and we have to move sooner or later.
The Y2K scare?
We in the RoW can move on to IPv6 and leave you Americans on IPv4. You'll have the full IPv4 address space to play with and we won't be able to make a mockery of your loopy copyright restrictions, either.
Let the rest of the world worry about running out of addresses spaces and things like global warming. Who [around me] cares as long as I can drive my SUV?
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
Why can't cell phones use NAT? I thought they already did.
This Slashdot article reported that the impending IPv6 shortage is just a myth, and this Slashdot article repeated what CmdrTaco says. What is the real story here?
"It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe."
"We couldn't care less about you other countries" seems to be the US motto nowadays.
In general, the higher the Mhz (or Ghz), the faster the computer. There are exceptions to this, of course, but overall the only people who argue against this are mac zealots.
Of course, I appreciate them the way I appreciate retarded folks... they make we appreciate what I've got.
When viewing this artical, in the browser taskbar it says 'US Shrugs Off World'...
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Not to dis Americans, but if the problem doesn't concern them directly, they don't care about it. At the moment they've got lots of IP's, so they don't care. When the IP's are almost out in the US, then you'll hear a frantic concern about it.
What ISPs (in any country) are planning to roll out IPv6?
Beuller? Beuller?
Seriously, have you seen IPv6 IPs? They're not numbers anymore, like 216.239.57.99 (google.com), but more like afbc.3fa31b.ca329b and the such. it's just hideous, and not as well known how to work with by regular schmuck programmers.
You can buy your own singular IP for about 50 bucks. It's very helpful if you don't want to change it each time you change ISPs, especially if you're running a personal box as a server.
This seems to sum up this guys knowledge of the Internet. Move along, nothing to see here.
Its the koreans
In general*, I'd say Americans don't become too concerned with change until it becomes necessary for THEM. Sure, the rest of the world needs it, but we don't. In this case I don't know if it's terribly crucial. Our (lack of) adoption doesn't seem to be slowing down that of anyone else. Also, we have plenty of large, international corporations that must make changes based on international customers as well as American customers, and I believe that will influence the speed of American migration to IPv6.
*Generalization, not meant as an insult to anyone and not speaking for everyone.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/13/194120 6&mode=thread&tid=95
I have a hard time seeing industry not doing the same-- even if it is kicking and screaming.
Actually, I'm kinda hoping this transition to IPv6 will kickstart hightech spending and put this economic lull to an end... GWB might want to think of doing that instead of tax breaks.. anyways.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
(emphasis added)
Is this an accurate assessment? Will it really be that difficult a transition?
they told congress that more IPs would only lead to more IP theft
*rimshot*
I'll be here all week folks.
I'm sure the parent is a troll, but here's the history of IPv6 in Linux.
Actually, your mom sucks.
D.J.Bernstein has an insightful rant about how/why the transition to IPv6 is going too slow while some people claim the transition is already done.
\they have the internet on computers now?\
I work for an ISP. One of my responsibilites is to manage our IP space (~/16). I am tired of dealing with IP justification, ARIN and customers who want to have public IPs on their office printer farm. Double and yes, sometimes triple NAT in order to get customer networks to talk to monitoring infrastructure. The sooner IP6 gets here the better.
Follow the money. Since US interests control most of the IPv4 addresses there is a vested interest in keeping them scarce. The fewer IP addresses there are, the more valuable they become. If we switch to IPv6 many generous campaign contributors will lose this valuable commodity. The rest of the world could switch to IPv6, but since so many important sites are located in the US there will still be a need for IPv4 for quite a while.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If you cheap service, they'll give you an unwieldy NAT setup behind a dynamic IP address. If you want your own fixed IP address, you'll pay the tollkeepers a handsome fee to get it.
People said the same thing before CIDR and NAT caught on... and we still have people shouting "Class A!" "Class B!" who are proclaiming the sky is falling on IPv4.
Cellphones eating your IP space? NAT 'em, except for the business users who want to VPN and pay for the priveledge (and stop kicking us off for inactivity while they're at it!). I'll bet that alone would save the Verizons and Sprints enough coins for an extra life.
IPv4 will be around for a good long time. At least a decade more. IPv6 is cool, yes, but there's so much architecture dedicated to IPv4 (and many paper MCSEs who don't know much else -- and their enslaved employers have more money and clout than we do at this point) that we can't just ask the world to change in a year, five years, or a decade. Patience, grasshoppers. Don't fix what ain't broken.
"I am root. Bow before me." To this I say, "You are root, and you bear the sins of the world upon your shoulders."
I really would like to see IPv6 take off and become widely used, even in the U.S.
Until then, why not start a market where IPv4 addresses may be bought and sold and even leased for a while?
A central marketplace would enable the IPv4 address changes to be forwarded automatically into the big DNS servers and a small tax on the transaction could fund the minimal cost of doing the updating.
Finally, if the price for IPv4 addresses gets too high, then IPv6 will become naturally attractive, much in the same way that obtaining .net or .org addresses is less expensive than getting the more sought-after .com registered domains.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Available number of IPv4 addresses: 4.2 billion
Number of people on earth: 6.35 Billion according to ibilio
At this moment, Every other person on earth could have their own IP address. And we'd still have a billion IP's to spare.
Throw NAT into the equation just for fun.
With proper addressing schemes, IPv4 still has a ton of life left in it. It's nice to know IP6 is out there. But just because it's better doesn't mean it will ever gain world wide acceptance.
Just ask Preston Tucker, The makers of the Betamax, The Newton development team, etc
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
But it is time for the US to think of more than just itself. This is not 19th century when you could be isolationist. It has to realise it is the leader of the world (consumer wise). Just because it not running out doesn't mean it shouldn't switch.. 1 billion addres isn't that much.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
There is a type of person who likes to panic. You couple that with the herding instrinct, and you get articles like this. You'll see the same story with the same people with extreme enviromentalism: all panic without real, testable science.
There isn't a shortage. NAT and firewalls have fixed it short term, and perhaps even for the long-term. If we really do start to have a shortage, then good old economics will take over and innovations (such as the IPv6 already planned, but my guess is not) will win out very quickly.
why isn't the time right? why not switch now and work out all the bugs so when that last ip address is taken we're not scrambling around like . american's tend to procrastinate and it always kicks us in the ass. let's not this time and be ready for it.
I write code.
I keep reading about how every device needs to have an ip address. WHY??? Why does every single device these days need to be connected to the internet? I see much more bad coming from a fully connected world then now.
Imagine your air conditioner, refrigerator, television and VCR, amongst other thigns, all connected via ip to the net. You could then make it so the user could log in to a server that acted as a gateway to these devices, and told them what to do when to do it. Now, say some punk kiddie scripter gets control of this gateway, and tell the frig to turn off, the air to be set at 60 (In southern cali where it gets to the 90s regularly this is bad), the tv turned on, the VCR to record (or try if a tap is there). All this is going on while joe user has no clue at all. Imagine the money lose because of someones actions all because we insist on things being connected?
I suppose that is why I just don't get why it must all be conncetd, which is why I don't see why 4.3 billion addresses isn't enough. I mean, do cell phones need ips, really? Can't the cell phone companies just nat some address space. They could fit i think 60 million by natting the 10 network if i recall. Oh well.
Santa Cruz Operation Incorporated (SCO-3)
Santa Cruz Operation Ltd (SCOL)
Santa Cruz Operation Incorporated SCO1 (NET-150-126-0-0-1) 150.126.0.0 - 150.126.255.255
Santa Cruz Operation Ltd SCO-1 (NET-192-86-169-0-1) 192.86.169.0 - 192.86.169.255
Santa Cruz Operation Ltd SCO-2 (NET-192-153-2-0-1) 192.153.2.0 - 192.153.2.255
Santa Cruz Operation Inc SBCIS68512 (NET-63-199-9-216-1) 63.199.9.216 - 63.199.9.223
Santa Cruz Operation Inc. SBCIS21385 (NET-63-192-223-80-1) 63.192.223.80 - 63.192.223.87
.sig
No, the Koreans are responsible for the supply of unsecured relays. The spammers themselves are usually Americans, based in Florida. See spamhaus.org for more information.
Verio
3 words : Network Address Translation
____
nico
Nico-Live
Now for webhosting, unless you need SSL there is no need for each website to have its own IP. IPv6 is great solution but currently there should be push to conserving IP addresses.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Ipv6 is good. So is oatmeal. I think we need to give it a new sexier name to motivate public support. Something like Hyper global inter slice. Or possibly Internet 2: The wrath of Cisco
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
If other countries were willing/able to dis-associate their chunk of the Internet from the US's chunk, they could do that RIGHT NOW to solve the IP Address shortage and not spend any money on the IPv6 upgrade. Just cut the cables and re-assign the addresses that America previously 'owned' to other nations on the Non-American Internet. It's the same principle as addressing on a private network; you can use the same IPs as someone else, just as long as your network can't see their network.
Oh, and with NAT your networks can even be connected and still work. Hey wait, if we can use NAT to hide non-unique addresses from the Internet and not lose connectivity... Why the big push for the switch?
The fact of the matter is users of the Internet DON'T WANT to be disconnected from the American section of the Internet. And the rest of the world switching to IPv6 while the US lags a few years behind won't bring that about, either. You can route between IPv4 and IPv6 networks (that's what the protocol was designed for) and there's no incentive for American businesses to spend money on an upgrade that they'll see no return on.
Really man, find a good reason to spit venom at the US and stick to it. Attacking us because the other nations of the world want a unique IP address on every phone, car, bike, toaster, and gilette razor while we don't see the need for it immediately is just silly. The world can do what it wants and we can do what we want without breaking anything.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
As reported before, the US Department of Defense is going to become fully IPv6 compliant by 2008 and purchasing only IPv6 compliant devices starting in October (see this press release).
Will they make full compliance by 2008? Probably not, knowing how government institutions work. However, DoD purchases a lot of computers, a lot of networked devices, etc. I remember hearing about 70% of their traffic goes accross the Internet (years ago, and they create a lot of traffic.) They have been a big influence on the 'net in the past, and I think this will be a big catalyst to IPv6 in the future.
espo
Nonono, we didn't invent the internet, Al Gore did.
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
I don't have time to wait for the anti-American sentiment to bubble up, so I'll respond right now.
Yes, North America (mostly the U.S.) has 70% of the available IP addresses. Any guesses as to why? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the Internet started here as a DARPA project and 20 years later the rest of the world decided to join in.
You don't like the U.S. being an information superpower? Start your own network.
Oh, and I don't give a shit if you think this is a troll.
No shortage of IP addresses: IP registry head
I think I will just wait until we are out of IPs then I will sit around and look like a monkey fucking a football because of my procrastination caused by being and American.
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
The U.S. is one of the very few countries that has not adopted the metric system. Hell, even England finally switched to metric.
The argument is that the economy would take a hit because of the conversion costs.
The question is: how much economic damage will the U.S. suffer by not adopting metric, IPv6, or other standards, along with the rest of the world? Of course, the damage caused by not converting (or deferring conversion) is long-term, and U.S. CEO's only think three months ahead.
Is the U.S. economy really that fragile?
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
Don't forget that IPV6 includes IPSEC, by default. So TIA won't want all of this encrypted traffic flowing around until they have a way to tap it.
How is this news?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
...that there is a strictly fixed pool of ipv4 addresses. :)
Luckily mares are self-replicable and there will never be shortage on sexy mares
Great, take credit for the Internet but blame asians for the spam. Hey, you invented spam too!
Yes - do away with this ridiculous notion of 'ports' and turn each port into a single 'location', with the routers handling the... umm... routing. It's not as if ports have a physical existence - it's just a concept in a driver, after all. Now everyone just gets one port on one ip from their new DCHPv61 server and everything is multiplexed through that port, with BEEP or something.
Sure - it wouldn't be compatible with IPv4, but neither is IPv6! And this way is alot cheaper! And it would be completely voluntary, you could move over as necessary. And you could still make outgoing connections to IPv4 computers quite easily.
Hey that's not such a bad idea, actually.
IPv6 isn't all about greater address space. It also brings improvements on routing and network autoconfiguration. The packets can also be classified into different categories, etc.
Enable your box with IPv6 today, Freenet6 provides free IPv6 connectivity over IPv4. Get some IPv6-enabled apps and use some IPv6-enabled servers/services, FTP and IRC being among the available ones.
Not only do your appliances need public IP addresses, they need an SNMP server too. Just think of the benefits of MRTG graphs on fridge usage. Now you know where your sandwich went...
IMHO, we are quickly meeting a saturation point where we are retiring and replacing IP devices more so than adding new ones anyway. A billion will probably last us a while.
Does the US hesitance to adopt a superior system come as a surprise to anyone? Ever heard of the Metric system?
I'm going to stop talking on this thread, an limit myself to this one now.
Don't we get to plunder the IP addresses of Afhganistan and Iraq now? Spoils of war and all that? I mean, if we don't get their IP addresses, what was the use of bombing all those poor defenseless motherfuckers in the first place?
The anti-NAT crusader is clueless.
First, why can't I use voice chat at work? And even gaming is not forbidden after hours in most healthy companies.
Second, I have 6 computers in my house, but I have to use a gateway because the ISP will only give me one external address. And then I have to make holes in the firewall because my son wants to play online.
And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!
If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
And your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash,
Then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash!
If the label on the cable on the table at your house,
Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol,
That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss
So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,
'Cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!
When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk,
And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risc,
Then you have to flash your memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM.
Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
1 googol is 1E100, while 128 bits is 2^128=3.4E38?
Seems there is a common misconception that was debunked as early as 1997 .
What part of the Defense Department implementing IPv6 in a few years and corporations starting to perk up their ears did the article writer not understand? Shrugs off the world? Corporations haven't upgraded yet cause they haven't needed to. It has nothing to do with saying 'screw you' to the rest of the world. Once the DoD gets it in, others will follow suit. Nothing this big gets done quickly in this country, especially when there isn't a blaring need.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There is no real shortage of IP address space. See my previous posts about this topic.
After reading this article, my sphincter opened like the floodgates on the Hoover dam, spilling the warm, oozing contents of my bowels into my chair.
They can use NAT when dialing in and browsing or picking up email. Every cellphone for Verizon could be Nat'd behind 4 ip addresses (or however many servers it took to handle the load) at the ISP level.
VoIP and other real time (full time connected) internet applications present a whole 'nother issue.
Even with VoIP, there are ways around giving every user in existence their own personal real internet IP.
l8,
AC
Just because you have a Billion IP addresses available doesn't mean you can just get any one of those from the list and start using it. The IP addresses are assigned in blocks which correspond to networks. So to truely provide addresses for a global end-to-end IP network there are going to have to be a heck of a lot more addresses out there just to cover individuals not to mention all these devices people want to hook up. So, figure one or two IP addresses per person and we are already Billions short of the number needed. Figure more than that including remote sensing devices, routers, automated systems and oh yea businesses... then we are at a far greater shortage. Sure we can just add complexity and do some address translation, but are the conversion costs really that insurmountable as to make IPv6 out of reach? Most routers and computers have built in support for IPv6, but its seems that nobody is willing to ditch the old numbers and just use their IPv6 equivalents.
I'd put a webcam in my fridge so I can finally find out what happens to that little light when I close the door!
Seriously though, for an IP enabled fridge to be of any use you'd have to have a way of knowing what's in it. Strike me down, but this seems like a reasonable application of RFID.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
We aren't going to see a major shift in the US until Arin starts pushing Ipv6. The real problem is that currently getting Ipv6 costs money and doesn't get you very far. Look at it this way... currently a Ptla /32 costs $2500 a year. But people that have been sitting on Ipv4 blocks for years don't pay anything. I know of two Isp's that would like to offer Ipv6 the their customers but because they don't have their own Ipv4 netblocks they don't want to pay $2500 a year just so few of their customers have Ipv6. So instead of getting Ipv6 and moving away from Ipv4 they are forced to stay with Ipv4.
I think that the situation is currently backwards to the way it should be. Arin ( and other Ipv4 providers ) should be charging next to nothing for Ipv6 netbocks ($100 or so) and slowly start charging more for Ipv4 blocks each year. So for the first year charge $100 for each Ipv4 block (on top of any other fees). The second year they would charge 500 and the year after that 1000 and then 3000 and so on... Until we start charging more for Ipv4 address's than Ipv6 we will not see any major move to Ipv6. The more people that can get switched over to Ipv6 the sooner the better.
A Government contract I previously worked on allocated IP addresses in a building with 190 developers based on workgroup! The problem was the building manager was assigning an entire subnet range to a group of say, six people. Before they replaced the hubs with switches and cut the number of subnets, this one building had 7,000 usable IP addresses for 250 computers, routers, hubs, printers, etc. I think the Government has a few IP addresses they could spare.
So it is a pain in the ass. Every new game or new online application wants a new port and a new redirection.
Of course the US isn't worried. When we run low on IPs over here, we'll just go bomb some country and take their IPs... hell, we'll even throw in a new government... NO CHARGE
Are you totally sure we will be out of addresses? Would you bet your life on it?
... and so on. Perhaps wise use of addresses is in order. Does every cell phone need a static IP so all the teenagers can show off to their friends? I don't think so.
I think if we gave the world 100,000 addresses, they would use 100,000. If we gave the world 1,000,000,000 they would use 1,000,000,000 if we gave
And who will be footing the bill for all the converting and maintainance? Will it be the United States? I don't think it's American-centric or clodlike to not want to take on a huge responsibility like that for nothing. If a bunch of countries approached the U.S. and said they would foot the bill, I think it would be much easier to change our minds.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Simple, the name of the virtual host is contained in the HTTP request. The HTTP protocol itself has support for this.
Similarly, we can rework P2P protocols to include the hostname as part of the request, then have a userspace daemon take care of redirecting the connection to a given internal host using port forwarding (call it a "dynamic hostname-bound port" if you want). I realize that old, entrenched protocols aren't going to take this approach, but it seems like the major complainers in this arena are P2P authors -- and their protocols are constantly changing anyway!
Hell, most P2P requests are encapsulated inside HTTP/1.1 which already has support for virtual hosts! The only piece missing is the little bit of software running on the NAT box to map a hostname to an internal IP and port. Sort of a weird kind of "reverse proxy." Actually, it's more of a two-way proxy.
The only people who'd be stuck are those running those silly little NAT gateway boxes that can't be programmed. Tough cookies -- if you're gonna bother with NAT, get a cheap PC and run a real firewall, not these stupid gateways.
This could be done right now. Sure, the correct solution is IPv6, but who the hell are we kidding here? It ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
Most routers and computers have built in support for IPv6, but its seems that nobody is willing to ditch the old numbers and just use their IPv6 equivalents.
or their isp doesnt let them
Why does each fricken device need its *own* IP address? Pool them. If you are on the phone and want to browse the web, then have the phone company temporarily grab one from a pool. It is harder to hack people's phones and gadgets if they keep rotating addresses anyhow.
Ok, I would be willing to convert my network to IPv6, but where do I begin? I use DSL, and have a static IP. How do you (a) get a block of IPv6 addresses, and (b) get your ISP to actually connect them to you?
If your ISP doesn't support IPv6, are you SOL?
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
It took me three months to learn to subnet IP4 addresses in my head. The thought of relearning how to do it it in hex with (how many extra bits?)- gawd it makes my head spin... How much more complicated are routing protos going to be? Gawd. By the way, where the hell is IP version 5?
Tell MIT to give back their Class A, unless they *actually* have 24 million machines over there! There is no way a university needs that many IP addresses. I believe Stanford already gave up theirs because they realized it was unncessary.
if these people would bother to tally up a BGP table they would come to realize that only 1.2-1.4 billion addresses are routed right now, thats roughtly 30% of the total ip range. (yeah yeah there is alot of special use and reserved space too).
Like he said, a penny saved is a penny earned!
Available number of IPv4 addresses: 4.2 billion
Number of people on earth: 6.35 Billion according to ibilio
Wait, but according to the article, 70% of those 4.2 billion addresses are allotted to the United States.
That leaves just over a billion addresses for the other 6 billion or so on the planet. And according to the article, the distribution among countries seems grossly unfair, for instance, "India.. has just 2 million IP addresses."
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
This *is* a problem, because remember: IP addresses aren't assigned one at a time, they're assigned in groups.
I like my women how I like my sugar.. granulated.
Birth Control
Most routers and computers have built in support for IPv6, but its seems that nobody is willing to ditch the old numbers and just use their IPv6 equivalents.
Actually no. A lot of users out there are still running Windows 98/ME or 2000. The only releases from Microsoft so far that offer built in IPv6 support are XP and Win2003. There is software from Microsoft Research that will let you run it on earlier versions of Windows but it is not officially supported by MS.
Another problem is the lack of application support. There are a lot of applications out there that still need to be rewritten to support IPv6. Not all routers are able to handle native IPv6 packets either. Most of the consumer and low-end gateway routers from Cisco and Linksys do not support IPv6 yet. Version 12.1+ of IOS from Cisco supports it, but not all service providers have it running on their core routers.
The last problem is the DNS system still needs to be upgraded. It is true that most DNS servers can return AAAA records (ipv6 addresses), but not many of the registrars allow you to register glue records of authorative DNS servers with IPv6 addresses.
I was answering to the AC above who implied voice chat is not an acceptable work application....
Just recycle older IP's! I seriously doubt that 4.3 billion IP's will be in use *simultaneously*. Ebay gets a billion hits a month, but not all at once!
stuff |
NAT and proxies work wonders toward preserving ipv4's longevity.
with a billion addresses remaining, the US can take its sweet time. though we could probably use the networking boom when corporations decide it -is- finally time to upgrade.
but does your voip phone really need a static address? and would you really even want it to have one?
as i've said before, ipv6 would need something truly amazing, something that couldn't be provided by ipv4 to push adoption. and unfortunately, that isn't anywhere even on the horizon or on the marketroid buzz sheets.
not even your networked appliances need static addresses. just 1 nat per house ( odds are that'll be nat'd again and again before hitting the 'real' internet)
until people who already have their ipv4 addresses see a benefit they can get only with ipv6, we'll be where we are now (which is where we've been for a decade) talking about ipv6, and asking why were not adopting it.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Just use NAT!
Sorry if this is OT, but it's hard finding discussion on this. Is anyone here using an IPv6 tunnel broker that can successfully IRC and listen to the mp3 streams in the previous Slashdot story? I've tried Hurrican Electric and freenet6 with no luck. I'm using XP SP1.
Do you what the biggest problem right now on the Internet is? Asynchronous callbacks! Why? Because NAT, firewalls, etc makes all of this damm difficult.
When you have GPRS phones you have the ability to make asychronous callbacks. How do you think that is going to happen outside of the network? NAT, does not easily manage this for you. There is only one way to manage this, giving each person a unique address...
Sorry, but there is a case for using IP6...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
What I don't understand is why so many are so against such a change. The benefits are all there. IP addresses for everyone; never have another shortage (until the Mars colony gets on board); and it is backward-compatable with IPv4 (a.k.a. 0.0.192.168.1.1 = 192.168.1.1)
The ONLY reason why people are so against this is because Microsoft has NOT incorporated it into its Operating System. Apple is going to be doing that with their Panther release, and Linux has been doing it for years.
Please, lets just make the transition!
"Stupidity is like neclear energy; it can be used for good or evil, and you don't want any on you."
Established five years ago, IPv6 creates enough IP addresses for every person on Earth to have 1,000 Web-enabled devices. It does so by quadrupling the size of the IP address itself.
The versions created 30 years ago were 32 bits long. Under that scheme, there are 4.3 billion different number combinations.
IPv6 addresses are 128 bits. The resulting list of IP addresses is two googols long, an enormous number. "It's a nearly infinite address space," said Cisco Systems Vice President Sangeeta Anand.
Ok. IPV4 may have a domain of 2^32, or roughly 4.3 billion, but large parts of this range is reserved, is it not? I don't expect to ever see a 127.0.0.0/8, 192.168.0.0/16, 172.16.0.0/16 or 10.0.0.0/8 assigned to anyone for use on the 'net, for example. Anyone have any idea how many assignable IPs exist in V4?
And what about V6? How many IPs are assignable? The article says it's a number "Two googols long". What the F is that? A googol is 10^100, and the domain of V6 is 2^128 == 3.4 * 10^38, or a little more than a third the length of a googol. (and 1/10^42 or so of the magnitude of one) The article also promises 1,000 V6 IPs for every person on earth. This indicates a total of around 6 trillion ( 6 * 10^12) V6 IPs, which is a tiny, tiny fraction (1/10^26 or so) of the total V6 address space.
Can someone who knows what they are talking about summarise how many V6 addresses will be valid and assignable, and why? Yes, it's huge, and we'll probably never run out. But how huge, and why?
--
grnbrg
dyndns.org
I have a dynamic IP (pppoe) and have hosted a personal server for several years. I have an address where I can FTP, ssh, start up a quake server, and run a website. With dyndns, webhop, NAT and IP forwarding on my firewall, it is all easy, and it is all sitting in my computer room.
Seriously, if you have a dynamic IP and want to have a static address linked to it, visit dyndns.org.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Something that is so fundamental to the internet will not be changed unless it absolutely has to. When the IP addresses are about to run out then ISPs and servers will support IPV6. Then, when the IPs DO run out, new IPs will be IPV6. THEN, once people see the advantages, and that change MUST occur, they will. The bottom line is this: The people who write the checks are going to want to postpone this dilema for as long as possible. It is not an investment, per se, but something that HAS to be done 'down the road', this is why companies are not spending money on the change now. neo
The article mentions North America, not America, and despite what some Americans, e.g. General Hull circa 1812, Canada is not part of the United States of America, yet it is part of North America.
Interestingly enough both Mexico AND Panama are also part of North America and yet not U.S. States(Central America is a geo-politcal zone, not a continent).
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
"The internet is currently full. Please hang up and dial again. Otherwise, you can contact customer service at internet@internet.net. Thank you."
I say we take up a collection and purchase all of the remaining IP addresses and then auction them off as a fund raiser for Slashdot. In return, we'll force along the need for IPv6.
However, there appears to be a misconception that Governments or ISPs must be the ones to make the conversion first. IPv6 is designed to run side by side with IPv4. I was given 1 IPv4 address from my ISP, but I can use the IPv6 6to4 transition mechanism and get 80 bits worth of routable addresses. And my ISP didn't have to do anything to set it up. (Static IP needed)
Solaris, Linux, and Windows supports this right now. So I say get off your butts and get on IPv6 today.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
yeah! almost 2 billion NAT addresses behind almost 2 billion ip4 addresses times 65K port numbers is about 260 x 10 ^ 21 portals of communication, like HALF A MOLE.
Marcus Ranum (author of NFR and someone who knows what he's talking about):
"IPV6 is insane overcomplexity if that was the only problems we wanted to solve. We could have doubled the address size of V4, bumped the version number, and left-filled from zero. As far as the "route glut" problems that stimulated the original design of IPV6, we could have used conventions (e.g. something like CIDR addressing which hadn't been thought of when the V6 effort started) that could easily have solved those issues.
Basically, the standards pukes are having fun playing their little games but none of it's really going to solve real problems. IPV6 is gonna be like ISO protocols all over again: what if they gave a protocol and nobody came?"
I thought for a second that no one was going to make some silly, ridiculous, unreasonably based Anti-American statement about US hegemony when talking about something as innocuous as internet updating.
THANKS, SIR HAXALOT!
That was a close one.
Nonono, go suck a donkey's cock.
For example, ISP could have a (secure) web page form, where you would enter the port and the protocol you want in the computer you are. Then it assigns and tells you a new port and public IP, which gets forwarded to your IP and the port you gave in the web form. So you can put up a server running at that port, and then tell the ISP-provided port-forwarded address and port to your client users. This could include an automatic expiration time if wanted.
A more complete alternative would be to have a new protocol, with which you could ask from a router for a port forwarding info. This would be used with a scheme like above for the server side to get the port forwarding enabled. After the server owner gets port forwarding from ISP router, things could work like this:
1. give the static IP of your router and the private static NATed IP of your computer to somebody who wants to connect to you.
2. He runs the client software that supports this new query protocol, and gives it these two IPs and possibly the target port.
3. The client application queries your router with your private IP and the given port, and gets a response: "my port X is forwarded to that port at that private IP" (or "not found").
4. The Client software connect to given port at the router IP, which port forwards it to the correct port at private IP.
And note that this scheme wouldn't provide a way to ask "hey, what ports are open at that IP". So a port scanner would have to ask separately for every port at every IP he wants to scan. With increasing delay for repeated queries from same IP, port scanning for non-well-known ports would be unfeasible.
And client software (say a standard SSH client) that doesn't support new protocol but allows typing any server port would still work too. You would just need a separate query client, which would give you the forwarded port and IP of the ISP router, and then you'd have to manually enter the port for the non-supporting client.
Would it work?
More IP addresses? Just move all the numbers to base 14.
Easy as pie. And no messy bandwidth changes.
Run out of sites then? Base 27.
Could I expect them to work under IPv6, if the client and the server have an IPv6 address?
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Norway reportedly moved over to driving on the right in one day because the PM said "well, if it's too tough for everyone we'll just have the trucks do it first".
So why not just pick a day and those that are interested, get to the v6 net?
There was a situation in iraq (let us not get into the many OTHER situations in the world which also need remedying) in which a populace was being ruled by a blatant dictatorship, which in addition to be a totalitarian one man ruled state also greatly oppressed and murdered it's OWN people by the thousands per year. This state's existance was nearly comepltely agreed upon by the world as in-excusable and wrong. The world due to many layers of inter-politcal agreements and tensions has in so far been unable to deopse the said state. Then one state decides for a multitude of reasons spanning from just cause, to liberation, to greed (oil)... upon removing that regime from power.. and creating a state that honors the civil liberties of it's members, and hopefully will not murder it's own populace in the thousands per year.
In all reality the world should have done it as a collective.... and that route was attempted... but due to politics failed miserably... The sole state that went forward with VERY BAD and some VERY GOOD reasons did so much at the behest against them from the rest of the world.
But for the iraqi's.... this will be a rough time... they will live lives slightly worse than before for a short span of years.... and then afterwards they will much better lives as a free nation which will no doubt shrug the US off of it. In the greater scheme of things... these 5 years of occupation by a state that has one primary intrest (oil) will pay off ten fold in the removavl of an even more oppresive leader (saddam).
There is a reason people in iraq cheered when they found out uday and qusay were dead.... They hated them and feared them very much. They also dislike the US, but to remove the even worse problems they had before.... they will no doubt look back and thank our greed for allowing them to be free.
Lastly ... america ISNT the spoiled child of the world.... that would be the many nations who subsist off of international aid. While i have no qualms with aid being given to them, it is those who live on the kindness of others who are spoiled. I do agree that the poster above is taking pro-american views in a blinded manner... or seems to... but that doesn't belie the good inside of what was done.
To be honest.... i wouldn't have cared if it was us or russia or the UN... or anyone.... as long as it got rid of saddam IMMEDIATLY and began instituting a representative republic for their people.
dont get greed twisted with evil. Sometimes greedy intentions end up doing a world of good for people.
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
We clear up the confusion that for some reason IPv6 is 'better' than IPv4, we'll correct this confusion by renaming IPv4 to IPv6. And to ensure we clearly express the advantages and disadvantages of one over the other to consumers, we will call IPv4 IPv6 "hi-quanitity" and IPv6 as IPv6 "full-quantity"
zx75
This is not a sig.
"innocuous as internet updating."
/Dread
Well this unamerican Dutch guy thinks updating the internet aint no innocent affair.
"silly, ridiculous, unreasonably based"
Kyoto, International criminal court, Iraq, "Old" Europe, enfin, you already knew you were wrong.
Don't really think it matters anymore what the USA thinks or does. Certainly they are the world's greatest threat to peace but that is quite offtopic. As for IPv6 it really is "Plug 'n Play" even if Microsoft can't quite do it yet. As stated, it is fully compatible with existing IPv4 and "opensource" has it completely covered. It just works and if, as one reader said: "99% won't care", that is just as well as they won't have to care. What could be better?
Assignment can be automatic, while not exactly "two googols" of addresses, 2^128 minus those reserved is quite some number! (use your 'bc' and see it for yourself) If there are seven billion people on the planet (and that is an overestimate) we are looking at over some 1.8 x 10^26 "class C equivelant" per every human on the planet! (sorry Griffen, you grossly under-estimated in the same line you grossly over-estimated! -- ditch that Microsoft crap!) I seem to come to a figure of over '60 quadrillion class C equivalents' per second of 7 billion people living for 100 years and the last part is probably a gross exagreratation of what the average human life expectancy will be. Sure the US of A is scared!
Somehow i fail to see the added expence in all of this. It may cost Microsoft $Billions, but the people that are going to need this don't care in the least if Microsoft lives or dies. IPv6 is today and i must admit i was quite impresed a number of years ago when i plugged in my old laptop running FreeBSD into an IPv6 network powered by OpenBSD and it worked instantly! It is this way today on all major Unix type platforms.
Finally, i see only one downside to this and it is not important: "You probably won't be able to memorise all of your IP numbers and ranges no matter what tricks you use for IPv4 today". Get over it, it used to be cool to memorise your entire address book, but when mobiles came out, phone numbers got bigger and became 'throwaway' too. (This is quite litteral here in Europe as GSM mobile phones are usually given away with each and every subscription.)
Canned response 0: there is no problem. Use IPv4.
5 8&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=95 where APNIC (you know, the guys who actually have to deal with IPv4 address requests from the Asia/Pacific region the hardware manufacturers and IPv6 supporters are so concerned about) says its 10-20 years before they run our of IPv4 addresses.
Did folks already forget http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/25/16292
And I used to think Slashdot was the place to go for biased grandstanding...
"The last problem is the DNS system still needs to be upgraded. It is true that most DNS servers can return AAAA records (ipv6 addresses), but not many of the registrars allow you to register glue records of authorative DNS servers with IPv6 addresses."
This seems to be a major problem. Once the DNS system changes to IPv6, then that will be the final "switch" to v6 since a computer looking up www.yahoo.com and receiving back a v6 address needs to know what to do with it. I don't think there is any way to make it a seemless transition, just have to make the switch and those people that refuse to upgrade are SOL.
Just roll out IPv6 along with the metric system.
Honestly, how are our children supposed to learn critical math computation skills without a system that makes insane conversions that are too complex to do off of the top of your head? Why pretty soon, Americans might have to stop walking around with floating point calculators and reference cards. Hell, that's just un-American.
It's a damn conspiracy, I tell you.
Europe types. Trying to take the easy way out. That's why the Germans almost got ya. Easy makes you lose your edge. It's the giant, insane, chalkboard-for-a-loaf-of-bread calculations keep your mind sharp. Ya think 1100-point-whatever kilogram bombs saved ya in "the big one?" Well, DO YA?!? NO! It was 500 POUND bombs! Ya damn English would've never got involved with those people if ya would've stayed the course like the good 'ol USA! They would have been shooting into the channel if you would have kept the old maps, Mr. Smarty Pants!
Always makin' things easy. Lazy bastards.
Before you know it, they'll probably try to dangle some new fangled thermometer in our face that is "easy to understand." I've seen that snake oil. I ain't buyin' it. I saw the other day in the news that they're creepin' in the back door with this "Kelvin" thing. Yet another damn thermometer! This has got to stop!
Damn bastards. Heard they were trying to make their money consistent too.
Since NAT seems to give all those sysadmins such a warm and cosy feeling of security: is NAT also possible on IPv6?
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
The United States is responsible for the drastic shortage of IP Addresses world wide.
In other news, the United States is responsible for wide-spread baby flatulence in France and China.
In other news, the United States is responsible for the rampant corruption in .
Plain and simply put: if it exists, SOMEone will find a use for it all.
Karma: NaN
No I think your being an idiot. One Billion Public IPs is a lot, especially since companies actually use less public IPs now instead of more, because of advances in HTTP that now allow more than one website to be easily hosted from one IP. Our company used to have ten IPs, now it only has one and the different sites are hosted by passing the name in Appache. And people don't need public IPs on their cell phones, that kind of crap disgusts me. Jesus, walk away from the internet for ten seconds it won't kill you. V6 isn't needed yet, nor for a long time and in that time something better may even come along, so why implement yet.
-Mess With The Best Die Like THE Rest- "You can hardly call Linux a joke, it's not even worth making fun of" webmaster
Hi: Look at Verio. I heard somewhere they were promoting ipv6 somehow. Forgive vagueness. Jim
The people, not the governments or corporations, the good responsible people should build a new, logically, perhaps to even make routing easier. Communication is required to do such a thing. Communication exists with the internet we already have here today. But I think they should build another one. One that doesn't have central authority for IP/Domain registration. And one that runs on IPv6 from the start, hopefully with some new techniques in dynamic routing and support for wireless mesh technology when it becomes available..
but I'm dreamin again.
Well, if nanotech ever comes of age, 1,000 IPv6 devices per person on planet Earth might not be enough. Maybe we should start drafting IPv7...
Frankfurt June 5th, 2005: German nanotechnology consortium Nanowerks is pleading with the U.N. to hasten implementation of IPv7 to greatly enlarge the number of IP-enabled devices by 2060.
"1,000 devices per person sounds like a lot, but when 1,000 devices can fit into a thimble, that's not quite enough," said Dr. Smith, director of advanced research for the consortium.
IPv6 was first implemented globally in 2010, allowing for 1,000 devices per person, instead of the less than 1 device per person the 20th century design, IPv4 allowed. IPv7 would allow for a forseeably unlimited number of devices per person, roughly equal in total to the number of molecules that make up the Earth.
Typically the U.N. endorses technological evolutions, such as the adoption of IPv7. There has been some concern though, about allowing such a huge number of addresses for nanomachinery to appropriate.
"The fear is, that if there can be as many nanobots as molecules, then another Frankfurt could happen. Only this time, it wouldn't be kept in check long enough to stop it," said Sarah Gerkenholler, referring to the 2045 outbreak of virulet nanobots in Frankfurt, Germany. The outbreak was stemmed only by limitations in the IPv6 infrastruction, limiting the number of addresses the nanobots could appropriate. Without enough addresses, the nanobots only took over a square block and were destroyed immediately.
Removing the limitations of IPv6 could theoretically allow for a global outbreak of nanobots, removing any constraints to their manufacure.
When asked about a new Frankfurt incident, Dr. Smith said, "We are aware of people's concerns with removing the limitations of IPv6. We would like to take care to remind the public that no one was harmed in 2045 and the machines were put down quickly."
The U.N. is expected to endorse the changeover within the next 6 months.
the post should read:
Frankfurt June 5th, 2050
the current system of handing out addresses (which have no value as such and should not be charged for, although an administrative fee can be charged for setting it up, which quite a few ISP's do) is essentially global through RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC and ARIN. So if China runs out, it means we have all run out.
/48 according to current policy, no extra charge)
Admittedly, the US has quite a bit of legacy space, but I'm sure that large chunks of it will be reclaimed for everyone, should the need arise.
In the US, the idea is still that the Internet is American, so the US will be ok. That is exactly why the ARIN region is (too) slow to pick up on IPv6.
Ofcourse, IPv6 may not happen in the end (there are still quite a few bugs to be ironed out by the IETF et al), but I hope it does, because NAT is getting old real fast. Port forwarding helps a little, but remains a hack at best. The pain of having several machines do the same things behind one IP address (ICQ, webserver, netmeeting) is simply not worth it when I can get over 65000 subnets (with billions of addresses in each one) assigned to me with IPv6.(Everyone that could subnet, should receive a
We could then finally do all the things that we should have been able to now.
And currently, IPv6 is totally free. Everyone gives free transit to everyone, IPv6 is not taken into account with the fee that the RIR's charge their members (at least in the RIPE region, I think the other regions too).
This will change ofcourse, but IPv6 is already a major improvement over IPv4, the US will feel the pain of coming late everywhere if they don't prepare.
CC
The reason US hasn't implemented IPv6 isn't because of fears of Big Brother.
The reason we're not running to IPv6 is because the expenditure won't increase quarterly EPS, and we all know by now that quarterly EPS is the whole purpose in life, right?
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Port. Forwarding.
This may be the news item you were referring to about Verio.
"June 25, 2003 - Verio, a subsidiary of NTT Communications (NTT Com) and a leader in global IP solutions, today announced it will be the first Internet service provider in the United States to deliver large-scale connectivity in North America of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), the next generation communication platform for Internet data traffic. The pre-commercial service is available immediately. "
"Microsoft, whose operating system runs 80 percent of the world's computers, has adopted the new addressing scheme in its Windows XP operating system, but it's switched off by default. The latest version of Apple's operating system is also IPv6-compatible.
;)
The open-source community has also begun incorporating IPv6 into its own operating systems."
Oh yes, we have 'just begun' to put IPV6 support in Linux, FreeBSD, etc.. I think these features were evident in the open source OS's before Microsoft and Apple made the switch.
I could be wrong. It's happened once or twice before.
Don't ever give a cell phone a publicly routable IP.
yes they have lot's of IP's, and blocks of IP's are doled out on a as needed basis. Running arround crying the sky is falling, makes for good tabloid headlines, They got all of us /. morrons to bite; but the truth is when we run out of ip4 Addresses, the whole world is out. Americans don't have a secret hoard of them saved for a rainy day.
Actualy if it really worked like the article implied and asia for example got one huge contiguous block of addresses spam filtering would be alot easier.
There are lots of good reasons for going to IP6, it's just that running out of addresses isn't one of them.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
US Citizen: What's a meter?
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
Someone who works for IBM told me that their internal network is called the '9.' network.
So called because all the dotted ip addresses beginng with 9, (i.e.
9.0.0.1 through 9.255.255.254 belong to them).
Thats 0.4% of the ENTIRE IPV4 address space, assigned to one company. IRC, MIT has a similar allocation...
ARIN ought to charge by the fraction of the total address space. Then IPv6 addresses, being less of an impact on the total address space, will cost less then IPv4 addresses. Actually, since IPv6 addresses would then cost 1/64,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of IPv4, there should probably be an additional constant factor for owning addresses...
::FFFF:address, which is an IPv6 address which addresses whatever is addressed with the IPv4 address specified? They don't have to buy blocks of these. For example, ::FFFF:18.7.21.70 is a perfectly good IPv6 address which will reach 18.7.21.70 by IPv6 instead of IPv4.
As far as ISPs not wanting to leave their nice old free IPv4 blocks, what's wrong with
Personally, I think that IPv6 will catch on in the US by way of something like a cell phone provider giving an address to each phone they serve, which can be used to interact with other IPv6 users. People whose friends have these phones then have an incentive to get the ability to send to them, and IPv6 becomes useful for some obvious end-user application, at which point people will discover that IPv6 is already in place and just not being used for much.
UPnP's Internet Gateway Device control protocol is neither a hack nor is it expensive.
The idea is simple; your NAT firewall is UPnP enabled, and UPnP aware applications simply use the standard UPnP IGDP API to configure the firewall for it use. No work involved on the user's part at all!
And if you think this is far-fetched or won't be available, realize that many current home broadband routers already support this protocol, and applications such as Windows Messenger already make use of UPnP router features.
If you want to read all about it, go here.
So how does that work exactly?
Take for example, I dug up ID's Quake to play some Team Fortress a few weeks back.
The server entry requires an IPv4 address for the server. Now, how are you supposed to resolve an IPv4-compatible address out of an IPv6 without having routing issues?
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
The main real-world applications I've seen for 127.*.*.* values with host-parts greater than 1 has been spam-blocker DNS responses that have to return something that's syntactically an IP address but is easily distinguished from a valid IP address - many of them return values from 127.0.0.2 to 127.0.0.6 depending on what reason you might have for not wanting to talk to some-machine.example.net.kr. I've personally found them to be useful mnemonics for host-file entries for machines I don't want to talk to ("127.0.0.2 doubleclick.net" makes their cookie requests not go through...).
Surprisingly, on my Win2K machine, pinging 127.255.255.255 didn't respond, though 127.2.3.4 did....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Most dial ISPs don't ban servers, though most of them don't give you 7x24 use of a static IP address, which makes running a server somewhat difficult, and most DSL services also tend to do dynamic addresses. But you can work around that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If the IP-enabled cell phone business takes off to the point that they need 10-20 Class A addresses to handle the 160-320 million new customers, all of us in the phone industry will be deliriously happy and we'll have the money to spend converting things to IPv6. (For a while, it's more likely the phones will run IPv6 with IPv4 NAT or web proxies to handle the portions of the network that don't need full-time IPv4 connectivity.)
The other big potential use is if a Billion extra people get full-time internet connections. The main reason this is likely to happen eventually is if third-world telephony deployment is done with IP telephony instead of traditional circuit phone switches, which the wired parts of the network may very well be. But that's going to take a while - and it'll take getting rid of telephone monopolies for most of those billion people, which may take some time.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"As much of the world nears an Internet address crunch, North America stands as an island apart, threatening to fragment plans for the biggest overhaul of the Web in decades."
Decades, huh?
Speaking of that C|Net, I'm looking for a job. I have 27 years in Linux experience, 15 years of Java, and I've been using Windows 2000 since 1987.
015/8 Jul 94 Hewlett-Packard Company
016/8 Nov 94 Digital Equipment Corporation
If no one in the US is using IPv6, maybe the file-swappers should just switch over to it. Then maybe the RIAA will think everyone stopped!
Spoken by someone who probably has NOT had to deal with doing huge amounts of NAT between many businesses. NAT is just a hack to get over the shortage of IP addresses to start with. So NAT's not solving the real problem; it's a bandaid solution. Then there's the protocols that have issued with NAT. These include FTP, DNS, H.323, IIOP (Corba), various Voice over IP, etc. Each protocol has to be pulled apart by the device doing the NAT, and the IP addreses embeded within the data has to also be changed accoringly. For DNS, you can forget about zone transfers as the NAT will completely stuff that up. The list goes on.
Another thing that hasn't been brought up is the massive shortage of IP adresses NOT used on the Internet. It's a huge problem. Many corporations run business-to-business connections between their own firewalls, the Internet is not used. Many of these internal networks are numbered out of either RFC1918 (private) networks, or bogus/stolen public networks. It doesn't take very long before you start to get clashes with the 10.0.0.0 network or the 192.168.0.0 network. Businesses need a large range of IP addresses to use internally, but still have uniqueness between each other for business communications.
ln -s
Wow I'm smart.
Many Thanks,
Luke
Not Scalable
What if I have 5 servers behind my NAT box all running the same service (say http or ssh). So now I have to use non-standard ports to get back to each individual server. Solution sucks as it doesn't scale.
ln -s
Actually, you can run just about anything you want with a dynamically assigned IP address.
How? Just use a dynamic DNS hosting service and make sure your router or a box on your internal net keeps checking your dynamically assigned IP and when it detects a changed IP, updates the DNS records. That's one of the things that DNS if for...
I setup something like this in about 10 minutes, and it's not like it consumes any system resources just to check a local ip address every couple of minutes....
From the first paragraph of the article: The standard is widely seen as a necessary successor to the current IPv4 system, which some fear could run short of addresses in Asia and Europe within the next few years.
IP Shortage In Asia Just Myth, Says APNIC
Americans ignoring the issues facing the rest of the world, and then complaining when it comes back and blows up a building or two - no....
Globally routable blocks of IP addresses are the real constraint for the Internet, because every "backbone" router in the Internet needs to know the best routes to each block. There are currently about 100,000 of them, and calculating routing tables takes a lot of memory - it's only been recently that the biggest Cisco routers could calculate that many using BGP. Within each block, it's the block owner's problem to find the best route to the destination - the rest of the net doesn't need to care about that. The advantage of having your own routable address block is that you can take it with you when you change ISPs (so you don't need to renumber your network), and you can get service from multiple ISPs aat the same time to improve your reliability and shorten your routes to everywhere. There are a group of old grandfathered Class C /24 addresses that are globally routable, but otherwise you need about a /20 (for a long time it was a /19.)
Neither of these constraints on address space will be changed much by IPv6. There's some work being done on making it easier to summarize routes into larger blocks while preserving routing efficiency, but I'm not particularly convinced it's getting anywhere (though that was certainly a goal - for now we're solving the problem by watching Moore's Law make memory much cheaper). The amount of work required to manage a customer doesn't change any. Address space is almost infinitely large - instead of giving you one static IP address, your ISP should easily be able to give you a /64 which has 2**64 addresses in it (roughly 2**16 subnets of 48 bits, so you can use your Ethernet MAC address to autoaddress IP instead of really needing DHCP, kind of the way Netware worked). It'll be a bit easier for people to manage their own subnet space because a /48 gives you 2**16 subnets of /64, so nobody in the world should be short on the stuff, but it's not a big help compared to the routable address issue.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But 6to4 tunnelling doesn't solve the IP address shortage. If your users can handle 6to4, they can probably handle NAT as well, and you can give them 10.x without bothering with IPv6 tunnels. If your users _can't_ handle NAT, because they need REAL IP ADDRESSES to give people in the real world, they probably need real IPv4 addresses, not IPv6 addresses.
IPv6 tunnels do help for customers of different ISPs who want to talk to each other without doing double NAT (10.x.x.x to Registered IPv4 to 10.y.y.y), so I suppose there's a bit of value there. On the other hand, *your* ISP doesn't need to offer it - if you can set up a tunnel to an ISP who's doing IPv6 tunnel brokering, that gives you real routes that other IPv6 users can use to reach you, even if your ISP is clueless. This means that for many users, IPv6 tunnel brokering is a service just like email is a service - it's convenient if your ISP offers it, but you can just as well get it from somebody else.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I wonder how long it will be before the US occupies another country for its IP addresses. Hey, if my Prime Minister bends over far enough he might get a share of the spoils.
The specs for IPv6 aren't halping it's adoption one little bit. Essentially, instead of doing something obvious and easy like adding another byte or two to ipv4 and kicking the rest into an upper level protocol where it belongs, they had to load everything including the kitchen sink into the low level protocol. While they're at it, why don't they just specify a full blown BASIC interpretor in the header so we can all buy supercomputer/routers to figure out where the next hop is?
They could have done something really simple like assign a legacy prefix to IPV4 to make the current internet a subnet. Not quite ready to upgrade EVERYTHING?, just have your router add the prefix when it routes a V4 packet and strip it off on the incoming packets. Had routers started doing that 8 years ago and used a simple handshake (send a V6 packet to the next hop and see if it responds), most of them would be ready to go to full V6 now.
Of course, there's the address allocation process. Since V6 addresses are a few billion times less scarce than V4 addresses, shouldn't they be dirt cheap according to supply and demand?
Another big help would be a decent way to avoid the chicken and egg problem. All of the extra baggage thrown in and no simple discovery method so you could have V6 behind your router and it has a way to discover tunnels to other pockets of V6? For example, I have an old class C at 192.168.1.0/24, you have one at 192.168.2.0/24. We both have V6 running behind our routers and one of my V6 machines sends a connection to one of your V6 addresses. My router looks up your V6 net and sees that a V4 tunnel for it exists at 192.168.2.22, so it wraps it in a v4 header and sends it there. That way, individual nets can upgrade usefully without having to wait for the rest of the internet to catch up. If you don't have V6 yet, my V6 address is NATed. At the same time, the tunnel lookup server acts as an address registry.
The reason nobody is upgrading to V6 early is because until everyone else does, it has no real value but it does have real cost. Make it inexpensive for hobbiests (why in the world would I want to cough up $2500 a year just for something that allows me to talk to NOBODY, it must be REAL expensive to store that 100 or so bytes to maintain my registration), and they'll start using Linux or BSD boxes to tunnel around. Once there's some cool stuff in V6 space, ISPs will start seeing it as a value add in a market where otherwise all providers are essentially the same. Then (and only then) will businesses want to upgrade.
C'mon guys,
the currently limmited IP addresses means LOTS of money for service providers.
How much you pay for a NAT DSL and a fixed IP DSL link?
Sure IP means money.
And attention: IPv6 working fully would cause the destruction of telephone companies, cell companies, etc as VOIP, wireless networks, etc moves on.
There are many big guys not interested on it.
That's it.
I live in guam. I pay $80 a month for my cable internet and I don't even have a publically reachable dynamic IP address. The entire ISP is a NAT. It sorta makes setting up apache on your own computer useless. I don't know how many of the addresses belong to APNIC to allocate. But back in the states I paid $40 dollars a month for cable internet that worked much better, and I even had a an actual IP address. Granted it was "dynamic" but it never changed.
They also own all these other address spaces.