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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 don't fear change per se... they fear changes to their bottomline.. that's what happens when a country is driven on money..
I'm not the devil.. just his advocate.
Why can't cell phones use NAT? I thought they already did.
But you are right, the switch over to IPv6 will be costly and that's a big reason why it hasn't been widely adopted. But here's my thinking on this: if you look at this for the long-range economics, more IP addresses will be a good thing. Every device you own can have an address and when a device has an address, companies can sell you services for it. Certainly, I'm not the only one to ever realize this and so I've got to assume that companies just aren't ready to roll out their product line of George Foreman Grills/Web Browsers - but it's coming.
In short, the economics of the move are relevant but not in the simple sense that companies just don't want to pony up. The market has to be ready to capitalize on the change.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
do cell phones, refirgerators, and other "appliances" really need a dedicated static i.p. address? why can't they use NAT and private addresses?
But if you have, say, 2 appliances that you need to be able to access from the outside, you'd need to keep them apart. For example one could be on port 31337 and the other on port 31338 and those ports are forwarded to 10.0.0.1:22 and 10.0.0.2:22. Of course, setting that up manually is a bit of a chore, plus you'd have to remember all of it. It would be neat if there was a standardized protocol to do this. Guess what, hotshot! This is your lucky day! There *is* such a protocol, and it *eliminates* all problems you could think of. It's not called uPNP,it's called... wait for it.. IPv6 !
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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.
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.
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.
Don't worry, I'm sure ISPs will still find a way to charge you an additional $15 (It's more expensive because 6 is bigger than 4) for each additional IP address you use.
:) It's really a shame that so many ISPs are terrified of people running private little servers for personal use.
Having a static public IP can be extremely handy though. Whenever I have a cool graphic or whatnot I want my friends to see, I just stick it up on the webserver and send the email in a link. Because many of my friends use pine or AOL or Hotmail or whatnot, that's the most reliable way of distributing the file. Even my Mom likes getting a link and being able to click on it rather than saving the file off somewhere and trying to open it later. And that's only one of the many many useful things you can do once you have a server and a static IPs, especially once you learn CGI and the power of perl.
I read the internet for the articles.
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
Maybe companies in poorer countries could aquire it for their internal networking. Stuff like this is real costly right now.
You do realize that poorer countries will probably have to make the switch to ipv6, sooner than the countries that will (in your scheme) be donating the routers, don't you?
Does anybody work in one of those overseas ISPs that have switched to IPv6? I'd like to hear some actual accounts from the trenches on this one. It could be as the above poster implied, or it could be relatively painless and automatic save for some of your older users who still have Win3.0 on their 386 and wonder why their 9600 baud modem connection isn't working anymore...
I read the internet for the articles.
> Have you tried to do voice chat?
Yes, better I've done video chat using MSN messenger netphone, CUCme, Netmeeting, and ICUII. Had to configure the router but it worked.
>Gaming?
Yes, both playing and serving. Had a RTCW beta server running on my Linux box with people connecting and playing outside my firewall. Quake servers, Counterstrike Server, even Moonbase Commander once, Age of Mythology beta test, Ultima Online, Anarchy Online. Just about everything.
>Serving?
Yes, I ran my own web server, FTP server, and mail server behind a NATted firewall/router for over a year on a cable modem. The only reason I stopped was because I moved away from the service area.
>Anything other then basic web browsing behind a NAT?
Yes, SSHing, telnet, MUDing, IMing, FTPing, Napster (shhhh) back when it was still up. IM file transfers.
My NAT router/firewall cost $50. One of those rare, expensive hacks I guess.
It's not like port forwarding is a big deal, or expensive, or really screws up the network.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
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
The classic KISS principle applies. Do you want your stove/fridge/critical home appliance to stop functioning because of a toasted circuit board? I like my protocols simple and my appliances simpler. This is a case of adding functionality to a system that really doesn't need it.
Sure, it'd be cool, but ultimately, who cares? I'm sure as hell not going to rush out a buy me a whole new suite of networked appliances.
Also, think about this, appliances last forever relative to information technology. We had a fridge that we just replaced that was new in 1976. How much has tech changed since then? I think this sort of thing is like color on appliances - sure lime green looked neato in 1975, but in 2003 it looks like crap. I'll stick with white on my major (and expensive to replace or fix) appliances and I'll be avoiding stuff that makes them more complicated than they really need to be.
Of course, your mileage may differ...
"It's real and we can touch it, so least we know where we stand." - Jack Burton
I have a NAT setup consisting of the following:
:)
:)
:) I'd also say it's really up to the protocol designers to use something more routable than a 1000-port range :)
Linux box for firewall/routing
Linux server (web/ftp/mail)
W2K desktop - gaming, p2p, general use
Laptop - email, web, work (VPN)
PS2 - games
Tivo - Tivoweb online scheduling, data updates via IP
Guess what? It all works. About the only thing I don't do which you mention is VoIP, but the others are all fine. I get great performance up and down for the p2p I've tried (e.g. kazaa, edonkey, gnucleus). Gaming on both the PC and PS2 works without a hitch. For the SOCOM voice chat feature I had to forward a UDP range to the PS2 from the firewall, but that's no big deal, and it seems to work for Hardware Online Arena as well. The gameplay itself worked first time with no tweaks (using the SuSEfirewall2 config script for iptables). Serving is all done from one box - web (apache) and ftp/mail. Again, with the aid of a couple of port forwards it works fine. The tivo is proxied behind the apache server, adding a nice layer of security and allowing me to use a seperate (virtual) host name for it. The VPN for accessing work works fine through the NAT, although I can only have one client running at a time (a limitation due to the way VPN works). Not a problem as there's only one of me
I have to agree with the original poster, for me NAT works perfectly well. It even gives some advantages (IMHO) - the knowledge that my less secure machines (w2k, tivo) are not even addressable from the outside world is somewhat comforting. And I'd disagree strongly with the idea that I "don't do much with my computer" - I think I do pretty much as much as anyone does, w.r.t network access anyway. You say forwarding is bad - how many webservers do you need in your apartment? I can see problems if you, say, had to PS2s and wanted to play SOCOM on both with the voice option, but I guess that's not a common problem
So I'm in no hurry to move to IPv6 - I can see no advantage to me whatsoever. Of course I support the whole process, it makes sense to migrate before it's an emergency, but until it's trivially easy (and it isn't right now) there's no point.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
And nothing to do with the fact that they would have to spend even more resources on technical support for their customers
ISPs could/should just provide an IPv6 to IPv4 tunnel for users unless they specifically ask for direct IPv6 access.
Even if a NAT is set up in an office, it's doesn't have to be used for VoIP. At our office, the phone switch is assigned direct IP addresses. But even if there are 75 people behind the NAT, no one would assign 75 IP addresses to the phone switch. Really smart switches would route local calls to the phone company's copper, and long distance to IP. If all IPs are in use, the phone company's copper is used for long distance. The net result is that less IPs are used than the number of workstations, even with VoIP in heavy use.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
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.
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?"
GE (3.x.x.x), GTEI (4.x.x.x and 8.x.x.x), army.mil (6.x.x.x, and 55.x.x.x), AT&T (12.x.x.x, 32.x.x.x), Xerox (13.x.x.x), HP (15.x.x.x, 16.x.x.x), Apple (17.x.x.x), MIT (18.x.x.x), Ford (19.x.x.x), CSC (20.x.x.x), ARIN.NET (24, 63-69), ucl.ac.uk (25), nipr.mil (33), inet-hou.com (34), merit.edu (35), psi.net (38), uu.net (40), v6nic.net (43), ampr.org (44), vt.edu (45), Nortel (46), Dupont (52), debir.de (53), usps.gov (56), equant.net (57), apnic.net (60, 61), ripe.net (62, 80-82).
Those are all of the ones that respond to an in-addr.arpa request. It would be interesting to see how many of those listed actually use their addressable space. ARIN, RIPE, and APNIC provide subdivided blocks of addresses to Europe, Asia, and North America. Net 34 (inet-hou.com) appears to be the personal property of a Houston resident named Richard Harrison. Net 44 (ampr.org) is the amateur packet radio subnet, and there are a few other ISPs there, like 40 (uu.net), 38 (psi.net), and probably one or both of the AT&T class A's. And there are a few universities both in the US and one in the UK. I would suspect that most of the corporate subnets are firewalled anyway, so moving any of those would represent only the inconvenience of renumbering their networks -- but it isn't as if the machines were actually reachable from the 'net.
--
BitTorrent in C -- LibBT
http://www.sf.net/projects/libbt
The reason the US isn't implementing IPv6 has nothing to do with address space.
I could be wrong, but it might have something to do with the cost of upgrading all of the routers. And I'm not talking about just hardware costs, I'm talking about the amount of time it will take net admins to upgrade their equipment. "Spend money to make money" doesn't seem to apply in this economy.
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
additinal bandwidth costs aside, the main reason us ISPs are afraid of you running services is when you decide to try for tech help and call in, stumping our techs and wasting about 12 bucks an hour. 90 minutes of tech support blows the profit margin for X number of users. its not your virgin apache install with a perl page counter that we fear, its the money that we lose that we fear :D
/20, I think it was. you do the math.
given that, we dont block any ports, give out real IPs, and my ISP at home far away also blocks no ports and gives out real IPs.
and given THAT, as an isp netadmin, and as an isp customer to someone else, i'd gladly pay 5 bucks/month to a paranoid isp to unblock my ports and give me a real ip. ARIN charges you like 2 grand a year for your own
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Canned response 3: NAT is an easy way to secure machines.
Not suggesting that you think this is true, but it's a very wide misconception. NAT gives a lot of people a false sense of security. ``My system is on a non-routed IP address, there's no way anyone can break into it.''
The problem, of course, is that they proceed to route it through a NAT, run externally visible services on it[0], network clients that are actively connecting out on the internet--possibly introducing back doors[1], etc...
[0] I broke into a major e-commerce site where the first system I was logged into had a 10.x address.
[1] I've had people attach to my local X server on a private network from the internet riding over a bug in my ssh *client* (good thing I usually use -v, saw it right away).
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.