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."

Comments

Re:nat

[wfberg]

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 !

Insightful IPv6 article

[Danta]

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.

Re:of course they are shrugging it off...

[jandrese]

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.

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. :) It's really a shame that so many ISPs are terrified of people running private little servers for personal use.

BZZZT wrong!

[Chibi Merrow]

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.

Re:I'll donate a few IP Addy's for a good cause

[Jeremy Erwin]

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?

Re:Shrug

[Twister002]

> 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.

Re:Shrug

[Anonymous Canard]

There are 32k class B addresses so there are about 32000 corporations or organizations which own the range of addresses you give. There are also 127 class A addresses, many of those also controlled by corporations or organizations. From a quick perusal of the registrations we find:

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.