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Dispelling the IPv4 Address Shortage Myth
Zocalo writes "While looking up some WHOIS information at RIPE just now I noticed a couple of articles about the IPv4 address space allocation status. IPv4 Address Space: October 2003 is a short summary by RIPE themselves, and IPv4 - How long have we got? is from July 2003, but has lots more detail and pretty graphs!
In short, the "Death of the Internet" due to lack of IP space is a myth, which doesn't bode well for getting IPv6 rolled out any time soon."
I'll take all the addresses I can :-)
If I get enough for free, we will have to use IPV6..
I think I want a screensaver where each pixel has an ip, and then we can replace X with a simple protocol just sending colors!!
This message was posted on a mailing list in response to a post that claimed that IPv6 would be widespread by 2005 due to an IPv4 address shortage
NATs, unfortunately, made a need to switch over to IPv6 wholly unnecessary. Such a switchover will probably not happen for at least another ten years. Even ten years ago, we were "running out of" IPv4 space due to incredibly inefficient allocations using the "class based addressing" method - by which your network was deemed to either to likely possess 253 computers, 65,533 computers, or 16,777,213 computers. A specific network was identified by 24, 16, or 8 bits. (The more bits it takes to identify a network, the more networks can exist but at the expense of having fewer unique addresses per network.)
This was quickly determined to be an inordinate waste of addresses and as early as the early 90's folks were predicting we'd rapidly run out of addresses. So class allocations changed a little, and instead of giving an organization with 1000 computers a class B (with 65,533 useable addresses), they'd give them four class C's (with 1012 addresses). This helped stem the tide for a bit and arguably saved the Internet's ass, but it was clear that a more elegant system for identifying networks was needed.
After some backbone technology re-architecting, a new scheme called Classless Internet Domain Routing, or CIDR was introduced, which allowed bit-sized granularity, meaning that a network was identified by exactly as many bits as you needed. Your network could possess 13 computers, or 16,381 computers, and the system could deal with that efficiently. CIDR definitely also helped save the Internet's ass. But the addresses kept on coming; that dang Internet was getting popular very quickly! Pundits started talking about The Great IPv6 changeover, despite the fact that less than one person in 100 on the Internet had an IPv6-enabled operating system.
Then came NATs. While Network Address Translation had been used in many environments, it hadn't really taken off tremendously. Then Linksys released a rather affordable cute little blue box. This piece of hardware let home users plug in several computers to the blue box, configure it with a web interface, jack in their cable/DSL connection and suddenly be sharing Internet access easily with everyone in the house, using one IP address and so fooling the ISP into thinking that there was only one computer using the Internet (many ISPs either don't permit or don't have the infrastructure to give out multiple addresses to a customer). These NATs had a secondary benefit, which was that by default, all incoming connections from the outside are dropped on the floor. I'm not sure Linksys had such "firewalling" in mind when originally designing the device - it's purely a practical issue. I mean, if someone says to a NAT "here's this piece of information" - to who which of the four connected computers should the NAT send it? By default, the NAT will give up and just drop the sorry packet. This means that when you're behind a NAT, you're protected from a whole class of Internet attacks. This realization further drove adoption.
Companies with low IT budgets realized that they wouldn't have to buy extra IP addresses from their ISP (which often came at a premium) and that they could have simple firewalling without a complex configuration. Both companies and people could not see the inherent value in having each of their computers have an Internet-deliverable address, and there was real value (protection) to be had in NOT be addressable from the Internet.
This, again, saved the Internet's ass. Instead of an organization of 1000 needing a class B, wasting hundreds of thousands of IPs, or even four Class Cs, this organization now only needs a single IP address to cover all of its desktops. Now instead of thinking about IP addresses as computer addresses, they have started to become network addresses, which is to say,
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
Check this presentation: mms://webcast.ripe.net/ripe46/plenary-2.wmv
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This is done because we have to, not because we want to. If IPv6 was a reality today i would put many machines with a public IP address that today are behind NAT.
rm -rf /home/leia
For philosophical reasons, there's some opposition to the mass NAT-ing of the Internet; it tends to break the equality between computers, creating the artificial distinction between servers and clients (just imagine all the pain you have to go through to use your favorite P2P/game/whatever behind a NAT router). IPv6 will solve that, although NAT will probably continue for other reasons.
My insight is to say that your right on the mark. NAT killed IPv6. Also, now with the focus more on security, more people are seeing isolated networks with single points of IDS monitoring as solid solutions to security. Hence people put everything on a non routable blocks of IPs and put a snort NAT box at the head end.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
According to their study, yes it will take 20 years for 100% of the address space to be used up. But there was a study done (trying to find the URL right now..) saying that once we reach a critical mass of around 85% usage, it will become nearly impossible for an organization to obtain new address space. At this point, we will essentially be in a crisis-state, where no one will be able to request more space.
NAT is a quick and dirty hack that has to be updated for newer, complex protocols-- it wasn't until fairly recently that NAT would actually deal decently with FTP, but it requires mangling the packets.
In the end, the only truly STABLE method for addressing is just to have real IP addresses. NATs just add points of failure and complexity in diagnosis.
It doesn't help that Microsoft's own implementation of the system is nearly impossible to configure-- since NAT is useless for servers, you're only going to see it on clients, and there's your #1 most likely NAT solution to see.
IPv6 will eventually be adopted, because the way IPv4 addresses are allocated, many regions of the world *do* have a shortage of addresses. In particular, Asia has a serious shortage of IPv4 addresses. In fact, I know of people who run IPv6-only machines in Japan (because there are 6to4 addresses that allow you to reach IPv4 servers with approximately the same functionality as NAT).
Moreover, as people deploy new infrastructure, they may be forced to use IPv6. For example, at some point every cell phone is going to have a routable IP address--and that is definitely going to require IPv6.
So while North American desktop machines are unlikely to be switched to IPv6 any time soon, it will happen in other parts of the world and for other types of hardware.
There is more to IPv6 than a larger address space. The address space issue is just what is commonly pushed, since it's something that's easily grasped even by non-techies.
The true benefits of IPv6 are things like; improved routing, multicasting scope, greater flexibility in what packets contain, flow labeling, privacy and authentication.
Especially flow labeling will be important if the net is going to be a source of media. Streams could get a higher priority, so low latency and glitch free audio and video can be possible. Makes me wonder if this couldn't be abused though.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
wouldn't you have to run some sort of firewall on each individual machine, rather than just the gateway/router?
No. The questions of whether computers on a LAN have their own IP addresses and whether they are firewalled by a dedicated box are independent. Even if each machine has an IP address by which it is publically addressable, you can still have a system which protects it by blocking known-dangerous ports.
The advantage of a situation like that, for instance, would be that you could have the firewall block file-sharing/RPC ports, while still allowing port 80 inbound so the individual machines can run webservers. With a NAT, only one local system could have a webserver, and you'd have to configure which one got it on the firewall.
Ok, this is idocy. Yes, the net can survive with NAT. The thing is, IPv6 is about looking forward.
If every phone, mobile phone, internet appliance, whatever had a publicly available internet address, things like VoIP could be routed over the internet, be more secure, have better latency, possibility of point to point encryption, etc. It would drive down the cost of mobile internet service, and make service better on the whole. Want your home phone# to ring your cellphone or computer? Forward it.
Phone numbers of the future should be like URLs. phone.yourname.com, mobile.yourname.com, and you could have as many of these as you could want to resolve to your phone's address. Want to have your cell listed by your employeer? joesmith.bigcompany.com. Confrence calls? IPv6 has much better facility for multicasting. Video, etc etc etc. are all quite possible.
It's not that complicated. IPv6 represents a paradigm shift for future accessible technologies, that aren't possible/interoperable any other way. People want mobile internet aware devices, lots of them.
What I want is to be able to subscribe to a mobile carrier like I would an ISP. They host my connection, give me some benefits (web space, whatever, more data transfer), and charge me for the byte. It's redicliously expensive to use internet enabled phones in most places in the world--Especially concidering that voice data is so much larger, by nature..