Map of the Internet

Wellington Grey writes "Author of the popular webcomic xkcd has put up a hand made map of the internet as today's comic. He also has an interesting blog entry detailing some of the work that went into it, such a pinging servers and creating a method of fractal mapping to display related regions as contiguous sections on the grid." The drawing is pretty damn impressive; somebody get on making that thing a giant wall poster so I can paper over Taco's office door.

Comments

Real Map of Internet

[Delta-9]

Thats neat, however opte.org is working on realtime maps of the internet.

Amazing web commics

[TheRagingTowel]

What amazes me most is his ability to make you see the character's face expression although it's a faceless stick figure (eg this). That and that he seems to be an absolute geek :)

MIT

[minus_273]

I always laugh at how MIT half as much as all of latin america and as much as all of Africa.

I remember being in MIT and getting a real fixed IP for every single device. We actually had a coke vending machine that was hacked and online with its own IP. Considering they has so much that they are no where near running out, I'm sure there are a ton of toasters online at MIT as well.

Re:MIT

[Pasquina]

Each dorm is assigned all of a second-level IP: 18.XXX.*.*, that's 65536 IP addresses per dorm. At about 300 students per dorm, that's more than 200 static IPs per student...just in case. My fraternity is assigned 512 IPs for 45 guys.
If nothing else, it has skewed my opinion on how quickly we're running out of IPv4 addresses.

I've also heard that MIT rents some of their IPs to Portugal. (This was also the subject of a supposed hack that some MIT student took out an entire country's internet service for a little while.) Does anyone know if either half of this is true?

Good job, but...

[level_headed_midwest]

They did a good job in labeling things like local, multicast, loopback, and VPN addresses, but they forgot to note 169 as such.

Re:Good job, but...

[dpilot]

Since you're mentioning the zeroconf space, it's also worth noting that they pointed RFC1918 at "192.", though I guess they discounted everything but "192.168.", but in the meantime they completely forgot about 172.16.-172.31. and gave 10. to cable companies.

I've been thinking for some time that 172.16-31 might be a better place to hide my LAN, away from normal expectations. In a very meager way, this confirms it.

Use Domains+Web Sites, instead of IPs?

[Kadin2048]

Although a map of the IP address space is probably more interesting and informative, something that was based on the distribution of domain names might be more appealing to a non-technical audience; perhaps something showing the relative size of various sites beneath each TLD, with some factor based on popularity and grouped by semantic distance and interlinking.

E.g., so you'd end up with something that had big regions for the major TLDs, and then within them you'd have semantically related regions (sites that are related based on keywords or link to each other heavily). The base unit could be sites, and their size would be proportional to their number of publicly-accessible pages times a 'popularity factor.' Maybe you could extract some of the popularity information from Google (not that they'd probably like you hitting them with a lot of scripted searches).

I think it would be neat, particularly if you ended up with something that showed such locales as the Spamblog Ghetto, Fortress Corporate America, and, of course, the Porn District.

A good reason to move to IPv6

[Rocketship Underpant]

Isn't it kind of sad that the entire continent of Africa gets the same number of IP addresses that Prudential, an insurance company gets?

Re:A good reason to move to IPv6

[iabervon]

Latecomers to the internet, like Harvard and Africa, have their networks structured such that they don't need huge numbers of IP addresses. When MIT originally set up their network, their routing was done by IP address block, so the routers could all decide where to send packets based on a single octet. So, if you have one computer in a location without any other computers, it gets 65536 addresses. Furthermore, the original routing between sites was simplified greatly by having the first octet dictate which site would get the traffic, so it would have been very difficult to give MIT or Federated less than 16777216 addresses, because traffic for all of those addresses would be routed through a single link to the rest of the internet.

These days, any infrastructure device is perfectly capable of looking up addresses in a table, and can discover and store the mappings for your whole network with no trouble at all. With this sort of hardware (which is all that's still available), each computer only needs one address. When there are 16 million computers in Africa on the internet, they can have more addresses. For that matter, MIT would give up most of their addresses if there was a shortage; last time I checked, only 18.*.0.* was generally used.

The real reason to go to IPv6 is not that there aren't enough addresses for everybody, but rather that there aren't enough addresses to not have to worry about allocation. With IPv6, every NIC that'll ever be created can have its own IP address (based on its MAC), plus addresses it gets by being connected through a router, private addresses, loopback, and so forth. There are useful effects of having so many addresses total that you can assign large spaces of them for purposes other than just having an address for each device on the internet.

Re:Interesting...

[ei4anb]

The Dragons are shown in real time on this map http://isc.sans.org/large_map.php

Re:Rasterizer.

[ei4anb]

obligatory reference to the CAIDA maps: http://www.caida.org/analysis/topology/as_core_net work/

I realy do like the simple structure of the xkcd map though; like the London Underground map it is a simple representation that took much work to make it so simple!

Re:xkcd

[loconet]

Here is another hilarious one.

Useful

[Hegh]

That's actually quite useful to me. Twice I've watched somebody attempt to brute-force their way into an FTP server that I run for myself (which I have since taken off of the public internet, since I realized I only use it on my LAN), and now I know that the attacks which came from 61/8 and 62/8 are in Asia and Europe, respectively (therefore I don't have to worry about blocking those entire IP ranges, since if my FTP server were public again, I would never be in one of those ranges trying to get in). Anybody else have a practical use for this?

Re:IPv4 space

[wayne]

Actually, wikipedia has a very good summary of when IPv4 address space exhaustion will likely happen. In particular, while the IPv4 allocation graphs made by Geoff Huston aren't as pretty, they are likely far more accurate than xkcd's. The only problem with Geoff's predictions is the exhaution date keeps getting moved forward so his dates are probably best-case predictions.

Basically, yes, the IPv4 space is running out. It is still 3-5 years out for IANA exhaustion and further for the RIRs and ISPs, but it is something that people need to start planning for. The predictions about IPv4 addresses running out back in the 90s was before the development of things like CIDR allocations, NAT, RFC1918 private network numbers, HTTP1.1's virtual hosts, DHCP, and the dot-com crash. There haven't been any new "gee, we can make the IPv4 space go a lot further if..." type ideas for years and it doesn't appear likely that any more large savings will happen before it is too late to deploy them.

Re:Where Y'At?

[Anonymous Coward]

Done and done :-)

plot yourself on the Map of the Internet