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IPv4 Unallocated Addresses Exhausted by 2010
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica is reporting on how the unallocated IPv4 address pool could run out as soon as 2010. The IPv4 Address Report gives details on just how fast the available pool of IPv4 addresses is diminishing. Will ISPs be moving towards IPv6 any time soon? Or will IPv4 exhaustion become the next Y2K?"
There are two issues:
- Switching protocols
- Getting IPv6 addresses
You can use the IPv4 subset of the IPv6 address space, and everyone can still talk to everyone while you convert. It's only the folks that have IPV6 addresses before the IPv4 users have migrated that become unreachable by anyone.So the online businesses are going to want to be the last ones to switch, so that their customers don't become unable to reach them.
But anyway, IPV6 gives you access to all the same content.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
what provider is giving out routeable addresses on their phones? Nextel is giving us 10. addresses.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
i've been hearing about how ip4 will run out in the next 5 years for the last TEN years.
Well, it would have run out a lot faster, had it not been for CIDR, which allowed addresses to be allocated more efficiently. However that -- like proposals to re-allocate unused space in some of the old corporate A-blocks -- slowed the bleeding but doesn't really do anything about the real problem.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
In fact, if IPv4 truly were a subspace of IPv6, then what sources address would an IPv4-only host be seeing when it receives such a packet from an IPv6-only host?
It is perfectly possible to use both an IPv4 and an IPv6 stack simultaneously, and there are some NAT-like technologies that run on a router to give IPv4 connectivity to IPv6-only hosts, but you'll still need an IPv4 stack somewhere on your network to access IPv4 content.
Oh really?
/7? And check THIS out:
Department of Defense Network Information Center 21.0.0.0 - 22.255.255.255
That's a...
Department of Defense Network Information Center 6.0.0.0 - 7.255.255.255
Department of Defense Network Information Center 11.0.0.0 - 11.255.255.255
Department of Defense Network Information Center 21.0.0.0 - 22.255.255.255
Department of Defense Network Information Center 26.0.0.0 - 26.255.255.255
Department of Defense Network Information Center 28.0.0.0 - 30.255.255.255
Department of Defense Network Information Center 33.0.0.0 - 33.255.255.255
Department of Defense Network Information Center 55.0.0.0 - 55.255.255.255
So that's... about 330 MILLION IP addresses for the US DoD alone? And people bitch about MIT hoarding!
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
The IPv4 addresses are a subset of the IPv6 space -- you can get to all of the IPv4 systems from an IPv6 network.
This is what IPv6 fanatics constantly FAIL TO UNDERSTAND. IPv4 addresses ARE NOT a subset of IPv6 addresses, because IPv4 and IPv6 are INCOMPATIBLE PROTOCOLS.
Let that sink in.
Just because there's some addresses within the IPv6 space that can map onto IPv4 addresses doesn't mean you've made the two protocols compatible.
I can't get to these embedded IPv4 addresses from my IPv4-only machine unless I go through extra hardware/software that tunnels or gateways the packets, basically converting them to IPv6.
And if there's an IPv4 address on the other end, I'll simply USE IPv4 TO REACH IT.
The *only* incentive for people to use IPv6 is if popular and useful web sites exist ONLY on IPv6. I.e., Google, Hotmail, whatever. Apparently, the IPv6 fanatics think that ISPs will happily upgrade their hardware and software just so that their IPv4 hosts can talk to IPv4 servers through some Rube Goldberg IPv6 network, waiting for the day that Google's IPv4 IP goes dark. No, that's not gonna happen.
If you can't comprehend what I've said, replace "IPv6" with "Fidonet" or some other protocol and think about it.
This is so patently wrong I don't know where to begin-
/64 and a tunnel to tunnelbroker.net (By Hurrican Electric). It took ten minutes to set up- and another minute to enable IPv6 on my FreeBSD desktop- at that point I was able to get to www.kame.net via IPv6 with no problems.
/27) and they neither offer IPv6- nor do they even have any IPv6 plans (or so customer service told me. This is just sad. The same goes for my employers upstream provider- and backbone provider.
My home network sits behind a Cisco 2621 running an IPv6 IOS image- and I have a
I even set up an IPSEC / GRE tunnel with a friend of mine along with mBGP (multiprotocol BGP). No problems. I set up route-maps and filters all without a problem. My friend and I were then able to get to each others Unix servers via ssh over IPv6 using hostnames that resolved via AAAA records.
I also run OSPFv3 internally- again without incident. Deploying IPv6 to my network took a grand total of an hour- and we're talking about BGP, OSPF, GRE IPSEC tunnels and so on.
In fact- the change was so easy I immediately began a project to upgrade my company to IPv6. So far it has been incredibly easily and completely transparent to everyone.
What's holding IPv6 back is two things: public perception that the change will be difficult (completely unfounded) and the unwillingness of anyone to just start deploying it. I have SpeakEasy for my home connection (business class SDSL with a
-sirket
Senior Network Engineer for a company you've definitely heard of
Everyone in this thread is sooooo wrong it isn't funny.
/8's into lot's of smaller networks is a TERRIBLE idea. There are already about 200k routes in the global routing table. Splitting up a single class A up into /20's (the current standard allocation) would increase the size of the table by 4k entries. Do that for a dozen networks and you've just increased the global routing table by 25%. That's an AWFUL idea. IPv6 avoids this problem with a stricter and more sensible heirarchy that allows for a LOT more aggregation.
First off- no one in their right mind is going to give up their addresses.
Secondly- let's not keep IPv4 around any longer than it has to be. Please let it die already. Moving to IPv6 is just not that hard- including OSPFv3, mBGP, tunnels, filters and route-maps it took me an hour or so of actual configuration time to enable IPv6- for gods sake- let's just do it already.
Finally- breaking up
The fact is- you don't know anything about backbone routing so please don't tell ARIN how to do their job.
-sirket
The stateful firewall you'd need on an IPv6 connection isn't inherently any more complicated than an IPv4 UPnP+NAT box. In order for NAT to work, the device performing the translation must keep track of all the individual connections; it's basically a stateful firewall already. If you can do that, then you can firewall IPv6 (provided you have the capacity for the longer addresses). You need a protocol, like UPnP, so that clients can request "holes" (so that things like FTP, Bittorrent, and VoIP work), but that's no worse than NAT right now.
Now, I think this is a completely crappy way to run a network, and I think we just need to get rid of the idea of firewalls completely (at least as a generic cureall, I'm all for retaining them for specific applications); security needs to be at the client level, not at the network-gateway level; as more and more devices become mobile, they cannot and should not ever assume that their local network is secure.
But unfortunately, people have gotten so used to the idea of firewalls that they're attached to them, particularly because it allows for a certain amount of laziness (running old, crummy operating systems on Internet-enabled systems, not patching, etc.) while giving the perception of safety. So I suspect that all IPv6 implementations will mimic the brokenness of NAT, at least initially.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You're kinda nuts...a 2621 runs the same price (on e-bay) as a mid to low end users computer! At $500-$600 on ebay we're talking router tech that's 6-7x the price of the average home router. So as long as that's the kind of hardware the end user will need, i's not going to work.
Mobius Custom Computers
IPv6 doesn't force you to give up any privacy, and there's no 'user serialization' unless you buy into it voluntarily. Sorry, but that is just not true. There's some fuss in the air about IPv6 privacy extensions, which is basically bullshit. As an IPv6 customer, you'll typically get a
BUT: The whole
To illustrate my example, there's a IPv6 ISP in Germany that gives out even a
If we're not counting accountability, but just usage tracking on websites etc, easy: just don't treat every Ip address as unique (like in IPv4), but instead every
Continuous positive slashdot karma since... uh, maybe next year.
companies that totally don't need them would be companies like: ...Boeing...
Apple has under 20,000 employees. Boeing has over 150,000 employees.
Apple is a computer company, but just because Boeing isn't as trendy as Apple today doesn't mean they design airplanes with slide rules.
And they're not all about building commercial aircraft, either (that's actually less than half the company these days). Phantomworks isn't as well-known as Lockheed's Skunkworks, but they do their share of high-performance computing (=lots of computers), too.
And Boeing is itself a small company compared to Ford (280,000 employees) or GE (315,000 employees). Don't forget that GE is the world's second largest company, who own everything from financial and real estate to industrial components (they make engines for Boeing) to big media (NBC Universal). (Ever watch Sci-Fi Channel? That's GE.) If you don't think GE needs a class-A, it's hard to imagine why any single company would, especially a small one less than 1/10th its size, that isn't even primarily a media distribution company.
I take it you haven't been following IPv6 closely, since that hasn't been the case for about six years (see RFC3041). The MAC address part of the IPv6 address was never used as a substitute for ARP; doing so would have broken addresses assigned in different ways (e.g. stateful autoconfiguration, manual configuration), which were always allowed. The low bits are a hash of your MAC address, and so only a mapping from MAC to IP is possible, not the other way around. If privacy is a concern for you, then you can easily pick a different IP at pseudo-random.
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