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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?"
Despite the best efforts of organizations like ARIN, the simple fact is that, compared to IPv4, IPv6 gives you access to very little content and very few users. So far, nobody has been able to get past this chicken-and-egg issue, although a The Great IPv6 Experiment proposes to change this by giving away free access to "10 gigabytes of the most popular 'adult entertainment,'" but only over IPv6.
Is IPv6 so unappealing that they've gotta bribe people with pr0n to use it?
i've been hearing about how ip4 will run out in the next 5 years for the last TEN years.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I bet that people will be bored of the internet by then
Y2K was a bug which was easily solved. This is an infrastructure defect which has an available, but expensive, solution.
It will be expensive to make a major shift to IPv6, which is why it's taking so long.
Until the complete exhaustion of all IPv4 addresses is an immanent threat the change will not happen, much like Y2K.
They could delay the inevitable by reallocating existing IPv4 space more efficiently. Many old/historical allocations are inefficient. Apple Computer, for example, has all of the 17.x.x.x space, comprising 256^3 = more than 16 million addresses, which is just plain absurd in this day and age.
Well duh, why do you think people got on the Internet in the first place? Some military experiment? pffffffft. It's all about the pr0n!
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
Telecom companies are switching everything, including cell phones, to VoIP. Soon, damn near every cell phone will have an IP address associated with it. CDMA phones that EVDO rev-A already do. I know one carrier that has a pool of 2 million available addresses, and 20+ million customers with cellphones.
IPv4 addresses are going to be going away very quickly.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Is IPv6 so unappealing that they've gotta bribe people with pr0n to use it?
With one of the bigger 'features' of IPv6 being the possibility of assigning and tracking users individually with the huge number of addresses - I suspect it does not play into the current (sorta) anonymous surfing mindset folks have today. (Not that anyone is truly anonymous on the web) Once you have to slap down your address to access the content, I can see why people might not be interested.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Man, am I glad I've got 192.168.0.100 through 192.168.0.105 setup on my network at home. Hmmm.....maybe I should lay claim to 106 through 110, just in case.....
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
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'
Is IPv6 so unappealing that they've gotta bribe people with pr0n to use it?
It's not unappealing, it's totally irrelevant to end-users. There's no market out there asking for IPv6 network access. ISPs and their upstream providers thus have no increase in revenue if they deploy IPv6, but that deployment will cost them real money -- v6 capable routers need much more storage and processing, for instance -- and so there's real financial incentive to avoid IPv6. Offering free pr0n might be a way to make the difference relevant to end-users and thus provide demand and revenue, but I kind of doubt that it's enough.
When end-users are getting IPv6 or private address IPv4 to the door, and a NAT exchange at the ISP, and their VOIP/game/spyware breaks, there will be financial motive at all levels. Being able to offer a full and uncrippled Internet experience will be the value-add.
But expect a period of chaos as ISPs try to barter IPv4 addresses around, and failing that, try to steal them.
I think companies will start 'renting' addresses as IPv4 is approaching its limit, pretty much like the concept of carbon credits.
Companies may cut down unnecessary IP usage, or buy/rent addresses from other companies with plenty to spare.
This 'trade' could go on until such point it's either more costly to rent than move to IPv6, or when all available-and-necessary addresses have been fully utilized.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
I doubt anyone will be making a concerted effort to switch until it actually becomes necessary. Once the IPv4 address space runs out, hacks will be done to extend it. Ranges will be "repo'd" from companies, or those companies will just start reselling those ranges. Not until there is no space left to squeeze out will people really start caring.
That's really just not true. With IPv6, you can get a lot more anonymity than you have now with IPv4. v6 has all sorts of special provisions for randomly assigning addresses, letting you reset them when you want, so that you can appear to be a new user in the middle of a browsing session. That's tough to do with IPv4; even if you try a DHCP release-and-renew from your ISP, generally they won't issue you a new address until the other one has expired.
IPv6 doesn't force you to give up any privacy, and there's no 'user serialization' unless you buy into it voluntarily.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If we do run out of IPv4 addresses for real this time, I predict ISPs will switch to 100% private IP addressing space before even thinking on IPv6.
Heck, it's already happening in other countries. In Chile for example (a reasonably high-tech country) VTR http://www.vtr.cl/, the only cable ISP, will give you ONLY RFC-1918 addresses, period.
The masses won't care. They only care about their basic apps, and ISPs will use that as leverage to control more services, especially all P2P and VoIP-related ones.
Those are MINE, you THIEF!
Kidding - I'm KIDDING
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
There's also significant financial incentive to keep the limited address space of IPv4. Want a static IP address or additional IP addresses? Fork over the cash, baby!
Routers that have been capable of supporting IPv4/IPv6 dual stack have been available for a long time now so unless you're a tiny ISP that has no budget for life-cycle upgrades it's very likely your kit is already capable of running IPv6. Now, whether or not your engineering staff is trained in supporting IPv6 is another story. Within 5-10 years though ISPs will have very little excuse to NOT support IPv6 since they will have replaced any antiquated IPv4-only equipment as it is end-of-lifed. US Federal Government agencies have a mandate to support IPv6 by June 2008 so it has been spurring a lot of vendors to get their shit in order and either upgrade their products to support IPv6 or face not being able to sell to one of their largest customers.
...and climb on board as an enterprise IPv6 migration consultant.
Hopefully it *is* the new Y2K.
I'm continually amazed at the number of people in the IT and Net industry who keep "wondering" when IPv6 will arrive. Its been here for a long time. I'm running a series of web servers for internal company use that have native IPv6 addresses. For public consumption, we have an IPv4 reverse proxy that allows us to run our entire web services behind one IPv4 address. Any customer who has an IPv6 address gets to talk to the individual servers.
/64 v6 address for a cheap price. You'll design your websites to be usable on v4, but for management tools, etc, you'll need to install a v6 tunnel.
The advantage comes when you consider management. In order to have 20 SSH/FTP/etc accessible Internet servers, I'd either need 20 separate IPv4 addresses (getting a decent segment of a class C here is expensive), or I'd have to play fun games with ports. All our technicians have IPv6 on their laptops, and use tunnel brokers for access to the v6 network.
Most of our clients have IPv6 connectivity, though they don't notice it. When we put in a firewall, IPv6 comes default setup with tunnel brokers.
People keep asking, when's there gonna be v6 content? There is no v6 content (ok, their is full colour ascii starwars). Any content provider would be nuts to say "you have to have v6 to see our content" at this point (with the exception of mobile phones). IT Techs brought v4 to the public, we'll bring v6 to the public. Its technicians like myself who appreciate having an Internet accessible toaster (ok, so its not yet accessible) that have already started the ball rolling.
Before long you'll see hosting providers saying, you can have one web gateway shared v4 address and a
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
There will be some guy in an ill fitting suit accosting you, "hey man, got extra IP4?" "I gotta plug in man, I'm jones'ng for some connectivity." "IP6? can't. My colon can't take the colons, 3 dots is all I can handle"
Just move slashdot to an IPv6 only address; voilla by monday every corporate will have a functioning IPv6 setup... ;-)
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.
ARS must have rushed the fact checking to get this article out. Truth is that ARIN does not, and has never, made a best effort at anything except to charge ISPs for address space and let them reap a 500 to 1000% profit reselling it. ARIN has done nothing substantive to promote IPv6, and ARIN looks the other way at hundreds of existing, unused, large IPv4 network allocations.
I've worked at Silicon Valley companies with multiple class B allocations that could have easily put them behind NAT gateways and firewalls. The University of California campuses have many class Bs and will tell you they "can't do NAT to the dormitories because it's too difficult to track". That's 65K address per class B and there are dozens of these, and several class As, that are just waiting to be reclaimed.
What these class A and B-owning organizations are doing is holding on to vacant land as long as they can, until it becomes valuable, at which point they hope to sell it at a big profit.
ARIN is doing the same thing by failing to reclaim these allocations. They're just waiting for demand to climb like California real-estate to begin cashing-in. This is exactly what Network Solutions/Verisign did with domain names when they had a government-protected monopoly. Have we forgotten so soon, one year domain registration was free (via SRI), and the mext year it was $100 per year per domain (via Verisign), despite actual costs of $7/year. This scenario should also be familiar to those who have had to change telephone area codes, sometimes more than once, until enough people complained (of course that was when the FCC was in Democratic hands. With Republicans the Telcos have once-again been cleaning up).
So believe the hype, but remember, if you fail to look a little deeper we will soon be paying the price, in increased ISP fees, for this wholly artificial IPv4 address shortage.
Same thing that happened when popular domain names started running out. I'm sure IP addresses will go up for auction. Seems kind of silly though considering the space available in IPv6. But if you have people that need these addresses, someone will be willing to pay for them. I imagine some of the big names that got them free from the start will be making a lot of money, such as MIT.
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.
Yes, it would have the same prefix, but that's exactly the same level of anonymity that you have now with a single IPv4 address and NAT.
With v4, your router gets the address and then NATs it out to however-many devices you have. With v6, you'd get a block of addresses at the router, which it could then distribute via DHCP, or the machines could randomly assign themselves within. You're not losing anything there. Where you might gain something is in the ability to quickly switch IPs when traveling and connecting to an AP that's not yours (which is conceptually similar to performing a DHCP release-and-renew).
If you want plausible deniability, pretty much your only option is to leave your AP unsecured and hope that when the cops show up they buy it as a defense, or use some type of onion routing like Tor.
There seems to be a lot of fear and paranoia going around regarding IPv6, and I just don't get it. There's nothing you can do on IPv4 today that you can't do on IPv6, if you want to. Hell, if you're that attached to NAT, you can do it with IPv6 addresses just as readily -- it's just that it's stupid, because there's no longer any reason to since there's no address shortage, and there's really no privacy or security gained from it that you don't get by just rotating your IPv6 address.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
clearly the real answer here is 42. we should skip right over IPv6 and go to.... IPv42
anything else?
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
One issue is all the home users inadvertantly using NAT as a "firewall".
If one were to build a proper ipv6 router, they would need to (pony up the cash to) include a proper firewall, or educate the users. Good luck with either one.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Well, yeah. That's the "Strategic IP Address Reserve."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
But if you talked to @Home's people as individuals rather than Corporate Employees, almost all of them would say "Well, Duh! Napster is the reason that people are *buying* broadband internet connections, of *course* we like it."
And, ok, the paranoia about servers on home cable modems was partly because their early trial equipment didn't work very well and they had no way to regulate individual upstream bandwidth usage, and PacBell's dishonest "Cable Modem Web Hog" ads made them really worried about perceptions of slow performance, but they were worried that somebody would run a pr0n webserver from home, become Cool Site of the Day because doing that on cable modem would be cool, and trash their neighborhood's network performance while causing a lot of publicity. And unfortunately most of the cable companies have not only not recovered from that attitude, they've been propagating it to the DSL providers, and they've been learning other cluelessly paranoid attitudes from the Australian ex-monopoly who thinks you should cap the total monthly download of their users (since that used to be expensive in Oz), and cap it to a ridiculously low level like 1GB/month, which is like 1.5 days of continuous 56kbps usage.
But when I had my corporate hat on, especially if I was talking to non-California customers, it was certainly much more proper to talk about the big internet usage being for music piracy than for pr0n
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
The IPv6 address space is hierarchically structured, making routing tables smaller, not larger (as opposed to what you want to do, which is the exact opposite). Learn your facts before spouting off.
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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