One Step Closer to IPv6

gbjbaanb writes "IPv6 came a step closer yesterday as ICANN added IPv6 host records to the root DNS servers, reports the BBC. 'Paul Twomey, president of Icann which oversees the addressing system, told the BBC News website there was a need to start moving to IPv6. "There's pressure for people to make the conversion to IPv6," he said. "We're pushing this as a major issue." The reason for the urgency, he said, was because the unallocated addresses from the total of 4,294,967,296 possible with IPv4 was rapidly running out. "We're down to 14% of the unallocated addresses out of the whole pool for version 4," he said. Projections suggest that this unallocated pool will run out by 2011 at the latest.'"

Comments

Sad

[suso]

Its sad to look at the list of class a allocations and know that we're almost out. All this was done before NATs became popular. I think ICANN/IANA should work on wrestling some of those class As back from companies like Ford, Apple, HP, etc. None of those companies are going to ever have 16,000,000 hosts on public IPs. I know some of those companies have already made sub allocations. We could probably buy 5-10 years if they could reclaim just the 3, 9, 13, 17, 19, 20, 34 and 40 class As and get over 130,000,000 IPs back.

I mean, if those companies complain, who cares. They wouldn't get such large and prestigious allocations in an IPv6 network anyways. So what's the difference.

I know, I know, we should move to IPv6 anyways. Just a suggestion. Poor initial planning warrants changes down the road.

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree with you. That is why I am going to pledge my entire allocation of the 10.0.0.0/8 network back to the IANA. As long as we ensure that it is reallocated properly, I think it will be a huge benefit for the Internet as a whole. For those of you who might control a part of or the entire 172.16.0.0/12 or 192.168.0.0/16 network, you might want to ask yourself this question: do I really need that many addresses?

Re:Sad

[TheRaven64]

Thats 2^48 Internets! Why would you want that? One of my staff sent me an Internet the other week, and it took three days to arrive! If everyone has 2^48 Internets, my staff's Internets will never arrive.

Re:Sad

[misleb]

Didn't Bill Gates once say, "127.0.0.1 should be enough for anybody." Damn, he's always so short sited.

Re:Sad

[CopaceticOpus]

But 3% of 2011 is over 60 years!

My home network allows over 10M hosts

[davidwr]

Sadly, it can't Talk dirEctly to my Next-DOor neighbor, who runs an equally large neTwork.

more the story

[trybywrench]

The only justification you ever hear for moving to IPv6 is address exhaustion in IPv4. There's a lot of other stuff built into the protocol that will make the net a much better place. Even if IPv4 had the same amount of addresses as IPv6 it would still be worthwhile to switch. Just give this a once over for an introduction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv6#Features_and_differences_from_IPv4

I don't expect much to change

[Waffle Iron]

ISPs see the limited IPv4 address space as a revenue stream. Many of them charge almost double for the privilege of getting a fixed public IP address. They don't have to spend money on a lot of scarce IP addresses themselves since they can always stick their customers in NAT ghettos.

They're not going to be very eager to give up their position as a gatekeeper of a limited resource just so their customers can frolick in a vast address space for free. Since most of them operate in a monopoly or duopoly situation, the proverbial "free market" won't force them to move off IPv4 either.

IP6 won't matter til Google supports it

[wowbagger]

Wake me up when I can pull up the main page of Google using nothing but packets with IP6 headers.

That means that I can do a DNS query using nothing but IP6 packets - NOT IP4 packets.
That means that I can do an HTTP transfer from Google's servers using nothing but IP6 packets - NOT IP4 packets.

Hell, wake me up when there's a AAAA record for Slashdot.

This is a *baby* step towards IP6 being useful.

Re:It's a sham - the Internet is mostly dark

[mxs]

You are an exceptionally bad engineer, coder, thinker, and internet citizen.

The sad part is, most of the IP addresses in question are... dark. Nothing there. Even though we're approaching 85% allocation, utilization is probably around 1-2%. No, I'm not kidding.

And you have ANY hard data to back that up ? No. Others are trying to come up with better metrics (http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html is exceptionally verbose), but you ? You are not kidding about thinking that it maybe probably is around 1-2% ... Wow.

Try it yourself - hack up some script to randomly generate IPs and then ping sweep the network blocks. You'll probably be quite surprised at the result.

Bzzzt. No, I would not be -- nor should anybody be. First of all, it's not a requirement for every address to be routable to (and you can check that much better by looking at what percentage of prefixes are actually advertized). Second, many, MANY hosts and networks are behind firewalls, intrusion detection & response systems, etc. -- a "simple pingscan" can easily land you in a black hole at the network border after a couple of pings -- if access to those machines is even allowed from your network. Sure, in consumer broadband connections you don't often have such firewalls restricting inbound access, but that's not the "entire internet". Hell, go ping amazon.com and see what you get back. Nada, that's what.

A while back, I wanted to have a way to detect if a host was "offline" so that it could modify its behavior. (EG: halt outgoing SOAP requests if the server's network connection was disrupted, preventing bogus error messages from entering the system)

A problem many others have faced and solved before you.

My first thought was to randomly generate 10 IP addresses, then ping them to see if they were offline, guessing that at least 50% would respond.

Accounting for the different classes of addresses, unroutable space, bogons, etc. in that random calculation would be more work than the result is worth, especially seeing as how the state of netblocks can change over time. I wonder, why was your first thought to crap out (at least) 10 packets to the net that really are not needed ? What possible reason could there be for you to automatically ping a cellphone in Singapore ? Just imagine everybody doing this, just to check whether they are "online" ... How about choosing some well-known addresses (such as one of your own servers in a different locale, or possibly "well-known" servers that you know will respond and that don't mind a ping from you every now and then ... Not only do you get a 100% response rate when everything is working correctly, you also forego abusing bandwidth in remote locales you are not at all interested in.

Basically, none did. So, then I tried randomizing addresses and keeping a list of only those that had, at one time, responded. Even that turned out to be unfruitful.

You know, while still a bit dickish, it might have occured to you that most of {a-m}.root-servers.net do reply to ping or DNS requests. So do, in all likelihood, a router in your upstream, or DNS resolvers you know about. Instead, you now latch on to addresses that respond. The cellphone in Singapore, for instance.

So finally, I took a dictionary and randomly created domain names from 1-2 normal dictionary words, pinging those, and keeping a list.

Ah. So now that flooding ICMP out to the net is not enough, you have to litter it with bogus DNS requests the reply to which you are not really interested in. Again, imagine EVERYBODY doing this. Why not pick 10 known domain names and always ping those ? At least the results will be cached, and you may even choose ones whose owners you know and can ask whether they mind to be flooded with icmp every now and then.

That yielded some 40% usable responses, allowing me to keep a list of fairly