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IPv4 Address Crunch In 2 Years, IPv6 Not Ready
An anonymous reader writes "We've known for ages that IPv4 was going to run out of addresses — now, it's happening. IPv6 was going to save us — it isn't. The upcoming crisis will hit, perhaps as soon as 2010, but nobody can agree on what to do. The three options are all pretty scary. This article covers the background, and links to a presentation by Randy Bush (PDF) that shows the reality of the problem in stark detail."
That sounds like an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" argument to me. Which in fine and good for simpler technologies, but can be disastrous for more modern technologies. Just think what would happen if you didn't change your car's oil until the car simply refused to run. What would happen if we all decided not to curb our oil consumption habits until we either ran completely out of oil reserves. You see its the shortsightedness that in the long run costs you WAY MORE than if you simply keep the options in mind and work towards a solution.
So in two years when they can't add any more addresses, the only ones to blame will be those who stuck they feet in the mud and wouldn't budge. Besides, they can always just start taking away all those spam sites that offer no real content and just distribute those to other who actually need them, I'm sure there's at least another 2 years worth of those.
And we need to retrieve some from the Vatican as well!
Looking at the information here then the Vatican has far too many IPs per capita. Ditto for the other tiny nations of Gibralta and Monaco. I'm sure it'll buy us at least a week!
And for anyone geeky enough to care (who isn't geeky enough to have it bookmarked already) here is the assignment list. Each of the companies mentioned owns an entire top level block (e.g. Ford own 19.xxx.xxx.xxx) and some like the Defense Information Systems Agency (whoever they are) own multiple blocks! That's an awful lot of addresses.
One thing is rather clear to me: We won't run out of IPv4 addresses anytime soon, instead the price will increase more and more and thus people will end up behind ISP enforced NATs, because IPs are to expensive for the average consumer. This is after all already the case, at least in part, static IPs are a premium service, not something you get for free from most ISPs.
So how to fix this? How about some good old government regulation? If you want to provide a "Internet service", you have to provide IPv6 or you can't call it "Internet". With a little force it shouldn't take all that long till the switch to IPv6 is done. But unless that happens the rarity of IPv4 addresses will simply be seen as a nice way to make money, instead of a problem that needs to be fixed.
That is one way to do it, keep patching it up and hope it becomes somebodies elses problem.
The problem is simple, the way we want to use the internet means we are getting more and more devices which desire their own internet adress. Some people suggest solutions like NAT but these only have so many uses especially when mobile phones become internet capable. If you want your internet node to be independent then you need an ip adress.
Don't believe me? Fine, give up your internet connection with its own IP and use the NAT solution of your ISP. Good luck running a torrent.
We could easily solve the entire problem if we just used NAT for every major ISP. It would free up countless adresses and keep IP4 usuable for decades rather then years.
So who is first? Who is going to give up their IP for their home for the greater good?
Thought as much, absolutly nobody.
It is the problem with humans, we don't want new power installations, we don't want to use less power and we refuse to switch to more economical appliances. Something has to give, but goverment or business is NOT going to do it. Sooner or later it just breaks down (see the LA brownouts) and finally a decission will have to be made.
Same with a solution to IP4 limited adress space. We will keep coming up with patches and ignore the problem until finally it can no longer be ignored and then we will have to really bite down to implement it at great cost and inconvenience when we could have solved it easily right now.
Because lets be honest, it ain't all that much of a problem. In the EU we switched currencies. A hell of a job but because it became accepted that it had to be done, it just happened.
We could easily do a switch to IP6 but only when the majority just accepts that it has to be done, and bites the bullet.
Analog mobile phones no longer work in the US, holland no longer airs analog tv signals, switches happen all the time. It is nothing special, but in each case somebody just had to say "we are switching and if you are not ready, though".
So what if countless devices will no longer work, at a given point you just have to be able to say "upgrade or be left behind" or you will be forced to increasinly bend over backwards to accomadate out of date tech.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
DJB said it best at http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html Why switch from an Internet with a billion people on it to one that has nobody on it that can't be reached by IPv4?
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
This is a much prettier depiction
While I appreciate the point you're trying to make, but there are quantitative differences between the thinking of a country like Japan and for example the USA. In Japan, they did have the foresight to make their systems IPv6 ready, so maybe just our expectations are too low? I'd rather tell people what to do than to make excuses in the technology/politics field referring to Joe Sixpack who allegedly wouldn't understand or care.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
NAT will solve the problems, but why live with that when we can actually come up with a viable solution- IPv6? It will be expensive to implement because, like always, past engineers haven't planned for their 1970s technologies to ever go out of date, and whiny slashdotters will finally have to upgrade their windows boxes to Vista because XP has 1990s networking support (read that pdf if you don't believe me). But we'll end up with a significantly better Internet than if we just keep expanding NATs around more and more IP addresses to free up address space.. the way we're going, eventually (and keep in mind that "eventually" in computing usually turns out to be in less than a decade) you're going to have to be a multibillion-dollar conglomorate representing thousands of web hosting companies just to bid for a single 5-address block of address space... though the way inflation's going, little billy and his friends might be able to pool their allowance and come up with that kind of money :) But can you imagine how horrifying the architecture of the internet will be if the solution is NAT, NAT, NAT? Development in router design is already unable to keep up with traffic growth. How are you going to pay for a $100 million server farm just to manage the American Eastern Seaboard NAT, and can you imagine what the latency would be to go through a 10 terabyte NAT table? Might as well upgrade to IPv6, save yourself the trouble of trying to stay v4.
I've read some of the reviews for that book. The story about everyone in a street ending up using water amplifiers (pressure boosters) to guarantee that they get their fair share of water is funny. Some things don't seem to different from other parts of the world.
Dumping garbage in the street - that happens elsewhere whenever the authorities impose apparently madhatter legislation; Example, a country in Europe creates a whole nation-wide network of recycling centers to reduce the amount of waste going into landfill - Totally sensible. Anyone could enter, and recycle their old boxes, cartons, polystyrene boxes, lawnmowers, furniture, whatever. Then the authorities decide that too many people are making too many journeys, so they decide that each family can only get a ticket to allow them to recycle once every two months. So now, everyone drives around looking for somewhere to dump their recyclables, even filling in the communal rubbish bins of neighbouring villages. Others simply burn it instead.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
That is true, the AEBS only does 6to4 tunneling, but that tunneling works with both Hurricane Electric and Sixxs static service. In fact, it works pretty well for home use, and if you've got Macs behind it, they pick up their IPv6 address quite nicely and it all works pretty transparently. I'd recommend it as a good (but expensive) way for geeks to get up and running on v6 with a minimum of hassle.
I've tried making some of my AEBSes work on a native dual-stacked network connection, with no luck. It doesn't listen to Router Advertisements, DHCPv6 service, or anything I can detect. You can manually set a local node address, but it doesn't seem to route or bridge at that point. Apple's forums have been less than enlightening, and I've never heard back from their developer tech support on the issue. There firewall is very buggy, it seems to be just a simple two line IPFW entry to block incoming connections and keep state on outgoing. Any kind of P2P activity causes the firewall to fail badly.
A Chinese company last year gave me a DSL router that speaks IPv6. It is some kind of OEM version of a popular Belkin model, but with a Chinese only firmware installed. They claimed it was the most widespread model inside of China, where many ISPs can only hand out IPv6, and there is a NAT-PT+totd translation service somewhere within the ISP. I played around with it for the few days I had, and couldn't figure out how to make it work for what I expected. Some of the configuration pages looked identical to Belkin, but in Chinese and with some obvious IPv6 entries on some pages. It certainly worked as an IPv6 only DSL modem, and dual-stack v4/v6 just like a Belkin, but I never got it to work with a NAT-PT gateway.
There was a muttered admission that by having a lot of IPv6 only services that aren't announced outside of China it makes it a lot easier to do the great firewall of china function. There is apparently a government funded push toward IPv6, but none of it is announced externally because of firewall issues.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on