Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's not hard to figure out why we haven't solved this problem. It costs MORE to fix it now than it does to wait.
So just wait until it costs more to live with IPv4 than to migrate to new systems. Then EVERYONE will be working on a solution.
Here is the story from a few weeks ago
And as I said before, the solution is to take back some of those huge class A blocks from companies like HP, Ford and GE, which are not using all the space. That would buy a few years.
Is this really a problem for most people? NAT really.
i'm sharing my blog ip address with a porn site dedicated to a fetish for women with moustaches, some guy's home security system in hong kong, a government bureaucrat's cell phone in helsinki, and an email server for a truck dispatching company waco texas
i think it's also a pretty good premise for a reality show or situation comedy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And put China behind it. IPv4 addresses, plenty. Botnet problem, solved.
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.
America will then become the Saudi Arabia of ip addresses. Price of oil will drop to something 200,000,000 barrels for one address. Woot!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The basic solution to this problem is to deploy IPv6 as soon as you can, figure out what problems remain to be solved before you can use IPv6 100% and then put pressure on your ISPs, vendors, etc. to solve these problems. That's how the Internet grew like topsy in the first place, and its not too late to get this going. Two to three years is enough time.
ARIN has published a web site which collects information about how to move to IPv6 here: http://www.getipv6.info/
It's oriented towards the things that ISPs and other service providers (hosting centers, large IT depts) need to do to get IPv6 working in production.
Soon, the stock market analysts will be asking the big ISPs and telecom companies what actions they are taking to avoid going bankrupt in two years when the crunch hits. Any company that can't get new IPv4 addresses will have to stop growing their IPv4 networks. If they have an IPv6 network to take up the slack, no problem. If not, then customers will flock to the providers that have IPv6 ready to roll.
There was a network operator meeting at NANOG recently where they showed that it is almost possible to provide full Internet access, both IPv4 and IPV6, using an IPv6 connection. Yes, I know, "almost" means there were problems, but they were not massive problems. They were the kind of things that people were working on fixing with IPv4 networks back in the early 90's. And they did that because they went ahead and built IPv4 networks and tried to make them work for everything imaginable. When things broke, they fixed the bugs and moved on, eventually becoming the global Internet that we know today.
There is a way to avoid going bust when the address crunch hits in two-to-three years and that is: Get yourself IPv6 Ready!
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.
1. Home routers that support IPV6 off the shelf.
2. Cable/DSL modems that support IPV6 off the shelf.
3. (The biggie) ISPs that hand out IPV6 addresses.
In a vain attempt to forestall the inevitable followups:
Yes, I am aware that I could install new software in my WRT-54G, and convert my home network to IPV6. But as long as my upstream connection is IPV4, this gains me NOTHING except a bunch of aggravation and downtime getting the thing set up. No thanks. When my ISP supports IPV6, then and only then will it make sense for me to convert.
Yeah, we always fall back on the government to help us out when us nerds aren't satisfied with how capitalism is driving the technological trends that need to happen.
But let's not forget those that went before us. Jun-ichiro Hagino, better known as Itojun, was one of the first researchers that was pushing for IPv6 since as long as I can remember (at least 2001). On top of that he was developing specifications for it and working through the BSD code to make it one of the first operating systems fully capable of being IPv6 compliant--starting a trend that needs to happen in more operating systems sooner. He even started documenting draft APIs to get developers thinking about how this would work inside software.
And then he died in a car accident at age 37. It's funny how you don't appreciate their work until they're dead. Almost like a painter or author.
Although many still carry on his work, the saddest part is that all his efforts to bring awareness to everyone about IPv6 may fall into the responsibilities of the government or, worse, capitalism.
My work here is dung.
As a commenter above posted, each of those companies with top-level blocks actually owns 16,777,216 IP addresses. These companies include IBM, MIT, Ford, DEC, AT&T, Apple and Xerox.
As big as IBM and MIT may be, do you really think they need almost 17 million IP addresses?
Why? Your money is why.
/8s and /16s de-aggregate into 100s of thousands of individual prefixes. Is there any Cisco router right now that can handle a BGP IPv4 routing table of 2 million entries? Are you willing to scrap your entire Border Router investment in 2010 when the routing table grows from 300,000 routes to 750,000 routes? Do you know what the cost of a Cisco CRS-1 is, even if you can find one used?
If you want to continue to use an IPv4 address from your upstream ISP, you currently pay about US$10 per month for that address, more if you want a nice static address to run services on.
After 2012, or if one of the hair-brained free-market schemes to buy & sell netblocks comes into effect, the price your ISP has to pay for an IP address goes from ZERO to $10 or $20 per month per address. Currently, with a freely available pool of IP addresses, there was minimal cost associated with obtaining a netblock, just some administrative overhead to ask, and some technical cost to program the routers. ISPs discovered that they could charge US$30/month to a user, of which $10/month covers bandwidth, $10/month for the connection, and the remaining $10/month is the pure profit from renting you an individually addressable IP address.
When the crunch hits, IPv4 addresses will be accounted differently, no longer will they be seen as a free resource that earns $10/month, they'll be seen as a cost center that needs to have a margin associated with it. So if the company has to start paying even $1/month per address, they'll pass that cost on to the end users as a higher monthly fee.
In the end, those who don't have an IPv6 service with a migration strategy will see their internet connectivity increase in price. Maybe only a little in 2010, more in 2012, and if there isn't a mass migration to v6, significant costs after that. You, and every consumer, better hope that ISPs and hosting centers get a migration strategy in place soon, or your costs are going to skyrocket.
That was costs from the consumer PoV.
From the techie PoV, imagine what will happen to your router FIBs if some of those nicely aggregated
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
God damn, I'm tired of fighting this meme. Look, as I mentioned in another response, we allocate 10-12 /8's every year, and that rate is increasing. Reclaiming MIT & IBM's /8's would buy us at approximately 2 months at our present allocation rate. The negotiation to make that allocation possible would take far longer. Reclaiming space is not a useful activity at this time.
But you don't "own" that netblock, you were allocated it from ARIN for a single use.
Put it on eBay and ARIN will then send you a polite email about how they have now reclaimed the netblock since it obviously no is no longer being used for it's original declaration. They will then turn around and allocate it to the next demand in their queue. They have all the authority, you have none.
If your sale goes though on eBay, for selling something that did not belong to you, you have committed fraud. I hope you have put aside some of your windfall for legal fees.
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
There is a lot of feet dragging going on, partly because too many business plans rely on short term spending. The irony is that some of the companies which you expect to be leading the way in IPv6 migration don't even have web sites that are IPv6 enabled. This includes IBM, Apple, Microsoft, RedHat and Cisco. I make the point because they should be picking up the torch now that research sites have already done their part, and showing that it is an achievable goal, and not some sort of pipe-dream. /. readers at the same time, should probably get to know and understand the technology, since it is not a question of whether it will happen, but when. When it happens if the IT crowd doesn't understand IPv6, then we really have issues.
If you want to get an IPv6 web site running there are number of solutions, including using Apache 2 with IPv6 support activated and making sure you have an OS that supports an IPv6 stack - most modern OSs do.
Migration technologies for people stuck behind IPv4 NATs include Aiccu and Teredo (Vista includes this, and for other OSs there is Miredo). If you are at home, then one of the 'consumer' routers to support IPv6 out of the box is the Airport Extreme. If others support it out of the box I am not aware of this.
When you are ready see the dancing turtle - if you don't see it you are accessing it via IPv4.
Other stuff you can do in the meantime is checking to see if some your favourite network based applications handle IPv6 and if they don't make some noise. Its best to make the noise now, when it doesn't matter so much, than waiting until it does. On the bonus side they can advertise the fact they are IPv6 ready.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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
The IPv4 crunch has been 2 years away for at least 10 years.
By the way, the idea of reallocating parts of Class-A blocks has been technically feasible for over a decade. Say hi to CIDR
Here's a completely random example: slashdt.org (obviously getting typo hits from slashdot...
According to This web site, that domain shares an IP with over 14,000 other domains!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Unfortunately the IPv4 address space isn't embedded in the IPv6 address space in the way that you suggest. Dan Bernstein pointed out many years ago that this was a mistake.
First of all, break up the "LEGACY" Class-A allocations. http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space. That'll free up a bunch.
All of the following companies have a full 16.7 Million addresses assigned to them. Level 3 might use theirs, (they actually have 2 blocks), but Halliburton? DEC? Amateur Radio Digital Communications? Do they all really need more than 16 million IP addresses?
This short list accounts for 654 million IP addresses -- over 15% of the address space.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925