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China To Run Out of IPv4 Addresses In 830 Days
JagsLive writes "China is running out of IP addresses unless it makes the switch to IPv6. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, under the current allocation speed, China's IPv4 address resources can only meet the demand of 830 more days and if no proper measures are taken by then, new Chinese netizens will not be able to gain normal access to the Internet. Li Kai, director in charge of the IP business for CNNIC's international department, says that if a netizen wants to get access to the Internet, an IP address will be necessary to analyze the domain name and view the pages. At present, most of the networks in China use IPv4 addresses. As a basic resource for the Internet, the IPv4 addresses are limited and 80% of the final allocation IP addresses have been used."
Do any Chinese citizens even have "normal" 'net access now? Thought NAT was used heavily, not to mention the GFWOC
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Or will they just open up reserved addresses or something stupid like that?
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
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C'mon HP, be a good netizen and give back the bulk of those IP addresses. Try using NAT instead of hoarding IP addresses that others so desperately need.
Slashdot runs it's 15th story about IP addresses running out "real soon now". The first was something like 5 years ago :)
These stats ignore the fact that there are huge available allocations that can go behind NAT's. An ISP can NAT big chunks of its user network. Charging even a modest amount per IP would free up huge numbers of IPs. There are abandoned blocks (companies out of business) and wildly oversized blocks (MIT etc).
Plus, we've been hearing these stories for years. The idea that the internets resources are going to become ipv6 anytime soon is unlikly. So folks are going to figure out a way to manage the existing pool, where there is lots of room for improved efficiency.
Fun to keep on reading these stories... they're always written as breaking news :)
Seriously their government is hell bent on controlling what goes into and out of that nation and what better way to do that than by forcing people to use a proxy..
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
IP4 doesn't have enough addresses, of course a managers solution is to put of the inevitable so that it happens on someone elses watch rather then taking the time we got now to develop and implement a solution.
IF pushing IP6 doesn't work in the roughly 2 years remaining THEN we can use the buffer of under-used blocks as a last reserve. if we use the reserves now, and do nothing then we still have the same problem, just a bit further away but this time with no reserves remaining and no work chance of it being solves in time.
You should run for president, you would do well with your solutions.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
ISPs will not be able to oversell their DHCP pool. Back in the days of dial-up, yes, but now that every broadband ISP installs a router/modem that is on 24 hours a day not a chance. Most people will turn off or suspend a computer when it's not in use, but will never do the same for their router.
Ordinary users of the IPv6 Internet should be allocated as a minimum two /64 subnets. One /64 subnet would be for a private LAN network and the other /64 subnet would be for a public facing DMZ network. The DMZ network would be useful for any kind of reachability which only selected people can access content. IPv6 capable VoIP PBXs would be especially useful here like Asterisk and Freeswitch. Imagine the possibilities of assigning every phone call or user its own IPv6. This should elimiate VoIP spam.
Other notes: Point to point links should be a /126, not a /64. Businesses of differing sizes don't need a full /48. This would be like giving out blocks of IPv4 Class A addresses all over again. The size of the allocated IPv6 for a business should match their real size and needs. Applications and operating systems need to be more IPv6 aware.
The refrigerator is a poor example, but other appliances and home HVAC systems could realize significant energy savings by communicating with each other, and by being controlled remotely over the internet (or some other means).
There are a lot of interesting scenarios: if you had real-time, fluctuating power pricing, you might want to have appliances change their energy consumption or other settings in response to their cost. Only run some appliances when the spot price is below $0.15/kwh, for example.
Or even simpler, if you have a peak-load factor as a component of your bill, devices could communicate with each other to ensure the total draw at any one time doesn't exceed some predetermined maximum. Different appliances would each have a priority, and would have to shut down to accommodate higher-priority draws. (E.g.: the clothes dryer would shut off if you turned on the electric stove or microwave, because it would have a lower priority -- unless you were really obsessive about not having wrinkled clothes, I suppose, in which case you could set it the other way around.)
The two could be combined, as well: once you have the infrastructure in place, you could set up whatever rules you wanted, balancing preferences for certain services against costs, and prioritizing certain services at various times. It wouldn't be hard to produce detailed reports of what each appliance/service was costing to operate, and how new rules would affect costs based on past usage patterns. (There's the potential for a lot of complexity in the control system, but to a user it might seem very simple on the surface.)
Also, there's a wide range of appliances that really only need to run when people are in the house (or just before they enter the house) but tend to run continuously because it's a PITA to run them based on inflexible timers: HVAC, lighting, water heaters, possibly even water pressure-pumps. Devices would only be turned on when necessary for another device, or a user need was anticipated. I could easily imagine a system that was plugged into an online calendar and controlled this in a way that hid it from the user as much as possible. Heck, if you had a PDA with GPS, you wouldn't have to do anything.
The driving force behind "home automation" up until now has mostly been the geek factor of controlling all your lights/appliances/whatevers from a single point, but I think in the future, energy savings and integration will be the selling point. Since it seems unlikely that we'll really make significant inroads on alternative sources of energy before we start to run low on petroleum, there's a non-trivial chance that energy may become staggeringly expensive. I could easily see a future where the running costs of energy-intensive appliances greatly exceed -- even to the point of triviality -- their purchase price.
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What is IPv6, 128-bit address space? That is what, 16 bytes?
Worse case in decimal (I added the dashes so *I* could make sure I typed it right :-)
216:126:59:03-58:95:58:32-126:43:55:129-59:59:59:1
Worse case in hex (same deal).
FA:FA:FA:FA-12:55:43:BA-55:DA:CC:DB-89:A1:C1:01
Basically, you are boned :-) Maybe we need a different number system that is like Base64 instead of Base16? Heck... why not just base64 encode the IP address. Base64 is what, A-Z, a-z, 0-9,+,=? A Base64 encoded IPv6 address is just:
Az.
Or make it Base32 instead so you can be case insensitive (A-Z, 0-9 and only drop a couple easy to mix up characters like i, l and o to get to 32 chars). A Base32 IPv6 is:
A1Y2.
You could even break out subnets with Base32:
A1Y:2/96 (subnet mask ZZZ0)
So yeah... why didn't they go Base64 or Base32 instead of Base16?
Actually NAT DOES provide some sort of security. That is because by default nobody can see which devices sit behind the NAT.
Well, kinda-sorta. If you look at the behavior of the IPid field of outbound TCP packets coming from a NAT/PAT router, which most of the time is untouched by the router, as well as the TTL field, you can make a pretty good guess as to how many devices are behind the router, and a rough guess as to their OSes.
The IPid field is usually used as a packet counter for a given OS, so it will increase in value by 1 for every packet sent. So if you have a few machines, each counting, you can group the outbound packets by IPid value. Also, various OSes have different default values for the TTL field (64, 128), so you can make a guess as to what OS it is as well.
See: "Passive Detection of NAT Routers and Client Counting," Straka, K., Manes, G., 2006 in International Federation For Information Processing, Volume 222, Advances in Digital Forensics, eds. Olivier, M., Shenoi, S., (Boston: Springer).
With the first link, the chain is forged.