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Millions of Internet Addresses Are Lying Idle
An anonymous reader writes "The most comprehensive scan of the entire internet for several decades shows that millions of allocated addresses simply aren't being used. Professor John Heidemann from the University of Southern California (USC) used ICMP and TCP to scan the internet. Even though the last IPv4 addresses will be handed out in a couple of years, his survey reveals that many of the addresses allocated to big companies and institutions are lying idle. Heidemann says: 'People are very concerned that the IPv4 address space is very close to being exhausted. Our data suggests that maybe there are better things we should be doing in managing the IPv4 address space.' So, is it time to reclaim those unused addresses before the IPv6 crunch?"
I was going to use the oil analogy. It's going to run out eventually, so why not switch to something better now before we run out?
That's a little silly. These allocations were made in the 70s and 80s, before the Internet really existed outside of the US. At the time, the recipients of the addresses were those who were most likely to use them. No hoarding is going on.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Nobody has configured for IPv6 because there's been no forced set date to switch over so everyone is still just using IPv4 which is working just fine.
But when the date comes it'll be a long weekend for a lot of admins, but I'm guessing the switch will happen just fine.
In addition to all those lying idle because of excessive address space allocation, there are huge swaths of space which have been hijacked. Recent discussion on the NANOG list has highlighted some of these; the Spamhaus DROP list features others. And other researchers have found still more that are obviously no longer under the control of their putative owners, and are being use for spam, spyware, phishing, and worse. Attempts to get network operators, registrars, ICANN, ARIN, and others to effectively disable these resources -- and eventually to reclaim them -- have been largely unsuccessful. Yes, in some isolated cases, limited action eventualy takes place, but it's far too little far too late to be considered anything close to "effective". We need a concerted, worldwide effort to not only reclaim this space, but to blacklist for life those found currently possessing that -- because (as we've seen repeatedly) they won't be deterred by anything else.
From the article:
The USC research group used the most innocuous type of network packet to probe the farthest reaches of the Internet. Known as the Internet Control Message Protocol, or ICMP, this packet is typically used to send error messages between servers and other network hardware.
My home network is in complete stealth mode, and to them that's another "idle IP" address.
I also love how they arrived to their conclusion:
the team probed a million random Internet addresses using both ICMP and TCP, finding a total of 54,297 active hosts ... ...
In total, the researchers estimate that there are 112 million responsive addresses
but the overall conclusion--that the Internet has room to grow--is spot on
How did this ghetto-science experiment end up on Slashdot again?
If you can't mod them join them.
NAT is a hassle, when it comes to more complex protocols than simple TCP. I've worked at a customer site which had a slightly... lets put it like this... unorthodox allocation of internal IP addresses. They just gave every site a 10.X.0.0/16, and then they had more than 256 sites (it's a large retailer, that's why). So they started expanding (yes I know, shame on them) into the 9.0.0.0/8 and 8.0.0.0/8 space.
When they bought a company in another country, the sysadmins there absolutely refused to route those nets into the VPN (right they were). So now the customer starts heavily to NAT, so the new company never sees any internal 9.0.0.0/8 and 8.0.0.0/8 addresses.
And now lots of things break. Videoconferencing and VoIP are among the worst offenders, but some complex logistics software they use is playing silly buggers too. And with more than 256 sites it's just not feasible to start readdressing all the IPs. They just don't have the people to do it, and they don't have the time to do it (it has to happen all at once, otherwise just more applications break during the transition period), and they don't have the money to hire enough external people to do it.
It's a lesson why violating RFC1918 never was a good idea, but it is also a lesson that NAT gets you only so far.