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IPv4 Address Use In 2008
An anonymous reader writes "The world used 197 million new IPv4 addresses in 2008, leaving 926 million addresses still available. The US remains the biggest user of new addresses, but China is catching up quickly. Quoting Ars Technica: 'A possible explanation could be that the big player(s) in some countries are executing a "run on the bank" and trying to get IPv4 addresses while the getting is good, while those in other countries are working on more NAT (Network Address Translation) and other address conservation techniques in anticipation of the depletion of the IPv4 address reserves a few years from now. In both cases, adding some IPv6 to the mix would be helpful. Even though last year the number of IPv6 addresses given out increased by almost a factor eight over 2007, the total amount of IPv6 address space in use is just 0.027 percent.'"
The ISPs don't care if the IPv4 addresses run out. They like it because then they'll be able to start charging extra for IPv4 and IPv6 addresses whereas they've been just giving them out for free. NAT also cuts their traffic costs because it keeps customers from running servers.
The space may be astronomical, but astronomical amounts of space are wasted in order to simplify routing and such.
For all practical purposes, I would estimate that IPv6 is about 64k times larger than IPv4.
What ISP isn't batshit insane in the US?
Why not extend IPv4 by adding more bits to the representation of each octet? For example, instead of using 8 bits, use x bits where x is specified at the beginning of the address. For example, you can use x=10 and create an address up to 1024.1024.1024.1024.
You misunderstand the meaning of the octet, which is little more than a way to make a large number more understandable. If you take 255*255*255*255 you end up with the largest number that can be stored in a 32 bit integer. And it's this integer that is actually your "ip address". It's just rendered in octet format because 63.95.215.231 is much more readable than some huge integer like 2393201938.
But when you are talking about very, very, very, very large numbers, such as 2^128, even breaking up the numbers into "bite sized chunks" falls apart. Even when you use alphanumeric values, it still is hard to remember.
So DNS is your friend. It works well, fast, and reliably.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
> Because IPv6 was an awful mistake, an abortion created by a project group (IPNG) that had become so politicized that the best people had left.
It has problems, but I can't think of a networking protocol, at any layer, which didn't. The question is not "does it have problems?", but "is it better to switch to IPv6 than to stay with IPv4?". For a lot of us, the answer is "yes".
> So IPv6 perpetuates IPv4's mistakes and adds more of its own. It is costly but doesn't fix anything.
It has the potential to restore the end-to-end principle across most of the internet. (I can't think of anything else I do on my computer where the standards we use have static limits which are so low.)
> The existing v4 space is not well utilized. Blocks can be traded/bought/sold in the interim until something smarter than IPv6 comes along. IPv6 at this point is mainly a hack by equipment vendors to make you buy costly new stuff.
A good solution today is infinitely more valuable than a perfect solution never. Again, simply observing that there are problems with the current administration of IPv4 addresses is not useful. What might be useful would be comparing the relative cost of "fixing administrative problems with IPv4" to "switching to IPv6". In my experience, getting people to upgrade to a newer technology is a lot easier than fixing social issues.
Besides, all of my stuff (at work and at home) already supports IPv6. I don't have to buy anything new. If you invented something better than IPv6 today, wouldn't I have to buy new equipment that supported *that*?
> NAT is harmless to any application that is not broken in the first place. There is never justification for putting an IP address inside the application layer.
Sure, and running without memory protection is harmless to any application that is not broken in the first place. Those of us who have ever done any large-system design in real life have learned the hard way that there are quite a few broken applications in the world.
> Look at HTTP: It uses names, not addresses. In fact, it was a mistake to have applications resolve DNS; that should be a function of TCP/IP itself.
So instead of upgrading IP, you merely want to change how DNS and TCP and all networking applications work? Yeah, good luck with that.
Why would you use addressing to keep un-authorized traffic from your computers. That is what a firewall is for. The whole NAT thing is really frustrating if you are trying to do any push application, VPN, video-conferencing...etc. Yes there are ways to cope, but why port forward when you could open ports in a firewall?