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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.'"
great, so now we're at 8 IPv6 sites, all of which are tunnel brokers!
the total amount of IPv6 address space in use is just 0.027 percent
So how many is that, in quadrillions?
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.
Instead of waiting for demand to outstrip supply, the IANA should artificially increase demand by bloating the prices for blocks. This will cause everyone to focus more on IP conservation. Because let's be truthful: IPv6 isn't going to be widely adopted in 5 years unless something changes (and it's best for everyone if that "something" isn't a complete lack of IP Addresses)
What's to prevent someone from buying them all and charging more later?
An open market for IPv4 addresses would solve the 'depletion' problem by encouraging the most wasteful users to sell their addresses.
Get your IPv6 addresses here: Tunnelbroker.net
They've got a ton of presences all over the place, so latency is not too bad. It's really nice to be able to SSH directly to your boxes behind your router. Every address you get contains the square of the IPv4 address space for your own use.
Then bug your ISP to give you native connectivity.
What is .027% of 2**128
Here's a neat (and understandable) place to find out just how stupid it is to say that "only X%" if IPv6 is assigned: http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_IPv6AddressSizeandAddressSpace-2.htm
IPv6 is HUGE. I didn't even understand how huge until I found out I can get an address for every friggin cell in my body.
Weeeee!
I don't know which ISP's or upstream providers you are dealing with, but in the last 2 years, every DS1/3 circuit I have ordered required quite a bit of justification for anything more than 5 IPv4 addresses. No, I have not had to pay extra for addresses yet, but I have been told by AT&T and others that /24 blocks are basically impossible to get on anything less than DS3's nowadays.
The last time I did get a /24 or larger block of IPv4 addresses was 3 years ago on a 6mbit bundle of T1's. That was a /23 for a hospital network of 5000+ internal hosts. At last check, we were using about 200 of our allotted 500+ addresses. A bit wasteful.
I remember getting T1's in the mid-to-late 90's, and there were no questions asked- you just got a /24.
Never trust anyone who takes pride in being called a 'geek'....
I don't understand why they made IPv6 the way they did.
Sure, the size of the new address space is absolutely staggering, but this was done at the expense of making them impossible for a person to remember. Right now, I can go to some internet cafe and ssh into my home network because I can remember the IP.
Were I using an IPv6 address, I would have to pay for DNS service just so I could log into my own network remotely, or keep a scrap of paper and laboriously type it out.
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.
This still allows people to remember them easily, as there is no difference between remembering, say, 189 and 857 from a human brain perspective. It's three digits in each case. And, you can go as high as you need to. You can never deplete it, as you can just keep using more bits to represent the address when necessary, and all of the applications supporting such a protocol would be able to support that natively.
Best of all, assume x=8 unless explicitly specified, and voila -- perfect backwards compatibility with the existing IPv4 protocol. You no longer need to have separate treatment of IPv4 and next-gen address spaces, because IPv4 will be a subset of the expanded space.
Why the current mess of horrible alphanumeric sequences? Why didn't they make it easy on our eyes and do it like this?
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.'"
IPv6 addresses are 128 bits instead of v4's 32-bits. I sure HOPE the percentage stays small.
It's a preposterous claim that a whole 0.027 IPv6 addresses are in use. If that many addresses were in use, then that would mean IPv6 is wildly successful
If you just consider the first 48 bits of a V6 address. That's 281474976710656 network addresses.
IF 0.027% of those are in use, then 75,998,243,711 IPv6 networks have been used, which is more networks than IPv4 has ip addresses.
The full 128 bits allows for 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 host addresses.
If 0.027 of those are in use, then that would mean 91876239068653385135111144006577417 IPv6 host addresses are in use.
> 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.
NAT is fine for a typical workstation now but I think it is a bad idea to build assumptions about the way applications work into network architecture.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
While China and the US consume the world's resources, even the virtual ones the rest of the world is trying to adopt more efficient methods? Same old familiar story.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Try running more than one HTTPS server behind a single external address and see how wonderful you think NAT is then.
Why not just take every existing IPv4 address and make it an alias for the same IPv6 address, but with 5 zeros in front of it? And declare that the owners of those IPv4 addresses now own the corresponding IPv6 addresses?
Technoli
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?
I had no idea exactly how big either. From your link:
[...]imagine the IPv4 address space is the 1.6-inch square above. In that case, the IPv6 address space would be represented by a square the size of the solar system.
It's perfectly fine to make assumptions, in fact it's part of designing stuff. You can't know everything in advance.
;) ) the designer was.
;) ).
You WILL have to make assumptions anyway - after all you aren't going to ask for 2 billion IP addresses for the hospital. Even if someone argues that in the future some applications may require machines to have thousands of IP addresses, but as a designer you are going to say "Even if that's the case, a hospital is unlikely to want that app, or by that time, the hospital and the world would have gone to IPv6".
How good the assumptions are, shows you how good (or lucky
It's perfectly reasonable to assume that most computers in the hospital should never need to have outsiders able to connect directly to them.
This may not be true for universities, but it is likely to be even more true for banks - only a very few ways in and out.
Many universities have an open campus, and outsiders can walk to any building and try to enter them, and the buildings themselves are designed with multiple entry points. Banks in contrast are desigend to have just a few entry points (that's why the crooks often make their own entry points
When will consumer grade routers support IPv6?
When I can go and get a netgear, linksys, or dlink router that supports IPv6 then I'd hope that I can get IPv6 connectivity from my ISP. (QWest)
I'm running Vista and Linux here at home, and could operate on ipV6 without any issues right now, except that I guess most software is only configured to talk ipv4. (Does Firefox attempt to talk to any ipV6 locations?)
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.
Wow, you have a lot of big words - but you show very little in the way of concrete facts. WHY is it an awful(sic) mistake? Just because you have to remember a few more hex digits? Boo-hoo, the world is a lot larger than just your back yard you know, and those other people also want to get on the internet.
Just screaming that something is bad without explaining why is not really a convincing debating tactic...
The remaining participants were hardly even the B team; they were F Troop. IPv6 was a mashup of two undergrad-level hacks, Steve's IP and Paul's IP, by Steve Deering and Paul Francis.
...and neither are personal attacks on people who aren't even present to defend themselves.
So IPv6 perpetuates IPv4's mistakes and adds more of its own. It is costly but doesn't fix anything.
Which mistakes does it perpetuate? Which ones does it add? Why is it costly? (I can sort of guess that last one: because there is so much IP4 equipment out there. Well, here is a newsflash: it will be costly to switch to _anything_ other than IP4, whether it is IP6 or something else!)
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.
So... Let's say I get assigned an IP that was previously unused by AT&T (since they have so many). Do you have any idea of the routing complications if this happened all over the world?
How do you think a "smarter" solution than IP6 will look like? Just give us a general idea, I don't need an RFC right now...
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. 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.
How can I write an application that connects from one NATted box to another? Ah, right, I can't. So the fundamental principal of end-to-end communication gets thrown out of the window, and the internet is reduced to a television model, with producers (those who have IP addresses) and consumers (those who do not). And that is something we REALLY do not need.
But the IPv6 overlords in their infinite wisdom have decided that we can't just use a 192.168.0.* equivalent, oh no. All addresses must be publicly routeable.
There is also a private v6 address range - anything in the fc00::/7 range should not be publicly routable so you can use this for totally private machines (not sure why you'd want to, but you might).
So why is there nowhere that will give me, as a private individual, an IPv6 address (officially, I mean - I'm aware of that website that generates an address that should be ok to use)?
Google for a tunnel broker near you. They will give you a /64 (i.e. a subnet of 2^64 addresses). This is not a range that 'should be ok' it is a range that is selected from the range given to that tunnel broker. They will then route all IPv6 traffic for you. Alternatively, you can use 6to4. Every public IPv4 address has a corresponding /48 in the 2002::/16 subnet, generated by appending the v4 address to the 2002 prefix. If you have a public IPv4 address, you can use the corresponding 6to4 address range without an explicit tunnel broker.
This sort of thing should be what drives the IPv6 transition - I'm willing to experiment, to find problems and fix them. But the system is such that I am locked out of doing so.
No, your inability to google for basic information is locking you out of doing so. If you want to have it just work without needing to know anything, but a recent Airport base station from Apple and use that as your router - it will configure 6to4 for you and route all v6 traffic from the local network without any effort.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The current situation with most residential ISPs is that each customer gets one public IP. This is typically terminated on a NAT router (either combined with the modem or as a seperate device). In this situation you can port forward because YOU CONTROL THE NAT.
When (not if) IPV4 addresses run out I strongly suspect the first thing the ISPs will do is force residential customers to either pay more or go behind an ISP LEVEL NAT (in some countries afaict they are already doing so). By doing this they will free up adresses for more lucrative customers. Since this nat is shared between multiple customers the customers will almost certainly not control the nat and will therefore not be able to set up port forwards.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
"If IPv6 was something that I had to install only on my router, I would have done it already (or would do when I change my routers software), now, not only do I have to install it on my router, but on all of my devices, for little to no advantage. Yes, all of my PCs would have public IPs, yeas, they would be filtered, so, where is the advantage?"
Every recent OS already has IPv6 installed, so you are complaining about work that you don't need to do. NAT complicates and makes additional work for protocols used for VoIP. Eliminating NAT reduces the extra work NAT requires.
"Also, I have old PCs running Windows NT4 and 2000 which (AFAIK) do not support IPv6, my printer also doesn't. So, I would have to have both versions, remember to map ports correctly, so that my PCs can accept incoming connections (for BitTorrent and other services) from v4 and v6 clients (and that the incoming connections do not end up routed to different PCs)."
You may recall that I mentioned that you might need NAT for legacy systems. New systems support IPv4 and IPv6 and do not need any special setup to work with both. Your legacy systems will look up the printer address by name, and get an IPv4 address. Your new systems will look up the printer by name, and get an IPv4 address. Where's the extra work?
I'll tell you where the extra work is, it's mapping ports to work around NAT for BitTorrent. Port forwarding or mapping is extra work required by NAT. If every device has a public IPv6 address, you don't need to forward ports. You simply add a firewall rule to allow access, exactly as you do with NAT. But a firewall rule isn't enough with NAT, you must ALSO add a mapping or forwarding rule. NAT == more work.
"Now, if I want to access my network from outside, I use VPN (L2TP). L2TP, by the way, works even when both endpoints are behind a NAT, given that appropriate protocols and ports are forwarded to the server (client does not need any forwarding). If I cannot use VPN, I can map a port to some service that I want to access even if I can't use VPN, then I have to remember my IP (or hostname) and the port, instead of having to remember IPs for all of my PCs (and ports too)."
You never need to remember IP addresses. They aren't meant for humans. Use names. Numeric addresses are for routing packets, and only routers should care about them. The only time I deal with IP addresses is when I configure DNS and DHCP for my home network. Every system has a hostname.
I access my home systems from anywhere on the Internet the way it is meant to be done. My ISP allows servers, does no filtering, and provides a static IP. I don't need to remember my IP, I have a domain registered that resolves to it. If I change ISPs, my domain will resolve to my new address.
I use NAT because my ISP doesn't support IPv6. I pay for one static IPv4 address. I'd rather have more, but they charge extra. So I use NAT and know how much extra work that involves. IPv6 would simplify my setup, like it would simplify yours, if you only realized it.
When I ran BitTorrent on my desktop, I had to enter a firewall rule to allow incoming connections, and I had to enter a NAT rule to forward the port. I upgraded my router, and now I run a torrent client on it. No NAT forwarding rule was needed, so instead of two rules, only the firewall rule was needed. NAT adds work.
"I am sure that I am not alone thinking all this, because, as we see, v6 usage is kind of limited."
It's limited because too many ISPs don't support it.
"I like to be able to appear as a single PC (just in case my ISP decides that I should also pay for every PC that I have), also, I do not want anyone to know how many different PCs are in my network and whether those multiple connections are originating from one or more PCs."
Your ISP can look at your port usage and tell that you are using NAT. They probably don't care how many computers you use. They care about about how many IP addresses you use, because IPv4 addresses are in short supply. They have no reason to care how many IPv6 addresses you use, because all of your IPv6 addresses will take up the exact same space in the routing tables as a single address.