Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

ARIN Letter Says Two More Years of IPv4

Posted by timothy on from the no-more-mister-nice-registry dept.

dew4au writes "A reader over at SANS Internet Storm Center pointed out a certified letter his organization received from ARIN. The letter notes that all IPv4 space will be depleted within two years and outlines new requirements for address applications. New submissions will require an attestation of accuracy from an organizational officer. It also advises organizations to start addressing publicly accessible assets with IPv6. Is ARIN hoping to scare companies into action with the specter of scarce resources? This may be what's needed to spur adoption since there appears to be no business case for IPv6 deployment."

65 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. What about my toaster? by MrEricSir · · Score: 5, Funny

    When IPv6 was announced, one of the benefits was that everything could have its own IP address; even your toaster!

    So as for a business case, what about the internet toaster business? If we don't switch to IPv6, what will they do?

    --
    There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
    1. Re:What about my toaster? by Burkin · · Score: 2, Funny

      Why would you be running Windows on your toaster?

    2. Re:What about my toaster? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      He likes his toast burnt to a crisp?

    3. Re:What about my toaster? by omnichad · · Score: 5, Informative

      IPv6 has 3x10^38 addresses.

      Assuming that everyone in the world owns a 1080p monitor, that's about 1x10^16 pixels.

      There would be enough IP addresses for each pixel, and still have more than enough IP addresses left to give every man, woman, and child's toaster an IP and also to replace IPv4 in its entirety.

    4. Re:What about my toaster? by shadow349 · · Score: 4, Funny

      So as for a business case, what about the internet toaster business? If we don't switch to IPv6, what will they do?

      They can receive bailout funds from the stimulus bill under the guise of a "smart power grid" appliance.

      You think I'm kidding, don't you?

    5. Re:What about my toaster? by jd · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's assuming packed addressing. IPv6 is hierarchical, which means that it's largely sparse addressing, so your theory doesn't hold up. However, since each home network has 48 bits of address space, you still have enough addresses for your monitor - you just won't be able to use the mobility option.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    6. Re:What about my toaster? by Bandman · · Score: 3, Funny

      HDoverIP

      Remotely address the individual pixels of a monitor.

      Talk about a thin client...

      --
      Check out my sysadmin blog!
    7. Re:What about my toaster? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      You can already get all that with the right kind of power meters you install at the outlets in the house.

      But the important question is are you ok with sending all that data to the government run power company?

      Do you want them knowing what appliances you have, when you use them, etc? And do you really think they will be able to resist selling that information to marketing groups, or giving it up to the authorities?

      Now combine the ID with RFID tags in product packaging...

      Just imagine the email you might get:
      "Good day, Comrade!

      We have noticed that you have switched from eating one bagel and two pieces of toast, cereal and milk, to simply drinking a cup of coffee each morning, and more alarming to us is the fact that there is no juice in your refrigerator. Your lack of caloric intake is probably why you have been running the heat more than normal, which is wasteful and we would like to remind you that waste is a violation of Health Ordinance 639462.
      In addition, we've noticed that you haven't been leaving the house as often, as there have been less sudden drops in the ambient temperature from the doors opening, and we are concerned you may be suffering mental fatigue.

      In the interests of your health & the well-being of the community, we have notified your local Health & Wellness officer, who will be at your house tomorrow to collect a mandatory urine sample. Anyone interfering with the collection of urine samples will face criminal charges.

      Be well, Citizen!
      - The Citizens Glorious Health Bureau"

    8. Re:What about my toaster? by jgtg32a · · Score: 2, Funny

      well what ever OS base they decide to use for their TOS hopefully they have a good TOS.

    9. Re:What about my toaster? by Miamicanes · · Score: 5, Informative

      > However, since each home network has 48 bits of address space (snip)

      The last time I checked (about 6 weeks ago), ISPs are supposed to assign a 48-bit address to each "customer" (read: site, household, office, etc), who'll have 80 bits, not 48, under his direct control -- from a block whose upper 32 bits are assigned to the ISP by the local coordinator (ARIN, RIPE, etc). In English, here's a theoretical IP address represented by placeholder letters (each letter represents 1 hexadecimal digit = 4 bits):

      aaaa:aaaa:bbbb:cccc:dddd:dddd:dddd:dddd

      where

      aaaa:aaaa is a prefix assigned by ARIN/RIPE/etc to the ISP. For now, most of the addresses we see will have "2001" as the first 4 digits.

      bbbb is a 16-bit value, representing 65,536 potential customers. This is the part the ISP gets to assign to customers.

      cccc is another 16-bit value. This is the part you, the customer, are officially supposed to be able to use however you please

      dddd:dddd:dddd:dddd is a 64-bit value. In theory, this value is supposed to be determined by your ethernet card's MAC address. Originally, it was "mandated". Due to privacy concerns (your ethernet card would be trackable out-of-band wherever in the world you used it from and would have effectively been the "tracking cookie from hell"), it was first softened to allow some randomization, and eventually made a "recommendation". More on this in a moment...

      So... what does this mean for you, Joe DslCableModelCustomer? In theory, you will someday be getting a letter from them to the effect of, "Your new IPv6 prefix is 2001:3f87:991d:/48". What does this mean? In the real world, it means you'll plug the shiny new Linksys router you bought circa mid-2012 into it, and configure its address to be 2001:3f87:991d::1 You'll then verify that the rest of your network (192.168.x.x IPv4 addresses and all) is happily doing NAT, and forget about it.

      To the rest of the world, your desktop PC (192.168.0.128) will either appear to be 2001:3f87:991d::1 (if the router is acting as an IPv4 proxy), or if you're extra-clever, will transparently be rewritten to something like 2001:3f87:991d:0::192.168.0.101 or 2001:3f87:991d:0::c0a8:0065. Ditto, for the other half-dozen computers and devices in your home that are connected to the internet.

      A few weeks later, you get into an IPv6 fetish, and decide to abolish the IPv4 legacy and make everything pure IPv6. At this point, your public IP addresses look even prettier:

      your firewall's new IPv6 address is set to 2001:3f87:991d::100
      your desktop PC's new IPv6 address is now 2001:3f87:991d::101
      your TiVO's new IPv6 address is 2001:3f87:991d::102
      and so on.

      Put another way, nobody is going to put a gun to your head and force you to use the lower 64-80 bits if you really don't want to. If you're a typical home user who just wants to plug things in and have them work, they'll autoconfig using the munged MAC address and publicly assume some horrific, ugly value its owner will probably never type directly anyway. If you want your network to be handcrafted, with addresses you can remember, you're perfectly free to collapse the 80 bits you control down to as few as 1 bit if that's what makes you happy. Maybe even ZERO bits (I'm not 100% sure whether 2001:3f87:991d:0:0:0:0:0:0 is a legitimate address, or whether the ::0 address still refers to the (sub)net as a whole).

      As for privacy, I fully expect that most ISPs will eventually have a semi-anonymizing web proxy available for their customers to use. They'll keep logs for a few days to fight spammers, botnets, and criminals, but keep things sufficiently shuffled around to keep marketers from ever getting TOO comfy and intimate with your IP address. It'll make ISPs happy, because they can make it cache traffic and squeeze more use out of their upstream bandwidth.

      Note that the allocation scheme I just mentioned IS radically different from what IETF envisioned circa 2000. Sometime in the past 2 or 3 years, they put down the crack

    10. Re:What about my toaster? by Miamicanes · · Score: 3, Interesting

      > I thought IPv6 split the network and local address segments right down the middle (i.e. each is 64-bit).

      From what I remember, that was more or less the plan circa 2002-2004. The main problem with the original address allocation scheme was that it left big gaps in places that made it nice to route, but a bitch to memorize and rendered the proposed shortcut notation all but useless. Originally, they planned to use the upper 3 bits as a grand macro-level version indicator, then leave the next byte zero for now, then hop and skip over the next few bytes using the lower bit or two of each byte until they got to the "meat" of the address somewhere around bytes 5-8. That would have resulted in lovely addresses like 100:103:401:3f7a:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx which, if you actually used your MAC address to set the lower 48 bits, would have been all but impossible to meaningfully encode with the "::" zero-packing shortcut. At best, you might have ended up with 2 pairs of sequential zero bytes to compress, and had to pick one or the other.

  2. Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by madbavarian · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nothing gets fixed until it breaks so fully that people can't ignore it any longer. ARIN should just hand out the last of their IP assignment already and then we can move on with actually deploying IPv6.

    1. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by SnarfQuest · · Score: 5, Funny

      Just do a HDTV conversion. Give a specific date when IPV4 support will be dropped, then extend the date when the timeout gets close.

      --
      Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
    2. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      A nit, I know, but DTV conversion had little to do with HD...

      That's partially why so many idiots were confused.

    3. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by vivin · · Score: 4, Informative

      There are a number of corporations and organizations that own /8's

      Here is a list

      Here's a few from the list:

      003/8 General Electric Company
      004/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc.
      008/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc.
      012/8 AT&T Bell Laboratories
      013/8 Xerox Corporation
      015/8 Hewlett-Packard Company
      016/8 Digital Equipment Corporation
      017/8 Apple Computer Inc.
      019/8 Ford Motor Company
      034/8 Halliburton Company

      Seriously... why does Ford Motor company need a /8?

      The US government also owns a whole bunch of /8's

      Instead of hogging these, they should just give them up. They don't need all these addresses.

      --
      Vivin Suresh Paliath
      http://vivin.net

      I like
    4. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Seriously... why does Ford Motor company need a /8?

      They've been keeping it in reserve for a rainy day.

      Do you know how much a /8 is worth in today's market? It could pull Ford out of its financial problems!

    5. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by morcego · · Score: 3, Informative

      IBM used to use 9.0.0.0/8 address for their internal network. Computers that didn't have access to the internet or anything.

      This was back in 1995, so I can't guarantee it is still true, but it is likely.

      --
      morcego
    6. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by aynoknman · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Seriously... why does Ford Motor company need a /8?

      They need it so they can sell it when they go into Chapter 11

      --
      We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
    7. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by jd · · Score: 2, Funny

      Nah. Ford already uses most of their /8 in assigning each nut and bolt in each of their cars its own IPv4 address.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    8. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by Blue6 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A lot of the companies that have class A networks had them issued before CIDR. Also don't underestimate the size of some of these networks. Ford has a half dozen datacenters spread out around the world thousands of VOIP phones, Desktops / Laptops, routers, switches, AP, servers. Not to mention most modern manufacturing plants PLC's run on a IP network sure you will never use the whole space but do you really think they are going to re-IP a network that size. Ford also owns a class B network :)

      --
      EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
    9. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by Bandman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And there's absolutely no reason that those devices can't be assigned an address from the 10.x portion of RFC 1918. None at all, except for the magnitude of the problem.

      They should have planned for that so, so long ago.

      --
      Check out my sysadmin blog!
    10. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      ..do you really think they are going to re-IP a network that size.

      If given proper notice that they will be losing the class A license, then I'm sure they would. There is almost no justification for a corporation to have public IP addresses for VOIP phones, Desktops, Laptops, and many network components (switches, routers, etc) which strictly reside on their internal network.

    11. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by timeOday · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's like land - what was initially given away to ranchers and farmers in vast swaths will now be sold back to us in ever-smaller and more expensive blocks.

    12. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Go ahead, yank 'em all back. Worldwide, the five RIRs (AfriNIC, ARIN, APNIC, LACNIC, RIPE) go through 12-14 /8s per year. Don't give yourself a charley-horse patting yourself on the back because you managed to move out the exhaustion date by 8 months.

      BTW, the US Government *gave back* several /8s.

      IPv4 is terminal. Get over it and get your IPv6 on.

    13. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by idiotnot · · Score: 3, Insightful

      THIS. Mod A/C parent up.

      Reclaiming class As only delays things slightly, and doesn't fix the inescapable math.

      But it's much easier to bitch and point fingers at evil corporations like Ford, than it is to pick up a damn book and learn how IPv6 works.

    14. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by iris-n · · Score: 2, Insightful

      +5 Insightful again?

      Can't we just let this die? There are plenty of unused IPv4 addresses, sure. Most are hard to get due to political problems. No company will re-IP all their network just out of goodwill. So what?

      The sooner IPv4 addresses end the better. Any quantity that is salvaged is just delaying the inevitable, and hurting IPv6. We could be in a much better infrastructure today if it wasn't for all this whining and "business case"ing.

      So what that these companies can make a buck selling the addresses? Anyone dumb enough to pay instead of upgrading does not deserve the money.

      --
      entropy happens
    15. Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks by jgtg32a · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Most of them don't just support it most look for an IP6 address and then fail to IP4

  3. It's to try to get some attention by kevmeister · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I just got back from the ARIN meeting this week and the letters are, indeed, a "scare tactic". Network providers keep reporting that PHBs won't spend any money on IPv6 even though engineers are begging for it. Most corporate officers probably think IP is only Intellectual Property and this is an attempt to draw their attention to the fact that the network world as they know it is going to end soon and that the only way to avoid serious problems is to either stop growing or to start IPv6 deployment. PHBs sometimes get the idea when they realize that not spending some money will lead to big problems in a few years. Others figure that if it's over a year away, it really does not matter because it won't impact their bonus this year, so it may not work, but we can hope.

    --
    Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
  4. I want IPv6 support, but ... by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 3, Informative

    I want IPv6 support, but there are lots of pieces still not in place. I am actually using Miredo (Teredo implementation) when I am on the move and Sixxs when I am at home. These are more stop-gap solutions and until the necessary entities start allowing to get on board properly.

    My parents live in France and they are with Free.fr who offers IPv6 as a standard option. On the other hand I am living in Canada and not one of the service providers offer IPv6 in any shape or form. One questioned about it they blame their up-stream provider. Even if they are ready the only IPv6 ready router for the home is the Apple Airport Extreme, and even then there is a blocker issue for connecting to Sixxs.net (Apple's bug). Linksys, D-Link and Buffalo are still not ready with a public release and you are left trying to see if the version of DD-WRT you need for IPv6 supports your router. Chances are you will be looking at eBay for a router that has enough flash to support it.

    Like the Swine Flu outbreak, I get the feeling that few entities are going to be rushing to do any work until there is media frenzied panic.

    There is no killer application for IPv6, since its just infrastructure. On the other hand the lack of a NAT can make certain application solutions easier to implement, since you don't need to do any NAT busting or other fancy tricks. Of course since internal addresses are now all routable, you will certainly need to make sure that you have a real firewall on the gateway device.

    Once you are on IPv6 you can start playing around with IPv6 torrent and http://ipv6.google.com/ , if you are curious.

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
    1. Re:I want IPv6 support, but ... by gbjbaanb · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That 6to4 support is bundling IPv6 packets and transmitting them inside an IPv4 packet. So technically, the poster is still using IPv4 with his linksys router.

      I think the home router issue is the one that matters. I want IPv6, but simply cannot have it (unless I cough up lots of cash for a serious router). I think the home router manufacturers are missing something here, they just need to say they cannot release firmware updates, and that you need to buy a new router to get IPv6, which is obviously better. They then sell loads more routers.. I don't understand why they don't do this.

      Mind you, a firmware update would be better for me :)

    2. Re:I want IPv6 support, but ... by mellon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There is no killer application for IPv6, since its just infrastructure.

      Not true, and you mentioned the killer app in the very next sentence: end-to-end connectivity. Having real, working end-to-end connectivity is a big deal, but most people don't know it because they're accustomed to living on a network where there is no end-to-end connectivity.

      So if you want to see more IPv6 deployment, start developing apps on top of Miredo/Teredo that really make use of it. When there's enough encapsulated IPv6 running across your ISP's network, it'll actually save them money to switch to native IPv6.

    3. Re:I want IPv6 support, but ... by mellon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      DD-WRT. Of course, this assumes you aren't running one of the crippled Linksys routers that don't have enough memory to support a Linux kernel...

  5. IPv6 is depressing... by wandazulu · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...because whoever is in charge of it does such a crummy job of explaining what it is and why I should care, and more importantly, why my folks should care.

    I got my router set up to use IPv6 (an Apple Time Capsule), and I went searching for some IPv6 love and found practically none. Yes I got to Google, and yes I found a few websites that seemed to do little more than blink(!) "hooray, you are connecting using IPv6! Your address is ..."

    IPv6 needs both a killer app (IPv6-only Twitter, anyone?) and some ready-to-explain-why-you-can't-get-to-it documentation that will get the people to *demand* that they have IPv6 addresses.

    Until then, it's a 32-bit address space world.

    1. Re:IPv6 is depressing... by compro01 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I have your killer app right here.

      --
      upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
    2. Re:IPv6 is depressing... by jd · · Score: 2, Interesting

      http://www.ipv6porn.com/

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  6. IPv4 Address Exhaustion Is Always Be 2 Years Away by afabbro · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Case in point. Thought it was supposed to be 2010? Now it's 2011.

    IPv4 addresses won't magically be exhausted one night. They'll just start getting more expensive.

    --
    Advice: on VPS providers
  7. As I keep pointing out by wowbagger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As I keep pointing out on each IPv6 story, there will be little motivation to move to IPv6 until you can hit major sites, like cnn.com and slashdot.org, using nothing but IPv6 packets.

    We've made a bit of progress, in that now, if you have IPv6 connectivity to "the Internet", you can in theory do the name resolution entirely by IPv6 packets, now that the root name servers support IPv6.

    Note to the "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" crowd: yes, you can form an IPv6 packet with an IPv4 address, but that doesn't mean the target machine will actually be able to understand it - it is still a completely different packet type than an IPv4 packet.

    So, does slashdot.org have IPv6 enabled? Does the colo housing slashdot.org's servers route IPv6 packets from the Internet to the slashdot.org servers? Can "the Internet" route IPv6 packets to the colo?

    If a tech site like slashdot.org doesn't have the ability to handle IPv6 traffic, then why should I get all hot and bothered about trying to get IPv6? And if I'm not going to demand it, then why should my ISP spend the effort to supply it?

    --
    www.eFax.com are spammers
    1. Re:As I keep pointing out by Ceiynt · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Exactly. Just like the conversion from radio to television. Once enough stuff started to get snipped from the radio, like a lot of the serials and soaps, and started to be put on television, television took off. Start making Yahoo.com and Google.com junk with IPv4, and advertise on the page why you get such crappy service and why they should upgrade, in plain enough English to the non-tech people to understand. Then wait a few years for OEM computer to ship with IPv6 compliant NICs, and offer rebates or whatnot for IPv6 routers.
      Or just do like the entertainment industry does, wait for the porn to be IPv6 enchanced, then IPv4 will be dead over night.

    2. Re:As I keep pointing out by gbjbaanb · · Score: 2, Funny

      Start making Yahoo.com and Google.com junk with IPv4

      so *that's* Microsoft's plan to get some users for their search engine!

    3. Re:As I keep pointing out by Bandman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm not sure you could get the tail to shake the dog like that.

      Those sites are important because they are easy to use and good at what they do (ok, Google is, anyway).

      Users typically follow the path of least resistance. If Microsoft Live Search was the only search engine available to people who had ipv4 and ISPs were still only handing out /32 addresses, guess which search engine those people would use.

      Of course, that wouldn't happen, because Google and Yahoo would retain their /32 addresses, because they're businesses designed to get money, not force social or technological change.

      --
      Check out my sysadmin blog!
  8. Re:IPv4 Address Exhaustion Is Always Be 2 Years Aw by Lord+Ender · · Score: 4, Funny

    ARIN really is the most trustworthy source you could have for a claim like that, though. Sure, many have made the claim before, but this is the next best thing to having Jesus, Moses, Mohamed, Buddha, and Thor all sit down with you around a burning bush and explain the importance of implementing IPv6.

    --
    A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
  9. Re:IPv4 Address Exhaustion Is Always Be 2 Years Aw by georgewilliamherbert · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They're already more expensive. The expense increase has been down in the noise for customers - that will no longer be true by the end of the year, and it will hurt by mid 2010.

    IPv4 is no longer too cheap to meter. If that's not a business case for IPv6 I don't know what is.

  10. Now what am I going to do? by bobbuck · · Score: 2, Funny

    With this junk IPv4 toaster?

  11. Class A Address Space by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How about they take back the Class A address space owned by companies who probably aren't even utilizing it. Here's a list of a few companies who have class A licenses and you wonder how much of it they are even using:

    General Electric 3.0.0.0 - 3.255.255.255
    IBM 9.0.0.0 - 9.255.255.255
    Xerox Palo Alto Research Center 13.0.0.0 - 13.255.255.255
    Hewlett-Packard 15.0.0.0 - 15.255.255.255
    Hewlett-Packard (originally DEC, then Compaq) 16.0.0.0 - 16.255.255.255
    Apple Inc. 17.0.0.0 - 17.255.255.255
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology 18.0.0.0 - 18.255.255.255
    Ford Motor Company 19.0.0.0 - 19.255.255.255
    Royal Signals and Radar Establishment 25.0.0.0 - 25.255.255.255
    Halliburton Company 34.0.0.0 - 34.255.255.255

    Why the hell do some of these companies even need 16+ million addresses? I can't see them utilizing the space available, but maybe someone here can enlighten me on how that is done (aside from trying to justify a public IP address for every workstation).

    1. Re:Class A Address Space by azrider · · Score: 2, Informative

      Why the hell do some of these companies even need 16+ million addresses?

      Can't answer to the others, but IBM uses it's address space for all of it's equipment worldwide (desktops, labs, wireless, etc). All of the equipment is accessible via internal LAN's for each and every building IBM is in (and access can be had via VLAN if approved). The others may have similar needs.

      --
      And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
      John 8:32(King James Version)
    2. Re:Class A Address Space by drmerope · · Score: 5, Informative

      Right. Most people are sitting on unaddressable addresses. The ANT census is pretty explicit on this point. Roughly 4% of the IPv4 address space is in use, 30% is not allocated at all, and the remainder (66%) is trapped due to inefficient allocations.

    3. Re:Class A Address Space by againjj · · Score: 2, Interesting

      How about they take back the Class A address space owned by companies who probably aren't even utilizing it

      Sure you can say "they don't need them", but so what. They've been purchased. You can't just take back their address space.

      Actually, the addresses are not "owned" by the companies. They are just allocated. So, theoretically, ARIN could deallocate them. The problem is that people would object and file lawsuits; besides, ARIN has no way to enforce the deallocation of addresses, as ARIN could simply be ignored. If that happened, you now have more than one machine per address, which is bad. Besides, it would only postpone the inevitable, and not by that much.

      So, the proposal won't work because it would be a lot of work, be destabilizing, and not actually have a worthwhile payoff.

  12. Set the Way-Back Machine 2 years... by volxdragon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...wait, didn't they say the same thing then??!?

  13. Re:We need ipv4.5 by georgewilliamherbert · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why couldn't we just add another octect. So my new IP is 1.24.101.1.15

    Fortunately, nobody in their right mind would let Slashdot design a new network protocol.

  14. How much of ipv4 is dark right now? by Marrow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If we had a measurement that said that only 25% of the entire address space is in use at any one time, then maybe would would rethink our choices.

  15. Why would businesses care? by OrangeTide · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have 6 IPs just for personal use. Every big networking company that controls some portion of the Internet is set for IPv4 space for a while. There just isn't room for anyone new to enter into the market. This is a huge advantage for those already established companies. I don't think they intentionally planned it this way, but the scarcity of address is a short term advantage for too many businesses for us to simply ignore that and keep pushing IPv6 as if is of some automatic benefit to everyone. Don't get me wrong, I would be thrilled if Comcast and others moved me over to IPv6. Maybe with a massive address space scanning IP blocks for SSH logins and open firewalls would no longer be as a productive use of botnet time.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  16. Re:We need ipv4.5 by Bandman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Awesome idea. We'll give Google 1/40, The government can 2/40, IBM will get 3/40, etc etc etc

    Same problem. The ipv6 is not a "bad" idea, it's just sort of like...imagine in 1950s if the phone company decided "we could go with area codes to subdivide numbers to prevent running out, or we could use letters AND numbers".

    Can you imagine the upheaval?

    In a lot of ways, that would have been even easier to deal with, because everyone's phone was owned by AT&T. New phones could have been issued without too much problem.

    No, imagine it instead in the mid 1980s. Ma Bell doesn't own the phones any more, in fact there are tons of cheap phones available, cell phones are starting to come out, and there are still rotary AND push button phones.

    That's more like what the IPv6 switch is like. Do you give the new people 2 numbers, so that grandma can still call them? How long is it before you stop accepting legacy phones that only have 10 dialing options? How the hell do you get DTMF to work with 36 numbers? Do we need area codes? It would be weird without them, but we don't really need them.

    The equivalent of these questions are still being asked. Just a couple of months ago, there was a huge to-do about NAT and IPv6. "IPv6 is a world without NAT". The hell it is. My internal routers don't get publicly routable IP addresses, even if I have to NAT back to IPv4.

    When the wrinkles get ironed out, we're going to wonder how we ever did without it. During the transition, it's going to be hell for everyone (with the possible exception of the clueless end user, who might have to buy a new router at most).

    --
    Check out my sysadmin blog!
  17. No killer app needed, just sensible migration path by Estanislao+Mart�nez · · Score: 2, Interesting

    IPv6 is depressing, because whoever is in charge of it does such a crummy job of explaining what it is and why I should care, and more importantly, why my folks should care.

    Actually, I would claim that that's not a big deal. The big problem is that IPv6 just doesn't provide a sensible migration path from IPv4. The idea that we're all going to wake up one day and switch off IPv4 at once just doesn't cut it. More precisely, an IPv4 node just has no way of talking to an IPv6 node. If we built some sort of standardized IPv4-to-IPv6 NAT technology that was invisible to existing IPv4 nodes, then IPv6 could be adopted gradually and incrementally with minimal cost (the cost could be rolled into the cost of general network gear upgrades).

    --

    Are you adequate?

  18. Re:IPv4 Address Exhaustion Is Always Be 2 Years Aw by characterZer0 · · Score: 2, Funny

    If the Pope declares ex cathedra that thou shalt use IPv6, I will convert to Catholicism immediately.

    --
    Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
  19. Re:We need ipv4.5 by snaz555 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Just a couple of months ago, there was a huge to-do about NAT and IPv6. "IPv6 is a world without NAT". The hell it is. My internal routers don't get publicly routable IP addresses, even if I have to NAT back to IPv4.

    I agree with the sentiment - however, it's one of policy, not mechanism. NAT is a pretty poor substitute for a router that implements policy (known as a firewall). NAT has literally an all-or-nothing granularity. For instance, I might want to specify that an internal host can enable BitTorrent via UPnP, but under no circumstances can CIFS be allowed through - in either direction. An internal host sending a CIFS solicitation out does not mean a pinhole should be opened and some set of hosts (depending on cone of restriction) free to respond. NAT is just not a practical policy tool. It's an address space recovery tool. Reverse NAT, however, has some redeeming qualities for load balancing and failover - I'm not versed well enough in IPv6 to understand how they'd be implemented without NAT. (Anycast addressing, I suppose.)

    But you can implement NAT in IPv6 just as much as in IPv4 if you wish. A router could appear to have a single interface ID and translate to/from that. It's largely unnecessary though since instead of a handful of IPv4 addresses you have an entire 64-bit space to yourself (and maybe even the SLN prefix, not sure about that).

    IPv6 really is a major cleanup and simplification from IPv4. I'm slightly disconcerted by the increased dependency on DNS however.

  20. Re:Why? by idiotnot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I manage two /48 IPv6 netblocks. I can remember them just as easily as I do v4 addresses. While autoconfiguration is the preferred method for v6 devices, you can assign addresses manually. So, the host that I have on (my.ip.prefix).20, is also (my.ipv6.prefix)::20.

  21. Re:We need ipv4.5 by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why couldn't we just add another octect.

    Because if we're going to completely break networking, we might as well switch to something that fixes a lot of IPv4's problems (such as, say, IPv6).

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  22. Latest report by mrstrano · · Score: 2, Funny

    Actually I've just read a report from Netcraft that shows that IPv4 is dying!

  23. economics as usual by shentino · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Again, the problem is hoarding of unused IPv4 addresses.

    We'd be just fine if it weren't for folks like MIT that have way more IP's than they need.

    Of course, when a resource gets tight, the folks who have it become kings. You can bet your behind no company is going to give up it's v4's without a fight.

    I'm glad that IPv6 is based upon a stewardship model rather than an ownership model. And also that the v6 guys are leaving 87 percent of the potential v6 namespace unallocated

    1. Re:economics as usual by davburns · · Score: 2, Informative
      No, the problem is that we really do need more address space. IP addresses include identification information and network topology information. We really do have almost that many computers, and almost that complex of topology.

      Forcing the holders of large legacy allocations to give them up would hurt more than moving to IPv6, and it'd only get us a few more years of IPv4 growth. Opening up the class-E space would also hurt more than moving to IPv6, and still only give us a few more years.

      NAT effectively adds 16 more bits to the address, but does so on a per-connection basis, not a per-node basis. It requires the network to be stateful, instead of just passing packets while the end hosts carry all the state. (This means that the end hosts can't just route around problems.) NAT is messy, but it happens to work because it can steal some bits of TCP or UDP to make up for not having enough in the IP header.

      IPv6 adds way more address space than anyone can think of a use for. So it can encode a lot of information about the node's position in the network, plus keep an address unique for (practically) ever.

  24. A message from our sponsors... by jonaskoelker · · Score: 2, Funny

    When IPv6 was announced, one of the benefits was that everything could have its own IP address; even your toaster!

    Wait a minute... Is IPv6 just a clever marketing scheme for NetBSD?

  25. Killer app by coryking · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd argue there is never going to be a killer app for IPv6 because it is nothing more than window dressing on the same old, boring protocols. The true killer app will be on a protocol that is nothing like TCP/IP... say a working mesh protocol where there is no notion ports, IP addresses or any of that nonsense. Where you don't care where the data you get comes from as long as it is authentic. That is the future. Bit torrent is the closest we have to that future and bit-torrent is nothing but a hack of TCP/IP. If the protocol stack was built from the ground up to not care about the source of data, only that it is authentic, *then* you'd have a killer app.

    IPv6 is boring and it isn't even mainstream. How about we cook up something new. Remember when TCP/IP was the new kid on the block and most games had dual or tri-network stacks (TCP/IP, IPX/SPX, Netbeui)? It only took like a few years before all that nonsense went away and we all settled on TCP/IP. Basically, overnight. The same thing *will* happen again. Only it will *not* be IPv6. Mark my words. We've outgrown what IP gives us... The mesh is the future.

  26. IP itself is hierarchical, that is the problem by coryking · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Nobody will adopt IPv6 because it is just a larger tree. It doesn't scale the way we are now using it. The way we are starting to use our network is peer-2-peer--dare I even say "cloud-like"?

    We dont care where the information comes from, only that it is the real deal. It could come from some data center, some server pool, a microwave, the cell phone, the car stereo, or your neighbors TV... doesn't matter. As long as I know the data is authentic, the source doesn't matter. That is exactly what bit-torrent is about. Only bit-torrent needs a tracker because of the deficenies of TCP/IP. If the network was all about data and how to get to it, rather than maintaining connections between two devices, we wouldn't need trackers or bit-torrent. And when you think about it, this is how it needs to be. Otherwise all the traffic has to aggrigate through larger and larger "central" links--down the tree and back up the tree to the other side. That is what we have now--it is the mindset of IP... you start and the edge node and work in than out to another edge... This doesn't scale and it gives a lot of power to the guys with the big pipes (i.e. your cable company or mega-ISP). Bit-torrent is really a mesh of interconnected goo. That is how it should be--only as a fundamental feature of the network. Focus on the data, not on end to end connections.

    IPv6 is more of the same. The fact that it is hierarchical is a bug, not a feature.

  27. Re:We need ipv4.5 by ion.simon.c · · Score: 2, Informative

    "IPv6 is a world without NAT". The hell it is. My internal routers don't get publicly routable IP addresses, even if I have to NAT back to IPv4.

    Hi. You're ignorant. Let me educate you.

    RFC3513 gives us Link-Local (fe80::/10) IPV6 addresses.
    http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3513#section-2.5.6
    These are addresses that *must not* be routed to the outside world.

    RFC4193 gives us Site-Local (fc00::/7) IPV6 addresses.
    http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4193#section-3
    These are addresses that you *may* choose to not route to the outside world.

    You don't need NAT. :)

  28. The problem is... by SecurityGuy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...they keep saying that in $SMALL_NUM years we'll be out of IP addresses, and $SMALL_NUM years goes by without incident. The sky persistently fails to fall.

    Call it the peril of poor predictions, but I'm now officially not worried because the claims have so often been false.