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At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses
An anonymous reader excerpts from an interesting article at Ars Technica, which begins "There are 3,706,650,624 usable IPv4 addresses. On January 1, 2000, approximately 1,615 million (44 percent) were in use and 2,092 million were still available. Today, ten years later, 2,985 million addresses (81 percent) are in use, and 722 million are still free. In that time, the number of addresses used per year increased from 79 million in 2000 to 203 million in 2009. So it's a near certainty that before Barack Obama vacates the White House, we'll be out of IPv4 address[es]. (Even if he doesn't get re-elected.)"
I just helped out a friend who lives in a remote rural section outside of Chicago. I tried for years and years to get her lit up on decent broadband service.
Finally, we got a relay from a WiMAX provider --
When I went to connect her broadband with a Cisco router - I discovered that she was assigned a FRIGGIN /27 of public numbers!! (i.e. she now personally burns 32 usefull IPV4's)
I was gonna call their support ... but why bother?
You never know if she's gonna need 30+ public ip numbers right? Just because she lives alone - she may get many friends real soon!
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I live in one of the most tech-focused parts of the country (downtown San Francisco) and as far as I can tell there's no way for a normal consumer to order native (i.e. not tunneled) IPv6 here.
When I moved to my current apartment in 2004 I specifically went with Speakeasy because they were talking about rolling out IPv6 to customers. Over 5 years later, those plans are still stalled as far as I can tell. None of the other providers seem to be even making a peep about it. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me - I'd love to switch to an IPv6-capable provider.
I've pretty much concluded that IPv6 just isn't going to happen -- instead providers will just force all of us normal people into shared IP addresses. From a technical perspective this isn't hard to do: just move the software that's currently running in your home NAT router onto the DSLAM and only provide a NATed view. For the ISPs there's no downside to this since not only can they avoid rolling out IPv6, it means they have complete control of your network connection.
I bet in 10 years we still won't have IPv6 in our homes, and the idea of having your own IP address (even a dynamically allocated one) will just be a memory. It's a shame.
Do you think the current owners are hanging onto their address spaces out of pure spite? If they rely on the Internet to do business, this crisis hurts them more than anybody.
This mess happened because of the simplistic addressing schemes that were implemented without taking into account the explosive growth of the Internet. One result is that that some early adopters ended up with Class A networks (16 million addresses) because they needed more than the 64 thousand addresses in a Class B network. Only one Class A space belongs to a university (MIT). (There used to be two, but Stanford gave its IP space back.) Other owners include Halliburton, Apple, IBM, and Xerox PARC. HP has two, counting the one that was originally issued to DEC. DoD has eight.
Reassigning all these addresses would be a logistical nightmare, because you're changing the basic logic of network routing. Imagine all the routers that would have to be reprogrammed or replaced, and the expensive down time that would result. Much more cost effective to just go to IPv6 already. Plus there are other features of IPv6 we really, really need.
Except that nobody's doing it. I used to work at Sun, where I kept suggesting that our embedded lights-out management system (all Sun servers have them) start supporting IPv6. The answer I always got was, "customers aren't asking for it." Which means that everybody is putting off this problem until the last minute. As usual.
There are so many ways IPv6 remains broken and too many of the people with influence can tend to say 'working as designed'.
I know that's controversial, so I'll enumerate my pain points:
-DHCPv6 DUID is a pain to 'pre-provision'. When any operating system or firmware instance dhcpv6 for the first time, it sends out something that you'll never know what it would be ahead of time. In 99% of cases, the DUID is a generated value at 'OS Install time' that is used only for that specific OS, and a reinstall or livecd boot will change it out completely. stateless boot, multi-boot systems and multi-stage booting (i.e. pxe -> os) cannot hold together a coherent identity because DHCPv6 is explicitly designed not to do that. Binding by MAC is considered 'evil', but it has been the strategy used for ages. I wouldn't mind so much if DUID was commonly implemented as a value retrieved from motherboard firmware tables, but no one is stepping up to drive that behavior in a spec visible to all parties.
No PXE/bootp boot. I believe they are trying to reinvent, from scratch the boot design from IPv4, and are nearing completion. I fear the extent to which the baby has been tossed out with the bathwater (i.e. 'root-path' was dropped and no one has pulled it into dhcpv6).
Some standards are missing the capability to operate in IPv6. I.e. IPMI hase some IPv4 specific portions of the standard without IPv6 capable equivalents.
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