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Five Billionth Device About To Plug Into Internet
alphadogg writes "Sometime this month, the 5 billionth device will plug into the Internet. And in 10 years, that number will grow by more than a factor of four, according to IMS Research, which tracks the installed base of equipment that can access the Internet."
What's the maximum number of different MAC addresses again?
"The original IEEE 802 MAC address comes from the original Xerox Ethernet addressing scheme.[1] This 48-bit address space contains potentially 248 or 281,474,976,710,656 possible MAC addresses."
Oh okay, never mind then.
Sounds wrong to me. My IP address is only 127001 and I've not had this computer for very long.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The cheapest method is to not have physical hardware. Get a single box, plug in the CLICK software routing element for the kernel and the routing element to pipe onto a network simulator like NS-2 or NS-3. Have your simulated network contain a million virtual nodes, all with their own IP address. You now have a million nodes on your network and there's nothing even a simple portscan could do to tell you that they were not physical devices.
If you're really clever, have some of the terminal nodes on the virtual tree connect to a virtual machine running on the Linux box. For any one of those nodes, you can even demonstrate the existence of applications, login prompts, etc.
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)
Cue lots of "Congratulations, you are the 5 billionth device to connect to the internet, click here [and submit your personal data] to win a prize!!" flash banners...
5 billion devices is, let's face it, outside the capacity of an addressing scheme (IPv4) that originally only anticipated a shade over 4 billion possible devices. Why are we not moving over to IPv6 faster? I don't know much about networking and related issues; what are the big challenges for IPv6 going forward?
First, you've got the whole chicken-and-egg thing going on. There isn't a compelling reason for businesses to roll out IPv6 because most of the world is still on IPv4. Nobody will be visiting you v6 website. There isn't a compelling reason for ISPs to roll out IPv6 because most of the businesses are still on v4. There are no v6 websites to visit. Nobody wants to go first.
Then you've got some very real technical hurdles... New software and hardware requirements. Patches, upgrades. All that good stuff. And right now that looks like an awful lot of work for relatively little benefit. Legacy hardware that might not be upgrade-able.
Plus, right now, NAT pretty much works. Yes, I know, it's an ugly hack... But it works. It's hard to tell somebody that you really need to spend tons of time/effort/money switching things over to IPv6 when they're currently able to do everything they need to.
You've also got some weird psychological resistance to IPv6 addressing. Folks (even IT people) freak out when they see all those hex digits.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Find your old PCs, install some dialup software (like NetZero)*, and give it away to anyone who does not have a computer. That's how I got my brother, then my niece, then a poor neighbor online. So +3 additional devices. If all the geeks did this with old PCs or laptops, we could add several million internet devices within a year.
*
*If they have DSL, use that instead.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You know, if you aim low you'll certainly succeed.
(Generally if you are going to use the phrase "there's nothing even can do", then should be something powerful. Such as "my plan is coming to fruition and there is nothing Superman can do to stop me." Contrast that with "my plan is coming to fruition and there is nothing two week old infant can do to stop me.")