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There Is No Plan B, the Ugly Transition To IPv6
An anonymous reader writes "The Internet is running out of IPv4 addresses — not at some point in the future, but right now. But the only solution to the problem, IPv6, is just now really starting to be deployed. That's why we're all in for some tough times ahead."
Maybe we should reclaim some of AOL's massive block of addresses. It would help a little in the short run. And they sure aren't using them.
What? We're running out of IPv4 addresses? Why are we only learning this NOW? This is an outrage! Why haven't tech sites told us about this problem sooner...say, several times a year?
Why is it that problems never seem to get corrected until they are well and truly disastrous in scope.
Nobody cares, nor needs to, except the ISP's and hosting outfits. If they provide a nice 6-4 proxy (or whichever way around it is), 99.999% of users can continue doing everything they normally do. I've done it on several of my machines in the past, been in the IPv6 net and browsed IPv6 websites to confirm it, and I never once had to touch my IPv4 config or do anything too fancy - certainly nothing that an ISP couldn't do transparently from their side of the net.
It's an issue if you're hosting websites, because then your site needs to be accessible from the IPv6 addresses, but that's an issue for the hosters, most of the biggest of which are managed hosting outfits that can switch that on overnight if they haven't already - if they are allocating static IPv4 addresses, it's just a matter of translating and passing on IPv6 requests for a recognised IPv4 equivalent address to an internal IPv4 network. The root DNS servers are running IPv6 already, etc. There's absolutely nothing to stop this just working on most people's machines today and, no, not every machine needs to upgrade to IPv6 addressing in order to do that. In fact, if anything, suggesting that internal business networks suddenly become IPv6 addressable is the most stupid suggestion in the history of the world - most places just want an "4-6 convertor" in layman's terms and they'll tick along quite nicely on their internal 10, 176, and 192's without caring. Most places would run absolutely fine, the only place it matters is the extreme borders of the Internet.
People don't run IPv6 not because of any of those reasons in the article but because a) they haven't heard of it, b) ISP's don't support it or won't do it for them automatically and c) a lot of OS's never come preconfigured to use IPv6 if it's available. Oh, and of course, d) nobody will care until their IP address allocation requests start getting turned down.
It's not a big deal, it's not going to kill NAT's and 30 years from now there will STILL be local networks, internal VoIP systems, print-servers and whatever else using IPv4 addressing because it's a damn sight easier to leave a working config alone than to upgrade/replace every bit of hardware that touches IP. I can use IPv6 today. There's absolutely no need to until every link in the chain supports it and that's still YEARS away even with US government backing. And even then, IPv4 isn't going anywhere - it's just being superceded. It's like saying that all SSH servers have to switch to SSH2, or all wireless LAN's to 802.11n - it'll happen, and a little nudge won't hurt, but overall people just don't care enough for the majority of cases and their old stuff will still work on IPv4 in 20-30 years time if it's still operational.
Tell me when even 5% of the websites that I use regularly are available over IPv6 and I'll look at setting up my VPS to do the same.
And at every job I've worked in the past 5 years, management has completely had their head in the sand about it. :-( And none of the developers understood enough about IPv6 to push in an even faintly credible way. :-(
I've been running IPv6 on my home network since about 2002. It's just not that hard. In fact, it's a lot easier than running IPv4. My IPv4 home network has a seriously contorted configuration because of the constrained addressing. When I wasn't even given a block of IPs but instead given X number of individual IP addresses it was even worse. My IPv6 network, OTOH, is configured quite simply and obviously.
OTOH, even though I've had an IPv6 DNS server for ages, my stupid registrar STILL does not support IPv6 glue records. It's ridiculous. The standard has been stable enough to do something like that for at least 3-4 years now. I just want to strangle them.
Last I checked, we only have about 200 days before ARIN stops being able to hand out new IPv4 addresses. It's around 7 months. After that, hosts start appearing on the Internet that only have IPv6 addresses. The connectivity breakage will be slow, subtle and inexorable. I bet it takes the tech industry at least another 5 or 6 years before they have to fix the problem or not have customers, and I bet it won't be fixed before then. So very very stupid.
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Just force all porn sites on the internet to be accessible from IPv6 addresses only.
Serious question. I already have an IPv6 address, why doesn't Slashdot have one?
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
So, what are the best ways to profit from this crisis?
Hoarding IP addresses is an obvious way, but that market seems pretty crowded already.
Actually you might say we've been running out of them since the moment the first one was assigned...
While that might have been a better design, smarter people than me decided it wasn't practical to approach it that way
The problem with the approach is that it's very difficult to do in a way that doesn't break backwards compatibility, and if you're going to break compatibility then you may as well fix other things at the same time.
One option, for example, might have been to get rid of the port field as a fixed length and make network, machine, and port number all combined in the same way that network and machine addresses are now. This would let you have, for example, 256 ports per machine while getting 256 times as many IP addresses, or doubling the available addresses at the cost of only having 32K ports per machine. Only the routers at the very last hope would need any modification for this to work. Since you only need a unique port for each app that connects to the Internet (you can reuse ports, as long as the remote end is different), 2^16 is a lot more than most machines need, and losing 3-4 bits from the port field would be a lot more convenient than NAT for a lot of home users.
Of course, that would still not be a good long-term solution. After a little while, you'd end up with the port field being shortened so much that people would complain. You'd also have the problem that you actually use the variable-length port field, every machine on your local segment would need an upgraded network stack, and protocols that expected to be able to use high port numbers would have serious problems.
The effort in deploying such a solution would only be slightly lower than the effort of deploying IPv6 and it would be a significantly inferior long-term fix.
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One issue with NAT is the difficulty in running a server. I like being able to ssh to my home computer when I am at work; but behind NAT, that becomes more difficult (not impossible, just more difficult).
Palm trees and 8
It's the unnecessary use of IPv6 on private networks.
what limitations? my iphone is on NAT. what will IPV6 allow me to do on it that i can't do now
The original idea of the Internet was a network of peers. Every address was globally routable, and any machine could host content.
There are obvious security issues with this... Which is why we've got firewalls... But there wasn't really anything standing in the way of you hosting a game server, or website, or whatever on your home machine.
NAT now stands in the way of you doing this. NAT has destroyed the whole "network of peers" thing.
NAT is fine for simply consuming content. For your iPhone, for example, I doubt if it's an issue. And if you're just loading up random web pages at home, or connecting to WoW, or whatever - you'll be fine.
But if you want to host a web page at home you're going to have to not just open the ports in your firewall, but forward the traffic from your outside IP to the inside IP. And if you want a second box to serve up a web page too? Too bad. You only get one port 80 per IP address, and you've only got one globally routable IP address.
Again, if all you're doing is consuming, this isn't all that much of a problem. But then you aren't a peer, either.
Where this starts to be more of an issue is with various devices that we now want to be able to communicate with remotely. It's becoming more and more common for people to want to remote into home computers. Or maybe program a DVR remotely. Or maybe some utility company wants to be able to check your electric/water meter remotely.
Being able to host your own content is becoming more important, not less. And shoving everything behind NAT is becoming more of a problem, not less.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
I'll never switch to IPv6 with its cold, digital precision rendering of data. The lower resolution of IPv4 just provides a better rendition of old favorites like slashdot, to my eyes anyway. Sure, there's some noise, some clicks and pops, but nothing matches wikipedia seen through a nice tube monitor.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Basically, this is what is going to happen:
Some ISP somewhere with a /20 is going to project that in 6 months time they will be out of IPs, /20.
and it's going to be too expensive to buy another
So they are going to buy some Cisco-hardware-NAT-appliance and say to their customers: "look here,
you are all on NAT from now on, if you want a real IP you pay extra."
This NAT box will NAT a /20 to a /24 of temp addresses+ports. It will be plug-n-play and
easier than setting up IPv6.
99.9% of customers won't read the announcement and won't notice. They are all NATing through
their DSL modems anyway, and this Cisco equipment will have hacks for all those special
apps that need it to work behind double NATing.
And no one will ever think of switching to IPv6
-paul
The problem with the approach is that it's very difficult to do in a way that doesn't break backwards compatibility, and if you're going to break compatibility then you may as well fix other things at the same time.
Didn't have to be that way. We could have had an IPv5 with all the addresses and none of the backwards compatibility issues if not for special interests in the IETF:
http://bill.herrin.us/network/ipxl.html
Gets my vote for IPv7...
Assuming you don't want to use VNC, VoIP, IM file transfers, bittorrent, access your home DVR remotely... sure, it's workable! It's as workable as a backup to the Internet as candles are a backup to electricity.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Y2K was only a minor issue BECAUSE every programmer and their cousin was busy fixing the bugs for several years. A few million man-hours and workarounds from hell later, you'd expect things to function fine. There were vendors that ignored the issue and it is those vendors that reported problems in 2000. It is THOSE examples you should look at, because THAT is what your world would have been had the rest of us not fixed things for you. Be grateful, wretch, that we bothered. Because next time we might not. And there is NOTHING you can do or say to change that.
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)