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."

Comments

Reclaim Some?

[d0nster]

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.

Re:Reclaim Some?

[Carewolf]

kidding aside, I'd be interested to know what the actual Class A block utilization numbers look like.

True, that is obligatory. Map of the Internet

Re:Reclaim Some?

[kaptink]

I've wondered why this hasnt been done sooner. There are some relatively small groups out there with class A blocks (16.7m) still. Make those who own these blocks justify their use. I believe back when the internet was just a wee bub, IP addresses were handed out to anyone who wanted them. And some companies just took huge chunks.

Have a look at this list for starters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks or http://abhishek.nagar.me/content/class-ip-address-and-owners

Some organizations, such as Stanford University, formerly using 36.0.0.0/8, have returned their allocated block to assist in the delay of the exhaustion of addresses. Perhaps some others could follow in their steps.

Re:Reclaim Some?

[jon787]

ICANN considered this option, but decided that it didn't extend the deadline out far enough to be worth the costs.

http://blog.icann.org/2008/02/recovering-ipv4-address-space/

Re:Reclaim Some?

[geekoid]

"which thanks to compression looks as fast as 500k DSL"

hahaha, no.

Why didn't somebody tell us?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Procrastination

[dmgxmichael]

Why is it that problems never seem to get corrected until they are well and truly disastrous in scope.

Re:Procrastination

[oldspewey]

Because by being insanely focused on quarterly results, our society rewards short-term thinking, and often actively punishes long-term thinking. In most (not all, but most) companies, if a system architect told his CTO
"we need to undertake a $X million project to transition our systems to IPv6. This is going to become a big deal in about 10 years time and we want to be on top of it,"
the CTO might or might not take the idea seriously. But even if the CTO did decide to bring the idea to the board for approval, he'd be shot down in seconds.
"You want to reduce shareholder profits by $X million to fix something that might become a problem in 10 years? Let's move on to the next item on the agenda shall we? And don't bring stupid ideas like this one to the table again in the future Bob. We need you focused on shareholder value."
.

Re:Procrastination

[hedwards]

That's why some of us advocate increasing the short term tax rate to something much higher than what we currently have and tailing off to what we've got now for long term capital gains. And pushing the holding period to 2 years or so. And cut the tax rate on dividends to the rate that people pay for capital gains.

The effect of that is to increase the holding period of an investment and discourage reckless speculation. People tend to forget that Enron produced far more winners than losers. The people who ended up holding the bag were a small fraction of the total number of people who invested in it.

It also has the upside of discouraging charlatans that practice technical analysis from screwing up the markets with their charts. Any practice which ignores what a business does to make money should be discouraged.

Re:Procrastination

[hjf]

Yes, all sounds good, until your ISP starts providing you with 1 private IP address for your home, with no way around it. Here in my city 1 of the ISPs does this, you get an address from the 10.0.0.0/8 range. If you need to poke a hole in the firewall for things like IM file transfer or webcam, any kind of P2P, SIP, SSH/remote desktop/vnc into your home machine, etc... guess what? you're out of luck. Change ISPs? Sure, until the other ISPs are forced to do the same. What are we going to do then?

And that's what we're going to get. I simply don't see the point of mentioning NAT as a near-term temporary solution: it ALREADY is doing that. Guess what? Companies don't give their desktops public IPv4 addresses anymore, they haven't done that in several years now, so I don't see what your point is. You're just in denial and being too optimistic.

I wonder why no one mentions v4 addresses are "lost in routing". Take for example an ISP here, they used to give you a full /24 (legacy CLASS C, and let me stop here for a bit: NOT EVERY ASSIGNMENT IN THE NET IS A, B or C. Only script kiddies dreaming of "T3" "pipes" talk about "class C" and "ping of death", get over it! It's 2010 already. OK, back to my point). So they used to give you a /24. For every 256 addresses on a /24, the .0 and .255 are usually not usable, and the .1 is usually the CPE router. But now they don't give out a /24 anymore, unless you specifically state why you need such a large space. So they give out a /30. 8 addresses, again the first and last are unusable, and the first available is the CPE router. 3 out of 8 or 27% of the addresses are lost in routing.

Let me recap: NAT is not the solution, it's already there holding the internet like duct tape.

The solution is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Just force all porn sites on the internet to be accessible from IPv6 addresses only.

When is /. going to get an IPv6 address?

[avij]

Serious question. I already have an IPv6 address, why doesn't Slashdot have one?

Re:When is /. going to get an IPv6 address?

[gmueckl]

heise.de, a major German tech news site ran a test for precicely that reason about two weeks ago: they added an AAAA to heise.de in addition the normal AA record. Out of the thousands of visitors they have each day less than 10 were unable to reach that site in that configuration and wrote in about their problems and only one turned out to be unfixable because of a router misconfiguration somewhere else in the network. Since they advertised their test weeks ahead and asked users to report any problems they might experience during the test, the number of complaints they received is pretty low. So the argument of mixed AA/AAAA records not working properly of users is luckily losing its credibility, it seems.

Re:The IPv6 nightmare begins with it's design...

[TheRaven64]

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.

The leading cause of smug is no longer hybrids.

[pak9rabid]

It's the unnecessary use of IPv6 on private networks.

Re:NAT

[Ephemeriis]

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.

Re:Plan B

[PitaBred]

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.

Re:May are reporting doom scenarios

[jd]

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.