Slashdot Mirror
Can Large Scale NAT Save IPv4?
Julie188 writes "The sales pitch was that IPv6, with its zillions of new IP addresses, would eliminate the need for network address translation altogether. But Jeff Doyle, one of the guys who literally wrote the book on IPv6, suggests that not only will NAT be needed, but it will be needed to save IPv4 at the tipping point of IPv6 adoption. 'I've written previously that as we make the slow — and long overdue — transition from IPv4 to IPv6, we will soon be stuck with an awkward interim period in which the only new globally routable addresses we can get are IPv6, but most public content we want to reach is still IPv4. Large Scale NAT (LSN, also known as Carrier Grade NAT or CGN) is an essential tool for stretching a service provider's public IPv4 address space during this transitional period.'"
Of course it could fit most people needs who, by the way, don't even know what having a unique IPv4 address means, forget about knowing what a fixed IP address is. My only concerns would be towards people hosting services, even if they only host a gaming server.
Before getting a fixed IP address, I remember using services like dyndns before I setup my own private dyndns server on a fixed IP address server that I had access to. I could always reach my system even if it changed address every 6 hours on the first dialup provider I registered to back then.
So yes, it could, my only concerns is that it may cause prices to have a unique address or a fixed address to rise.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Stop the madness. Give us ip6. We (as a society) would gain so many productive hours without NAT and the shit that comes with it. (Portforwarding etc). We have the technology ready to go and give everything it's unique ip. Can we please use that tech? It's not like it's high-tech or to new to be implemented by now.
You know... you really should upgrade your toaster.
at work we use NAT behind a whole public class B and it work great. But as a customer I would not put up with it. I want to act as a server not only a dumb host. So please stop the carrier grade nating madness.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Probably because he doesn't own the infrastructure. The problem is that in the US we heavily subsidized the industry, but didn't require them to really do anything to deserve the money. We didn't require neutrality, we didn't require them to keep building out broad band, or enhance the speeds in urban areas either.
Considering that ultimately they're using public resources to provide a service, I do think they owe us at least something in exchange for making profits using our right of way or airwaves.
It has never been "this year", but it *will* be in the next two years, probably next year, at the Registry level. Existing ISPs already have their pools of addresses they can continue using for sometime longer until those are depleted, and yes, NAT has kept this from happening a lot sooner, but lets not make the mistake the US did with the metric system and keep an archaic and broken system in place when life is so much easier (after the transition anyhow) if we switch.
Most P2P protocols have at least some trouble working with local NAT. If it was implemented on a large scale there might be a few more problems, and it certainly gives ISP's (the ones running the NAT) more control over the traffic they route. I wonder how quickly the RIAA and friends will pick up on that and start pushing for NAT instead of IPv6...
Large scale or ISP wide NAT is part of the solution. It will not "save" IPv4, whatever that means. It will make it possible to transition to IPv6 and still access all the old sites, that have not yet made the transition.
It is not really important that slashdot.org is still IPv4 only. You can access it just fine. And slashdot.org has no need to access you.
You use IPv6 in all the cases where you wanted that nice static IPv4 address before: When running peer to peer software. Setting up your small hobby server. Using direct peer to peer VoIP. And so on.
All the consumer ISPs will transition soon enough during the next few years. We will fairly quickly be able to assume consumers will in fact be able to access IPv6 only sites. For the next 10 years you can also assume consumers will be able to access IPv4 only sites - is anyone really surprised by that?
If all your gaming friends got IPv6, playing on your private IPv6 only game server - what do you care that some backwards dialup only ISP, in a country you never heard of, still is IPv4 only?
There are only 65536 port numbers, so there is only so thin that you can spread a single IP address. Remember that some clients open many ports. There are also questions of reuse; you can't simply cram the 65536 space close to full. When a TCP connection terminates, you don't want to start reusing the port number right away. It's tricky.
People are not going to be happy to be NAT ed. Will large scale NAT also come with large scale port forwarding? Large scale UPnP? What do you do about port number abuses?
Dynamic DNS goes out the window. People can't have a quasi static IP any more with their own port 80, port 22, port 25 mail server or whatever.
If I were to be NATed, I would not want to pay more than 5 dollars a month for such a crippled connection, regardless of bandwidth. So you will automatically have to sell the service to ten subscribers like me instead of just one to make the same revenue.
As long as I can get non-NAT-ted service somewhere, than that is where I will be.
NAT == CRIPPLED_INTERNET. Impose that next door. Next city. Next country. NIMBY: not in my backyard.
And remember that if EVERYONE is NATted, then nobody can talk to anyone. Because you have to connect somewhere to use the Internet. That means resolving DNS to some IP address.
To reach a DNS server you need an IP address. So the DNS server can't be NATed. That DNS server has to hand you the IP address of a host such as a web server. Are all web servers going to be NAT ed? That means they can't be all on port 80 any more. You are looking at redirects! There will have to be a port 80 service sitting on those NAT nodes, which will intercept web traffic, parse the HTTP request and forward to the appropriate node behind the NAT.
Or else DNS will have to be re-architected so that it returns not only IP's but port numbers, so when you go to www.somewhere.com, it resolves to x.y.z.w:n, and the host x.y.z.w has port n forwarded to the right server.
Good grief, and good luck with that.
Because there will literally be mountains of eWaste and headaches galore? How many of the home routers sold in the past 5 years even support IPv6? I don't think any of the consumer grade stuff does. That means we will have to replace just about every router in every home or have some sort of IPv6 to IPv4 bridge built into every modem in the country, again not cheap.
Whether we like it or not, there is a reason why IPv4 has lasted so long. It is a mature tech that everyone knows how to fix. IPv6 is gonna be a nightmare for probably 5 or 6 years and it really ain't gonna be fun trying to fix the mess. So yeah, I can see them stretching out IPv4 for as long as humanly possible, simply because the transition costs are gonna be insane.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Add to this how many more NAT workarounds we will need to have in software. We already have to deal with NAT busting solutions, now we will have to deal with double NAT busting solutions. Believe me, NAT was a workaround to a limitation and we shouldn't be using this workaround at any more levels than necessary.
There is only so much duct tape you can use before it is time to just accept you will have to install the new solution.
If IPv6 appears so hard, its because people keep on waiting for someone else to take the plunge. If you are an IT professional, then is should be your business to understand and embrace IPv6, whether that is in your network or in your software. If your issue is with your router not supporting IPv6, then make some noise to your router's manufacturer, install a third-party firmware or go with a company already offering an IPv6 capable router.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Joke aside, my network printers don't support IPv6, my 802.11 access point doesn't support IPv6, my SIP phone doesn't support IPv6, my ADSL modem/router doesn't support IPv6.
Tell me again, how is this transition supposed to work if a good 50% of equipment doesn't support IPv6?
Even if all these devices actually did support IPv6, why would I want them on publicly accessible IP addresses? The truth is, IPv6 hasn't taken off because really there is no huge need for it. Private networks (and there is gobs of IP space for those) are the norm, and in 90% of cases are more than acceptable with a device doing NAT to the rest of the world.
There is nothing stopping people having both public and private IPs (like I have) for things that don't behave behind NAT. That is unless your ISP won't give you addresses....
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
http://www.ipv6porn.co.nz/ is giving away free porn to anybody who can access it with an ipv6 address
This would be great for pirates, who the hell would the MPAA and RIAA sue if everybody in one region shared a single IP#?
I don't know where you have been getting your predictions. It is pretty certain that IANA is going to run out of space about the middle of next year.
We have 14 /8's left in the IANA free pool, we use up almost 2 /8's every month.
Are you betting on the ipv4 space usage magically decreasing ( right when everyone will start freaking out about getting their last allocations )?
I am a lawyer and this constitutes legal advice and I shall indemnify you against any losses arising from taking it.
Because there will literally be mountains of eWaste and headaches galore? How many of the home routers sold in the past 5 years even support IPv6? I don't think any of the consumer grade stuff does. That means we will have to replace just about every router in every home or have some sort of IPv6 to IPv4 bridge built into every modem in the country, again not cheap.
Whether we like it or not, there is a reason why IPv4 has lasted so long. It is a mature tech that everyone knows how to fix. IPv6 is gonna be a nightmare for probably 5 or 6 years and it really ain't gonna be fun trying to fix the mess. So yeah, I can see them stretching out IPv4 for as long as humanly possible, simply because the transition costs are gonna be insane.
You can't get better evidence of the incompetence of government than this. There's a dwindling resource that will run out in just a couple of years, impacts practically every person in every OECD country, yet have you heard of even one government agency, in any country, that is mandating IPv6 for consumer grade gear to force the vendors to solve the problem before it becomes critical? Of course not! That would require foresight and competence. About the only IPv6 push I'm hearing is that for government tenders in the US, IPv6 support is required, but that does nothing to solve the problem of hundreds of millions of home routers that are IPv4 only.
No government on Earth has even bothered to lift a finger to solve a well known, easily predicted problem with a ready and tested solution that would cost the government no money whatsoever (it's just legislation!). Given that, now picture the level of competence you'd get from the same bunch of idiots when tasked with solving much bigger issues like global warming, peak oil, or overpopulation. Issues like that won't be critical for decades, have no obvious solution, and all possible solutions are expected to cost trillions. I can only imagine the level of incompetence that will no doubt ensue...
slashdot.org has no need to access you.
As far as I know, Slashdot does a short port scan on your IPv4 address when you preview or post a comment in order to make sure that your machine isn't an open proxy that might be abused for vandalism. That's why your first preview of the day from a given machine is so slow: it has to wait for the connections to time out.
You use IPv6 in all the cases where you wanted that nice static IPv4 address before: When running peer to peer software. Setting up your small hobby server.
In other words, things that cable and phone companies don't really want customers on the residential plan doing in the first place, as explained in the terms of service.
If all your gaming friends got IPv6, playing on your private IPv6 only game server
By the time that happens in several years, you may have grown out of online gaming. Which of the current video game consoles supports IPv6?
Are you betting on the ipv4 space usage magically decreasing ( right when everyone will start freaking out about getting their last allocations )?
No no, there is always more to be found. That link of yours only show the _known_ reserves of addresses. They continue to find new fields of IP addresses and existing fields continue to find more than initially expected. This "peak IP" is never going to happen and you know it!
Haven't you heard? The IAB has known for decades that the default-free zone is continually making new IPv4 addresses as a natural function of the BGP protocol. The reason you've never heard about it is the evil telecom companies control the media and the NRO, and they don't want you to know the truth.
jhw
1. Is Comcast going to give me unlimited IPv6 addresses? How will that work through my router? Do I now need to announce every device to Comcast?
You get a subnet, and your router routes the whole subnet. Just like with IPv4, coincidentally.
NAT makes for a pretty good firewall. I have Linux and Mac machines, and consumer devices, behind my current NAT router. With NAT and SPI, I have it pretty good.
As opposed to having a firewall, instead of having a firewall?
Hey, I understand the need for IPv6. I guess I just don't want to lose what NAT offers.
Like what? Nothing what you stated had anything to do with NAT as such.
You're right. NAT makes a pretty good firewall. But you know what makes an even better firewall? A FIREWALL.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
ISPs are licking their chops for this. They want to roll out NAT for all default consumer grade ISP connections. It solves problems with scarcity, they profit from scarcity (want public IP? You pay extra for it), and it will jack with routing of P2P data and thus cut down on the leeches. It's a WIN-WIN-WIN for the Telco and cable companies.
If you guys think IP6 will be adopted, just wait till they find huge money in artificial scarcity of IP4 blocks. There will be no where to run and escape it! Unless you pay that premium...
Life is not for the lazy.
@CRC'99 all my equipment (except maybe the cable modem) support #ipv6. stop using #oldshit
Ironically, if you want an IPv6 internet, the cable modem needs IPv6 support more than the other stuff he mentioned.
Because they're globally unique. You'll never have a conflict of address when you start doing business with other entities with large networks or because the hotel just so happens to be using the same private addresses as a network you're trying to make a VPN connection to from your laptop.
And just because they're public addresses doesn't mean they're publicly accessible.