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Interop Returns 16 Million IPv4 Addresses
klapaucjusz writes "Every discussion about IPv4 address exhaustion prompts comments about whether Apple (or MIT, or UCB, or whoever) needs all of those addresses. Interop has set the example by returning 16 million IPv4 addresses to the ARIN pool, extending the IPv4 address exhaustion deadline by a whole month."
How long are they going to keep this up for? Jeez.
Please, just let it run out already.
Problem solved!
IP ADDRESS MONSTER HUNGRY!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Nortel that is now nothing but a bankrupt shell has another 16 million.
Who are you, the owner of rackspace?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Why didn't they wait until the supply/demand curves pushed the price of an IP into the dollar or more range? They could have turned their class A into tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars...
So because NAT happens to work for you, and your rather basic needs, we should delay the inevitable instead of fixing the fundamental underlying problem.
Got it.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Right, only criminals need a globally visible IP address for their personal computers, so that they can pirate stuff. As long as you only ever make connections to corporate-owned servers like a good little law-abiding citizen, NAT won't hurt you a bit.
ARIN is neither the cause, nor the solution. ARIN is a community organization, so their policies are only what the greater ARIN community (ie, the present IP space users) ask for. Until the ARIN community asks for market-cost based allocation, ARIN won't do it. The converse is also true: the reason ARIN *isn't* using a market-cost based allocation system is that the actual users of IP space don't want it to be that way.
I'm guessing the best place to free up IP4 blocks is with the cell phone industry. They could roll out IP6 and eventually drop IP4 depending on the model of your cell phone (dual IP schemes in place for the transition). That industry changes so rapidly anyways and has the largest consumer share over the personal computer. Plus, cell phone devices centrally managed for the most part anyways. Shouldn't be too difficult of a task. At least, not nearly as difficult as flipping home users and SMBs over to IP6 in the same amount of time.
Life is not for the lazy.
Yesterday I was cleaning out my cupboard filled with old computer crap and found 16 million IPs. They are on a 5 1/4" floppy. Should I just mail it to ARIN?
Internet addresses are more leased than sold. The agencies in control let you use them, they don't give you a deed you get to keep forever. As a practical matter they belong to you because they don't want to cause trouble, but if push comes to shove, addresses can be taken back without compensation.
That may be part of the thought with this. Not only is it altruistic and makes you look good but they may be worried it becomes mandatory later. They worry maybe IANA says "Guess what? We are taking back that block, you've got 1 month to renumber," and it is a big hurry, rather than just doing it and then being in the clear.
So because NAT happens to work for you, and your rather basic needs, we should delay the inevitable instead of fixing the fundamental underlying problem.
Got it.
Yes, well, you just described civilization.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If you don't understand the rather complex issues in converting everything over to IPv6, you might want to look in to it. On every level there are issues that have to be addressed. Some of them just cost money, some of them take work, etc.
So a simple example, but a big issue, is that of high end routers. They don't do routing in software, it isn't like they have a general purpose CPU that handles all the routing. They have one, but it is limited in power and is just for control. The routing itself is handled by ASICs. That is for speed reasons, only way to get data around that fast. Like all ASICs they do only what they were designed for. Ok well that means you have have a bigass router that can't handle IPv6. Sure technically you can upgrade the software and turn it on, but that hits the CPU. If anything more than a small amount of flows starts happening, the router crashes. You have to get a new router, that can do IPv6. Fine and well, but that costs a lot of money. These can be 7-8 figure devices. You don't just run out and buy all new ones all the time.
There are also software issues. Not everything handles IPv6 well. A major stalling point is Windows XP. It can have IPv6 added to it, but it doesn't support it by default. No problem on Vista and 7, but there's still a good amount of XP systems floating about. That'll change with time, but right now if ISPs just go IPv6 and fuck over their XP customers, well people get mad.
IPv6 is just going to be a gradual thing. Slowly more and more things will support it, it'll be enabled in more and more places. There isn't going to be a "We stop using IPv4 now and switch to IPv6 now," day, it'll just be a case that IPv6 will get rolled out everywhere. As that happens, you'll start to see IPV6 only services, or cheaper IPv6 services. Your ISP may offer you as many IPv6 addresses as you'd like to have for no cost, or IPv4 addresses at $10/month. Cheaper shared webhosts may do dedicated IPv6 addresses per site, but only one IPv4 address per server. As time goes on, people will probably stop bothering with the IPv4 stuff. New OSes may ship with it turned off by default, and eventually without it at all.
It will take time though. That is the only way it'll happen. Only in the fantasy world of geeks can it just be a switch that gets flipped tomorrow and everyone changes over.
Number Authorities:
Once you run out of IP allocations to hand out (which you have done at an incredible pace), you have two solutions:
A) Force everyone onto IPv6 before they are ready
B) Acknowledge that there is significant underutilisation of existing resources, and that supply/demand are going to encourage the rise of secondary markets.
IPs are a sometimes food...
Given that humans are the fundamental underlying problem, there doesn't seem to be a lot of support for getting rid of them.
Support SETI@home
if IP allocation were governed for market forces instead of some dudes that demand paperwork and some justification...
What are you talking about? IP allocat is governed by market forces.
Who do YOU think ARIN is?
Hint: ARIN is an industry organization whose members are the ISPs and resource holders in North America.
Also, without ISPs all over the world recognizing ARIN's allocations, ARIN has no power of enforcement of its wishes, it simply does what its officers elected by the broader community of ISPs agree that they want ARIN to do.
.4% And a several percent boost to the free amount.
We need a hybrid system maybe ipv6 outside ipv4 inside to make it easier to move over and less the cost of having to buy new printers, wifi AP's, home media stuff , and more.
Do you real want a printer to have a global IP? do you want buy a newer printer / copiers just for IPv6? the high end ones cost alot.
Remember back when all this was set up the Internet was a toy for academic institutions and so on. The idea of 4 billion computers in the world was unthinkable. So they handed shit out real cheap. One time cost kind of thing, and the big orgs that got on first got 16 million. Nobody thought this was a problem, nobody needed it. The whole reason for a Class A was just to let you subnet up your network to a high degree easily.
Maybe they will start charging or doing something else to put the pressure on but I bet not. You might notice that the "OMG IPv4 is runs outs!!!111" story hits Slashdot a lot, and has been for like a decade. Not only are we coming up with new creative ways to deal with it (classless routing, NAT, etc) but it just isn't as big a deal as it is made out to be. It isn't a thing of we run out and suddenly nobody new can get on the Internet, it is that there are no new assignments to give out, so people will have to make do with what is out there. That can mean more NAT, renumbering, all sorts of shit like that.
For example the university I work at has a private internally routed IP space. It is one of the reserved, "non-routable" spaces like what you see behind a NAT. However internal to campus, it is routed normally. So you can put printers and shit like that on it. Keeps down the usage of public IPs, but computers on campus can talk to those IPs as normal.
Also IPv6 is slowly growing. A big step was with Windows Vista. Windows is still the most used OS, and is likely to stay that way. Windows Vista ships with extremely good IPv6 support and it is turned on by default. Same with Windows 7, of course, Means more and more end users have IPv6 support on their systems. That means a switch over is much easier. Heck you might not even know it. On our domain all the IPv6 enabled systems automatically register their AAAA record as well as their A record. When you request another computer, you don't even know which one is being used to talk to it.
IANA may not have to do anything in the end. IPv6 may slowly rise as IPv4 fades away and there may never be any real problems do to an IPv4 shortage.
The answer is: they DON'T. Nor does Halliburton, Eli Lilly, Prudential Insurance (!!!), or Ford. In fact, they've done a great job of proving they don't, by running out and securing a number of class B address spaces in other class A/B octets when they should have just given out subnets of their existing Class A.
Even HP, Apple, and IBM are standing on shaky ground; they're international corporations whose primary business is at least somewhat internet related, but they still don't need 16 million addresses in one space.
Please help metamoderate.
Thus solving the problem once and for all!
Admittedly it was only a /24 (called a C-net by us geezers), but I had had it since about 1992. That was back in the days you could get a C-net for the asking, and a B-net (a /16 to you youngsters) could be had without too much whining.
I got a nice note back from ARIN saying:
As the popular quote says, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. 199.201.131.0/24 has been returned to the pool of available addresses - thanks!
I have ONE static IP from Comcast Business. This is great; I don't really need more than one, right? Well the problem is they've given me a routed subnet. So for me to get my one IP, they also have to waste these additional IPs:
1. The IP on the WAN side of the router, provided to it by DHCP.
2. Internal network subnet address.
3. The router's internal network address.
4. Internal network broadcast address.
Yes, that means for my ONE static IP, Comcast is wasting four more. I can't help wondering why they built their network this way, rather than simply assigning me the WAN side IP and making sure it doesn't change. But hey, that's Comcast for you.
Who knows how many millions of IPs are wasted through inefficient allocation this way. If I have a block of six IPs it would make administrative sense to do it this way but for one? Come on. :)
by default WOW uses P2P for updates there are other things like games and more that double or mass NATing can mess up.
There is some stuff like that. That is the basic idea of 6to4. Allows IPv6 to be routed over IPv4.
In the case of printers what you might do is use print servers. If you have new desktops that are IPv6 only, due to lack of IPv4 addresses, you have your servers run IPv6 and IPv4 and your old printers run IPv4 only. Desktops communicate to the server, server to the printers, nobody ever notices a difference.
I suspect IPv4 will be around for a very long time, even after most things are IPv6.
This will not help in the long run, we must all switch to IPv6 immediately or the Internet(s) is going to die. In other news, the sky is about to fall on our head. I've been (ab)using IPv6 for a decade so I can scp stuff between boxen using DNS, and absolutely nothing has changed regarding global deployment during that period - and I doubt it ever will
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
return their 16M IPv4 addresses, just look at the map
http://xkcd.com/195/
HP, DEC, Ford, Xerox, Bell Labs, Apple, MIT, USPS, DuPont, IBM, General Electric, Boeing, Prudential, Eli Lily, Halliburton.
Why does plane, car, drug or chemical manufacturer or an insurance company need 16M publicly routable IP addresses?
I guess HP has now all the DEC IPs, so they have 32M, WTF!
Given that humans are the fundamental underlying problem, there doesn't seem to be a lot of support for getting rid of them.
Actually, there's plenty of support for that, we call them "missile silos".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Of course, ISPs and data centers should convert to IP6 first. But come client side, I still think cell phones should be converted. A much more doable task in comparison to home use and SMB offices.
If major ISPs deploy IPv6 then homes and SMB offices get it almost automagically these days. I use a he.net tunnel at home and radvd to share it. Everybody who connects to the lan gets a IPv6 addy. No problem. It works on GNU/Linux boxes, Windows boxes, Mac boxes, whatever. Most people visiting don't know and don't care, but it works. If your ISP gives you your pre-configured equipment and you connect to it and it hands you a IPv6 addy then 99% of end-users are all set and we're done. Actually getting ISPs to deploy is the hard part, end users are not.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
My printer (a ~$100 Cannon) actually does IPv6. My current router build does not. I'm not sure about my Xbox And the Windows XP computers might present a problem.
You do know that Y2K was (mostly) a yawn because of a massive push starting in '97 to be ready in time, right?
You also realize you can't just stuff servers behind NAT right? And an awful lot of apps like p2p and VoIP work a lot better without NAT?
Stupid fuckers could have made the protocols interactive, but no, they had to try to be clever and redesign the whole thing, so we will need to run dual stack for 5-10 years. No bugs gonna be there. They were just pissy because no one liked OSI CLNS . Which would be just as easy to switch over to, by the way. How many addressable addresses does IPX/SPX have? Lets Dual stack that instead, just to fuck them.
My only bitter pleasure will be watching microsoft networking melt down. Dynamic DNS? No way bitch, ip6 addresses handed out by the router. Of course they will just continue to cheat and use NetBui with a local global catolauge server, like they do now.
If anyone is wondering interop is 45.x.x.x
So you've just essentially proposed a solution which is almost exactly the same as IPv6 address scheme. Why do you think that your scheme isn't going to take a complete change of all equipment? because it uses a numbering system similar to IPv4?
IPV6 never caught on, like Windows Vista caught on. Better to wait for IPV7.
So what about Google, Microsoft, Apple, Rackspace, Amazon and the millions of other ISPs, Datacenters, Science stations such as the LHC, etc that all need publicly addressable computers in mass quantities?
It's easy to say that you don't need this and can happily live behind a NAT. That doesn't mean you represent the rest of the internet and it's millions of different use cases most of which do require the internet to work as it was designed.
"ARIN warns that Interop's return will not significantly extend the life of IPv4. ARIN continues to emphasize the need for all Internet stakeholders to adopt the next generation of Internet Protocol, IPv6."
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
IPv4 and IPv6 can peacefully coexist. They already do on many networks and you don't know it. As I noted in another post, in domains this already happens. If you have Windows Server 2008 or R2 and Vista or 7 they'll just start doing IPv6 by themselves. When I look at the DNS for our AD a lot of hosts have A and AAAA records. You don't even know which IP you are using when you key in their name to ask for them. We didn't set any of this up, the OSes just have IPv6 stacks on them enabled and it all happens.
Now not everything is nearly that simple, of course, but it demonstrates how easily they can coexist. So what is more likely to happen is that as IPv4 runs out and places hit in to limits, IPv6 will be used for new stuff. Maybe all new desktops are IPv6 only. Old equipment will keep operating on IPv4 and servers, that have both 4 and 6 can talk to both. As time goes on the IPv4 will become less and less important. Equipment will get replaced and eventually it'll be all IPv6, save for a smattering of legacy systems here and there.
It is not a situation where you have to switch from 4 to 6. You can do both at the same time, no problem.
We had security problems with Macs and IPv6. Part of our PCI-DSS compliance scanning services ran over the apple airport acting as the firewall ( yea don't go there ) and found every single ipv6 enabled device on the internal network.
We had to disable all IPv6 in the building and I 'accidentally' dropped the airport when reaching up to 'reconfigure' it.
My lack of adoption is my lack of confidence in an ipv6 firewall do a good job of blocking malicious attempts at access if everything has a publicly accessible IP. Have they designated private network ip blocks yet? Call me old school, but I like my NAT.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Depending on how it's done, such as putting the private address after the IP header, it would be possible to only require the machines/routers at each end of the connection to understand this new form of NAT, with a fallback to today's NAT. All the routers on the route wouldn't need to understand the extension.
SSC
So tack 32 more onto the existing working IPV4 technology. No need to change the INTERNET PROTOCOL so drastically. Just extend the address space of the currently working technology. Duh... Like it would be hard to add 4 bytes.
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
I think you just reinvented 6to4
They do it wrongly, they should have waited until the limit was reached, so all alarms would run off and force corps and ISP to implement IPV6... then after a few days/weeks they would give this block back, to easy the life late players and broken implementations
those ipv4 company blocks are the last safeguard we have, after that, the late players are cut off until they setup proper ipv6
Higuita
My services are all IPv6 enabled and I'm actually surprised that a good 5-10% of my traffic is in fact from IPv6 users.
What I would like to see if for big companies (thinking Google, Microsoft, Facebook) to offer some IPv6-only features/services. It doesn't have to be spectacular, just enough to cause consumers to be aware and "remind" their ISP's to have a look at this IPv6 thing.
You can definitly do that, no1 is stopping you. When IPv4 is not available anymore, does not mean you can't still use 192.168.0.0/16 on the inside. You can run IPX if you like.
You can even still use the IPv4-addresses assigned to you. But you might need to add IPv6 soon, to get good performance when connecting to people who do not have IPv4 (when using peer 2 peer for starters or Skype, etc.).
New things are always on the horizon
What we need as a stop gap are routers that support IPv6, and IPv4 that don't start out at $800. (yeah, I checked)
Routers should be able to connect to an IPv6 or IPv4 uplink, and hand out IPv4 and/or IPv6 to the internal network.
This would solve a lot of the issues ISPs are having with switching to IPv6. Don't have a computer that supports it? Buy one of these routers.
So, the initiative needs to start at companies who manufacture SOHO networking equipment. Most of the changes are software upgrades too.... I mean.... OpenWRT supports it on routers that don't support it out of the box. I wish they would get a contract with a manufacturer to build and sell a router that ships with OpenWRT...it could be called the OpenRouter, or RoWRTer.
Make America grate again!
Private IPv6 IP ranges have been designated:
Link local addresses: fe80::* - automatically self-assigned by an IPv6 device, exist even if the device has a global address
Unique local addresses: fc00::* / fd00::* - manually assigned, globally unique but not routable on the internet
its 192.168.0.101, my laptop broke so i dont need it anymore.
What would have made things even simpler would have been legislation way back ensuring all new devices were IPv6 compatible. Of course, that would have added to the production cost so nobody wanted to do it, but you can bet we'd be jumping on the switchover a lot quicker if it meant reducing costs at this point in time (i.e. being able to finally ditch IPv4) instead of increasing them.
Why did you spoil a good posting with profanity? Do you not know any better words?
Not quite; 6to4 requires more than this scheme. 6to4 sticks the whole ipv6 packet inside an ipv4 one and requires a relay router to reach native ipv6 hosts. Furthermore, my scheme loses the other advantages of ipv6: stateless autoconfig, for example. The address space is only the square root of the ipv6 address space. I can go on.
What it does have is compatibility with far more equipment. The updates would be simpler as well.
SSC
Even handing out /64s, you've still got tons of address space. Most people completely miss the scale. Comparing the IPv4 address space to the IPv6 space is like comparing a square inch to the area encompassed by Pluto's orbit.
And the "/64 is the smallest block we hand out" is current convention, mostly in the interest of keeping routing tables from getting too huge. They can always decide to hand out smaller blocks later.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Correction : That should be comparing the IPv4 space to the number of /64 IPv6 blocks. Otherwise I'm off by a factor of about 4.2 billion.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
i think we need to keep anything on ipv4 on ipv4 and anything new on ipv6. leave alot more ipv6 space open. as someone said with how many isps east ips i wouldn't be surprised if they tried to move everyone tov6 the same problem comes up in a couple years.
Every discussion about IPv4 address exhaustion prompts comments about whether Apple (or MIT, or UCB, or whoever) needs all of those addresses
I notice how the biggest offender, Hewlett-Packard, is not mentioned. Why does HP need those /8 blocks that they've been inheriting over the years? Surely a technological company would know how to use NAT......
You're old-fashioned. If your router is routing packets to internal systems then your NAT is only giving you obscurity - anyone who guesses an internal IP address correctly will be able to connect to that machine. That's not a good way to get a secure system. If you want to block connections from the internet to internal machines... do it by blocking connections from the internet to internal machines, not by hoping no-one figures out your internal addresses.
I am trolling
That was not an option.
I suppose since you posted AC you were the one that modded Troll for disagreeing with the utterance of an actual event. Which is one of the things I do not like about Mac Fan boys. It's not enough to have a dissenting opinion, you have to persecute along with it.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
We fixed the problem by removing the Mac device entirely and going with a dedicated hardware firewall solution and put wireless on the DMZ, and disabled wireless access for any machine on the wired network.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
So you fixed the same problem in the same way for both IPv4 and v6?
I am trolling
According to whom does the IPv4 pool last a month longer? It does not say in TFA.
And when will it run out?
The estimates I gathered were:
2011-05-28 according to Intec NetCore,
2011-06-05 according to Hurricane Electric.
And now it is a month longer, is that global or just ARIN adress space?
Possibly, at this point the boss was so whipped up over ipv6 it was safer for his health just to leave it off. :)
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
The plan was, we were supposed to have a transitional period in which both IPv4 and IPv6 were in use. But there aren't enough IPv4 addresses left for a comfortable transitional period. We'll have to use complex, problematic approaches such as ISP-level NATs to stretch out the use of IPv4.
My understanding was that the major reason for /64 blocks being the minimum was that the standard addressing scheme uses a node's 64 bit MAC address for the host portion of the IPv6 address.
MAC is 48 bits. It is expanded to EUI-64 format by inserting 0xFFFE in the middle and flipping the 6th bit of the first octet. This is then used as the host part of the address.
Doh!
Thanks for the correction.
Not much more. The IPv6 header that 6to4 inserts is mostly just address bits, which your suggestion would also require, perhaps using RFC 2004 or loose source routing. Most of the remaining 8 bytes are equivalent to fields in the v4 header. Only the (optional) flow label is unique to IPv6 (for now, see the IPv4 flowlabel draft).
As opposed to your proposal, which offers no method to reach native v6 hosts.
Which equipment? 6to4 is already 'compatible' with the routers on the public v4 internet, by virtue of hiding the v6 stuff entirely. NAT devices have to be upgraded in either scheme, as do the hosts and the applications that run on them, to accommodate the new addressing scheme. And yes, your proposal does introduce a new addressing scheme, in which hosts without public v4 addresses will require multiple v4 addresses to identify them uniquely (just how many are needed depends on how many layers of NAT it's hiding behind). Your scheme may avoid the need to upgrade any links and routers between the host and it's NAT device, but ISATAP or 6over4 can do the same for IPv6.
Simpler how? By introducing a variable-length addressing scheme, you actually seem to be making things more complex.