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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."
Problem solved!
IP ADDRESS MONSTER HUNGRY!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
How long are they going to keep this up for? Jeez.
Yes, but this at least gives people an extra month to make sure everything is ready to go.
It's actually refreshingly nice to see that for once, a company has turned around and said: "I know this is ours, but we aren't using it. Someone else might need it more. Here you go chaps!".
Have you heard of Altruism?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Who are you, the owner of rackspace?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nortel has more than the 47.X class-A that they
could reasonably give back. They have a sizeable
flotilla of class-B and class-C networks that
they acquired through M&A over time as well.
When I worked there, I made more than one attempt
to see if we could give some of it back. But
alas, internal politics were an insurmountable
force.
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.
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.
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.
Apparently, if IPv4 addresses keep getting returned at an average rate of at least 16,000,000 per month, they could keep this up forever.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
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!
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.
We've known this was coming for years. Do you really think adding on another month is going to do a single thing?
Yep, it will add another month. That is a single thing.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
IPV6 never caught on, like Windows Vista caught on. Better to wait for IPV7.
"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.
This is correct. If the class based system had kept up, we would have exhausted the ipv4 address space years ago.
SSC
After the University Of Hawaii began getting Google Over IPv6 in March of 2010, we began noticing problems with user devices on our wireless sending router advertisements and “black-holing” traffic. This problem is, of course made more apparent by initiating Google Over IPv6, which causes significantly more content to be requested by clients over IPv6. Despite first appearances, this is a good thing, since it is a problem that must be faced and dealt with in order to operate a IPv6 network for the near term.
In a nutshell, a “rogue RA” scenario occurs when some device besides an “official” router identifies itself as a router using “router advertisement” ICMP6 messages. Once client hosts see the “rogue” as a router, they may prefer it as their next hop to send traffic out to the Internet.
This can result in one of two problems:
These issues are not IPv6 specific problems. There are numerous similar problems that occur in IPv4 networks, on 802.11 “WiFi” networks, and on Layer 2 switched wired networks.
The best-known cause of rogue RAs on an IPv6 network comes from Windows Vista hosts with Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) enabled. Other causes are probably common, since the “personalities” of rogue RAs seem to differ widely.
And there also appears to be a problem with enabled 6to4 tunnels advertising to the network that they are willing to act as virtual gateways.. Not exactly my idea of 'extremely good'
Once the IPv4 space runs out, it is likely that there will be a secondary market for /24's. That /8 could make quite a bit of money if carved into /24's. It would also be another 65k routes for the global routing table, which would be no fun at all.
We should appreciate their gesture; they did lose something and we are all slightly richer because of what they did.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
No need to worry, actually. It won't take longer than it took the US to switch to metric. People will just realize it's a better option and start using it voluntarily.
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.
I assume it reflects their confidence in a successful migration to IPv6 in the near future. Think about it this way, if they predict a future where we're stuck on IPv4 and go down the route of addresses being sold off to the highest bidder, they're giving away a massive asset for some goodwill return. If they believe that IPv6 will come in and render IPv4 redundant in the very near future, they're giving away effectively a resource that's soon to become useless for some goodwill return. The second sounds like a much better deal.
Nice for you. We are.
I work for a major telecom company. We are scant months away from all of our TV customer's STBs exclusively talking ipV6. Internet cable modems will be following next year.
Some of us - many, in fact - _are_ very near to that.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban