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Vint Cerf Keeps Blaming Himself For IPv4 Limit
netbuzz writes "Everyone knows that IPv4 addresses are nearly gone and the ongoing move to IPv6 is inevitable if not exactly welcomed by all. If you've ever wondered why the IT world finds itself in this situation, Vint Cerf, known far and wide as one of the fathers of the Internet, wants you to know that it's OK to blame him. He certainly does so himself. In fact, he does so time and time and time again."
Is this a backwards opportunity taken for asserting that he is one of the Fathers of the Internet?
Cool. Now that we've assigned blame, hopefully we can move forward with FIXING the problem.
Since there is already a fix available (IPv6), if/when this DOES become a problem, THAT problem should be assigned squarely on the shoulders of the people who failed to implement the FIX in a timely enough manner.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
... to quote that hilarious line from Idiocracy.
In Liberty, Rene
Vint Cerf should blame himself for the IPv6 mess instead.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
So, Vince, if it makes you feel better, we'll blame you. It's all your fault.
Now, has that got us more IP addresses? No? Why worry about blame then? Real engineers fix things.
It's a good thing IPv4's address space is 32-bit. Without that limitation we'd never move to IPv6 and get all of the other benefits that it offers.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
There isn't a true shortage with companies that are hording large blocks of IP addresses. Example HP has 2 class A address blocks among others which gives them over 32 million IP's. With all the mergers that have happened why isn't there a process to recover address blocks that can be reused properly.
Part of the problem is that no one thought of recovering address blocks when companies merge. You can't tell me that HP needs 32 million plus IP's?
There is also the fact that both companies and ISP's can use the Private blocks and NAT for internal and only use routable blocks for devices that need them.
It all boils down to miss management of the address system which could be changed to extend the life of IPV4 and make it more efficient.
The scale of computing was much smaller then.
It was pre-home computer revolution and nobody thought computers would shrink to the size of everybody's pockets (cellphones). Nobody thought we'd be using machines will a billion bits (or more) or memory. Back than ~4000 was considered a lot (it was the hardcoded limit for the Atari console). Everything was smaller in scale, and Mr. Cerf is not to blame for not predicting the invention of the Web Browser (killer app) and how it would reach into every facet of our lives.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
After hearing this story and the '640k ought to be enough' story, the lesson learned is that whenever you are planning on building something technical, be sure to go wayyyy overboard on the size and scope of the projected requirements in order to future-proof the technology.
By the way, is Vint short for 'Vincent?' or 'Voila...Internet?"
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Pfft.it's obviously Al Gore's fault.
Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
In a speech around 2004, I remember Alan Cox said that the reason IPv6 wasn't advancing was that big software players were afraid to adopt it before it turns 20 in case there are submarine patents / patent ambush.
Anyone got links to confirm / disprove this theory?
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patent_ambush
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
The examples of him putting the blame on himself for IPV4 running out of address space is just a modest way of saying "Hey I invented the Internet" in a real way not in an Al Gore kind of way.
I can only wish that I would have such a failure in my career!
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
the internet and doesn't know what HP is should go to write about boy bands.
\
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Here's an interview where he says it:
http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t576610-alan-cox-on-software-patents.html
"""Alan Cox: The same has happened with IP version 6. You notice that everyone
is saying IP version 6 is this, is that, and there's all this research
software up there. No one at Cisco is releasing big IPv6 routers.
Not because there's no market demand, but because they want 20
years to have elapsed from the publication of the standard before
the product comes out -- because they know that there will be
hundreds of people who've had guesses at where the standard
would go and filed patents around it. And it's easier to let things
lapse for 20 years than fight the system."""
(More info would be good - any other prominent techs saying this?)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
I'm going to this event in San Jose to hear him speak and perhaps give me some good advice around IPv6.
http://www.gogonetlive.com/
Next year will probably be the last year I run IPv4.
Always with the hyperbole.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Wants you to know he's still around. Vint, you've done enough damage around here but you got a Turing Award anyway, much to the shame of many of us, which is why yours was probably the first and only Turing Award to incite a protest. Then you finished whoring yourself out by working for Google. Now please, show a little common decency, and disappear. Forever. Thanks!
You forgot to take the garbage out again! Oh, and about that Internet IPV4 thing, well, it lasted a while, good job building it, considering computer technology and how fast its obsolete, if you gave people IPv6 right away, they would have all cried out "oh Noes, my 386 'pewter can't easily manage all of that, make it simpler, make it simpler!" So instead you give them IPv4. It lasts for what, 30+ years, then its starts to run out of space, and they all cry out "Vint buddy, just what were you thinking! This, this IPv4 is running out of space, dammit! Who was responsible, YOU? " ...So yeah its beat up on old Vint day. Really, I think he did a heck of a job building IPV4, If you think of the internet now, booming across the world, and what lead to IPv6, you thank Vint and IPV4. If every one of the billions of people now on the internet gave old Vint a penny for his contributions, he would turn off his computer, climb into a nice 150 foot sailboat, and order the skipper to sail to a very warm quiet tropical island with great fishing and clean cold rum. Once there, he would anchor, fish, swim, and after a great supper of snapper, fresh potatoes and a sip of rum, he would shout to the wind "Hey IPV4 haters, go %*#&^! yourselves!", then take a whiz over the side, and relax for a month.
engineering is about fixing problems
so when issues of economics, or climate, or policy, or anything else gets political, the political leaders of course make themselves busy with who is to blame for the problem. which of course doesn't solve any problems, it just makes people feel better that they didn't cause the problem (while they continue to suffer the consequences)
we need more engineers running this country, and less politicians
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually, since this problem is sure to boom in the coming months, I've started a wiki page for it:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/IPv6
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
How many years is it from the start of alleged infringement to the rebuttable presumption that the patent holder has snoozed and lost?
"It's enough to do an experiment," he said. "The problem is the experiment never ended."
This sounds like the vast majority of software projects...
Some programmer whips up a quick and dirty prototype to prove to management that it can be done... Then they tell him to put it into production and support it for the next 34yrs.
This is why quick and dirty prototypes should never be shown to anyone, because the temptation to actually use them is too great.
At the time, XNS, the Xerox protocol for Ethernet networks, was in use. It had 24 bits for the network number, and 24 bits for the device ID. Thinking at the time was that each network would be a local LAN, and "internetworking" would interconnect LANs. Xerox was thinking of this as a business system, with multiple machines on each LAN. So XNS had a 48-bit address spade. That's what we call a "MAC address" today.
The telephony people were pushing X.25 and TP4, which used phone numbers for addressing. Back then, phone numbers were very hierarchical; the area code and exchange parts of the number determined the routing to the final switch. "Number portability", where all the players have huge tables, was a long way off.
The problem with a big address space is that memory was too expensive in those days to deal with huge address tables. A big issue was locative vs non-locative address spaces. In a locative address space, there's a hierarchy - you can take some part of the address and make a local decision about what direction to go, even if you don't have enough detailed information to get to the final destination. IP was originally organized like that - routers looked up class A, B, and C networks. A huge, flat address space implemented using multi-level caches was way beyond what you could do in a router back then. Routers used to be dinky machines, with less than one MIPS and maybe 256K of RAM.
There was a lot of worry about packet overhead. Each key press on a terminal sends 41 bytes over a TCP/IP network. That was a big deal when companies had long-haul links in the 9600 to 56Kb/s range. Adding another 24 bytes to each packet to allow for future expansion seemed grossly excessive. Especially since the X.25 people had far less overhead.
So there were good reasons not to overdesign the system. I don't blame Cerf for that.
The foot-dragging on IPv6 is excessive. The big deployment problem was getting it into everyone's Windows desktop. That's been done.
that map wasn't correct to begin with--the upper right-hand corner, 240-255, is "class E experimental" addresses and will never be given out.
Battlemaster--Game with friends in medival realms
I feel a bit guilty myself now, I got a block of 16 IPv4 addresses last week when I changed ISP. Although they also give me real honest non-tunnelled IPv6 too.
C'mon Slashdot, start supporting IPv6! - even Youtube's on there now!
Here's a question for the day: Why did they pick a class A network to place the local machine address (127.0.0.1) in? Why not 192.168.0.1?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Choosing 32 bits for IPV4 was reasonable at the time when 56kbps was considered a fast link.
The real problem is that when IPV6 was designed it did not allow IPV4 to be included as a subspace.
so you cannot have an IPV4 address that is a valid IPV6 address.
That means that there is no soft migration path from IPV4 to IPV6.
The people who designed IPV6 did not consider the problems of real world users;
they designed in a vacuum. A properly designed IPV6 would be in widespread use by
now, and the problem would be under control.
$ host -t AAAA slashdot.org
slashdot.org has no AAAA record
$
'nuff said. Our organisation (that's me) is already 96% dual-stack. We treat non-ipv6 connectivity as fatal. When are you gonna do it?
The address space on IPv4 doesn't REALLY need to run out. Each address from the IPv4 space can be used as a gateway to a NAT'ed network of addresses in the 10.x.x.x space. The number of addresses available in IPv4 is ACTUALLY NOT 2**32=~4 billion but 2**32 * 2**24 = ~48 trillion addresses. The ILLUSION that IPv4 address space is running out is a marketing ploy being used by network companies that want to create churn in the market to generate revenue, and more egregiously, by software vendors like sMegmasoft that want to have a unique permanent IPv6 address assigned to each PC so that they can make sure that everyone is paying all the possible license fees that MS can cook up. After all, if you can't innovate, then you increase profit by raising the rent on your antiquated "intellectual property".
((http://www.myhouse.brick/kitchen/refer/freezer/icemaker ))
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Maybe the mayan word for "world" was translated incorrectly. It actually meant "IPv4 address space".
...the ongoing move to IPv6 is impossible.
T,FTFReality.
There's zero economic incentive to stand up an IPv6 service, and won't be until a critical mass of clients have only IPv6 connectivity (no IPv4). There's no economic incentive for an ISP to provide IPv6 unless the customers demand it, and they don't care because there aren't any services or content exclusively on IPv6.
It's sad to us geeks, but the future is an internet of many-layered NAT where connections can only be routed from end-user to well-known servers, not from end-user to end-user.
0 1 - just my two bits
And a patent does not have to be enforced to be valid - latches and waivers do not apply to patents.
This is one difference between patents and trademarks, but Google patent laches produces this document describing how laches applies to claims of patent infringement. It cites A.C. Aukerman Co. v. R.L. Chaides Construction Co., 22 USPQ2d 1321 (Fed. Cir. 1992).
Sir Arthur C Clarke saw it coming in 1964. “These things will make possible a world in which we can be in instant contact with each other, wherever we may be, where we can contact our friends, anywhere on earth, even if we don't know their actual, physical location.” He had little idea what the mechanism would be. But he had perfect insight into the scale.
I hear he's really fat.
jhw
That'll give us 3 more spaces we can use! ;-)
we are not hearing any apologies from Al Gore.
in a weird way twitter has taught us it needs to be as painful to switch as possible. twitter represents what people would once the switch is made. think of the chair that tweets farts. the toilet that tweets flushes. the meter on your power line that phones home to the power company in real time. there are somethings that don't need a deticated address. has anyone ever looked into how long before we run out of twitter space? by running low we force ourselves to the them wisely (peak oil)
That map has some errors.
The big green block in the top right (240-255) is unusable.
The 10 block is reserved for RFC 1918.
Aside from that, only the following blocks remain unallocated. everywhere else is white.
005
023
037
039
100
102
103
104
105
106
179
185
IANA has a report of what blocks are assigned/reserved, to whom and when they were given out.
http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
IPv6 addressing is wonderfully simple. Because it is hierarchical, in one byte units, there are at most 256 upstream, 256 parallel and 256 downstream router addresses for any given router. The lowest 48 bits are taken from the MAC addresses.
The only time you need to hold more addresses than 768 is if you are supporting Mobile IP or NEMO using transitory addresses (the original IPv6 mechanism), where re-routing is handled with temporary router entries that last 30 seconds or until the computer/network moves to a new network, whichever comes first.
Typical IPv4 router tables - especially for ISPs - are huge. You don't need 8 Mb router tables unless you plan on holding upwards of a million routes. I don't know if anyone sells corporate-grade routers that small any more.
Since there are no situations where you will ever want a more specific rule for a route (other than to support transitory addresses), you don't need to search for the most specific case of a routing rule. If you have found the first case, it will be the only case. Even in the transitory address case, you're comparing the whole IPv6 address, so there will be exactly one match for it, so the worst case is looking for two matches for strings. This means that searches are much, much faster. On large routers, you can use the three bytes as indexes into the table of hierarchical addresses and then use a tree to store the transitory addresses. You can search both in less time than it takes to search an IPv4 router table.
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)
When some says;
- I blame myself
- I take full responsibility
- I am the guilty one(eg when a father says this when he allowed his daughter to go out that night, and she was subsequently killed by a drunk driver)
What they invariably do no expect is a response in agreement, and enhancing the argument that they are in fact responsible.
Vint Cerf would never expect (or want) a flurry of media articles, Blogs, and peer discussion that say "Hang on?! He *is* responsible. We now question his competence. And we will take these damages as a consequence of his error and will need to seek recompence."
Just imagine that father being taken away in cuffs because he admitted to being responsible for a death.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Nobody's ever going to need more than 640k ip addresses
If there are any patents associated with IPv6, the Feds could claim Eminent Domain over them if I'm not mistaken.
Life is not for the lazy.
Robots don't dance!
In 1996, when IPv6 (back then called IPng) was declared the "fix", there were two proposals that could have extended the address space.
* Use TCP/UDP on top of IPX (RFC1791). This, IIRC was implemented in reality, for example, in Netware server 4.11.
* Use TCP/UDP on top of CLNS/CLNP (RFC1347).
Now think about it for a second. Both IPX and CLNP are closer to IPv4 than IPv6 will ever be. Both were already proven, well understood, and the implementations were solid...
In 1996 EVERY router on the planet had the algorithms necesary to route IPX AND CLNP (for different reasons, at the time IPX was VERY popular and CLNP was govt and Telco mandated) so the relevant patents and IP were already licensed. You also saved most of the training and implementation (meaning algorithm programming and testing) costs.
Same for the hosts. Most workstations (desktops) had an IPX client, from MS-DOS 5.0 onwards (but also in the *NIX and MAC worlds), while on servers it got better, you had your choice betwen IPX or CLNP (sometimes native, sometimes as an ad-on). So again you saved the training costs for your admins, the implementation (programming/testing) costs.
But nooooo, the guys of the IETF at the time had an acute case of NIH (or, as Eric Cartman would say, "Sand in Their Vaginas"), and came up with IPv6. Sure, it has al lot of advantages other than a larger address space, but was unproven, unimplemented, subjected to Intelectual property problems (the fact that intellectual property in its current form is flawed [I agree with that idea] is not relevant to this discussion), and had mistakes of it's own.
(my favorite pet peeve about IPv6, they removed the header checksum... come on!, I agree that recalculating the checksum in every router because of the TTL is stupid, but it was rather easy to keep the checksum, not include the hop count field in it, and make the Hop Count field a hamming code instead of a direct integer value!. And no, a half assed check on TCP of the Pseudoheader with a weaklish algorithm will not do. BTW, the guys doing realtime multimedia using UDP must also be jumping of joy that the checksum in UDP/IPv6 is mandatory now.. :-P I discussed this with my students last tuesday, but is not going to be in the exam).
At the time (1996), I was an undergrad student, in a backwater country, and had high hopes that ATM would solve everything (I did my thesis in ATM flow control)... Silly me... I did not speak...
Let's not blame Cerf, nor Khan of our current woes. Let's blame the people who gave us a crappy solution out of pride, and pitty those of us who have to implement it....
Salud!
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Just divide 20% of the total number of IPv6 Addresses (this is both to account for wasted addresses, as well as to point how silly the notion of running out of IPv6 Addresses is), and divide it by the number of Sq metes (or foots, as you preffer) of the surface of the earth (dry, humid, wet, or iced) and tell me how many devices for each tile of surface can have a unique address.
Pro Tip: Use a scientific calculator, a normal one, or the one on a cellphone will not do.
For the lazy: 1,33*1023 addresses per square meter, if my calculations are correct. This is more than the Avogadro #... just in case, check my calculation.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
neither does Kompressor... sorry ... had to...
Yes, that works if the addresses don't encode any geographic or routing information. If you can just lamely assign any old address to any old device no matter where it connects on, then yeah, you could spread over the whole earth like that.
But the real reason it needs to be much bigger than it would appear is that if it's big enough, you can let unfathomably huge blocks sit forever unused in order to allow the address itself to hint at the routing, so that you can have dumb routes that only have to look at part of the address to know where where to send it next.. you know.. every thing that starts with 3 goes left, 2 goes right, etc.
Simply assigning unique information to every thing on the network is necessary, but not sufficient.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
But nooooo. They had to go and start stuffing all kinds of crap into a NEW spec!
Would it not have been simpler to just expand each segment to 16 bits or 32 bits? It is FAR easier to remember 65000.100.2500.55 then it is to remember ACB1:C233:FF35:D5C6:22DA:B34D:6278:1234 plus some asshat use a colon to separate them so you have to jump through a zillion hoops to add a port number!!!
Please tell me this is a glitch and that my slashdot viewing pleasure is still lurking behind this obscene layout that I can't find any way to change.
rd
P.S. Well, one thing didn't change. It still takes a lifetime to preview a comment.
one's world is little bit smaller than the God's one
On a machine with a recent Ubuntu desktop install do:
cat /etc/hosts
There should at least be 127.0.0.1 for localhost but you will often also see a 127.0.1.1 with (only) the machine's name. I think (agree?) the OP was just making a joke rather than a serious point though!
It's because of Vint Cerf that it's called "Web Cerfing".
I18N == Intergalacticization