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."

Comments

Things people do...

[Anonymatt]

Is this a backwards opportunity taken for asserting that he is one of the Fathers of the Internet?

Glad thats sorted out!

[powerlord]

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.

Don't blame him, thank him.

[Matt Perry]

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.

Re:Bogus shortage

[jandrese]

The scary thing is that for every Class A returned to the pool, you only buy like a month of life for IPv4. It's just growing too fast now and we're going to start seeing a lot of stories about people not getting their IP addresses in a year or two. Luckily it won't affect existing customers too badly, but it will be a real limit on growth.

IPV6 is the problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:IPV6 is the problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

IPv4 was created decades before 56kbps was considered a fast link.

I've heard this complaint before about IPv6 not being backwards compatible, but, and no offence, I've never heard a constructive argument about how it should have been designed. I have my doubts that people who make this complaint have actually sat down and worked through the details of how they would have made IPv6 backwards compatible.

Consider a hypothetical IPvA (short for IPvAwesome) which obsolesces IPv4 and is backwards compatible. We have to imagine that the IPvA address space is bigger than 32 bits, either a fixed larger address space or a variable-length "extension" address stuck in the optional parts of the IP header or something like that. The problem is that no matter what mechanism you choose, every packet you send across the Internet is going to hit a 10 year-old router that's never even heard of IPvA. There's a 100% chance this router will have no idea whatsoever what to do with the parts of the IP header it's never seen before. If you're lucky the router will just drop the packet as being malformed. If you're unlucky maybe it'll do something silly like truncate the packet down to the RFC-specified 32-bit IPv4 address and your reply packets will end up getting routed to China somewhere.

The problem is this: whatever protocol you put in to replace IPv4, most of the infrastructure on the Internet will have no idea what to do with it. That means it's virtually impossible that you'll ever be able to seamlessly bridge between stupid old ignorant IPv4 routers and the more aware routers.

What you could do is have routers that nicely bridge between IPvA and IPv4. So you send out an IPvA packet and it magically finds its way to a router that speaks both IPvA and IPv4 and can nicely bridge between them. That would be cool, and in fact, I've just described to you how 6to4 works.

Truth be told, even you sat down and came up with a new protocol that was designed for nothing else but bridging between codgy old IPv4 routers and some kind (any kind!) of new Internet protocol, I doubt you could do better than IPv6 and its cohorts (6to4, 6over4, 6in4, 4in6, etc.)

Maybe I'm missing something, but if you're going to make this complaint, you're going to have to come up with something better than "they didn't think about backwards compatibility". They did think about backwards compatibility and they did it in the best way possible from what I can tell.