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

Is it a software patents issue? (alan cox)

[ciaran_o_riordan]

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

Re:Why is 127.0.0.1 in a class A?

[Sloppy]

I could explain this to you, but I would have to write a science fiction novel to do it. Well ok, I'll summarize the novel. Just remember this is a selective summary; pretend that all sorts of really cool things are happening and my characters are totally interesting and the plot is fucking fantastic. Can you do that for me, Wowbagger? Ok.

In an alternate universe, the IP4 designers did just as you suggest, and the loopback network was Class C. In this alternate universe, other things went in a different direction too. By 2010 we all have CPUs with thousands of cores, but they all run at 1 MHz and programmers discuss ways to improve the linearization of their code.

And we all have a weird crippled piece of shit operating system, which got popular despite all its limitations. (This may seem hard to believe to us, but remember I'm talking about an alternate reality.) One of its limitations, is that its networking code doesn't deal with port numbers, because the designers thought that was a waste of 16 bits. (Computers in this reality have about as much memory as what we're used to, but there are more addresses and the words are 4 bits wide, so working with 16 bit data is kind of a pain in the ass.) Another of its limitations is that is has no IPC as we currently know it. Fortunately in the 1990s some programmers "invented" IPC by having each process use the loopback network, but since there are no port numbers, each process has to have its own address on the loopback network so that the OS can sort out what process gets what message. This inevitably led to mocking jokes:

"255 loopback addresses ought to be enough for anyone." -- Vint Cert

There were terrible hacks for running hundreds of processes and having them all be able to talk to one another, where a proxy process would emulate a sub-loopback network for 254 other processes and present a single loopback address to the OS. It was such a broken, terrible system, that it delayed the popularization of personal computer networking, so there was no "mainstream" use of the internet and the supply of IP4 addresses lasted much longer. In 2010, there was no non-loopback address shortage; it wasn't expected for another decade.

Then one day a poster named whoasacker got on Hyphencolon and asked, "Why didn't they just use a Class A network for the loopback?" And a poster named Slippery answered, explaining, "In an alternate universe, they did..."