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Asia Runs Out of IPv4 Addresses
ZerXes writes "It seems that APNIC has just released the last block of IPv4 addresses and are now completely out, a lot faster then expected. Even though APNIC received 3 /8 blocks in February the high growth of mobile devices made the addresses run out even before the summer. 'From this day onwards, IPv6 is mandatory for building new Internet networks and services,' says APNIC Director General Paul Wilson."
This might have a really obvious answer, but is there any reason why mobiles necessarily need an IPv4 address? Surely they could get away with IPv6 and a bit of tunnelling. Hell, in the UK most mobiles share an IP anyway.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
At least now IPv6 is mandatory!
Wouldn't it have been better to make it mandatory years ago?
APNIC is NOT out of IPv4 addresses. They are down to their last /8 - the one they got as one of the final five /8s being allocated to each of the RIRs. This puts them in the third and final stage of their IPv4 exhaustion plan, whereby they will only allocate a maximum of a single /22 to each network operator which is supposed to be used primarily to enable a transistion to IPv6 by supporting IPv4 to IPv6 gateways and hosts that just have to be on a native IPv4 address.
More information directly from APNIC here.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Why? I already have an inet6 address. Anyone who bought hardware that doesn't do ipv6 in the past two years must not be a real geek.
Caveat Utilitor
GRAMMAR NAZI ALERT!
"a lot faster then expected"
Do people know the difference between then and than anymore?
Inappropriate use of your/you're there/their/they're then/than drives me nuts.
ZerXes, go back to digg.
Like how browsers all still having to cope with both Gopher and HTTP? Like Gopher, IPv4 will fade out, slowly. At some point, new networks will see no need to have an IPv4 address just for the tiny minority of users who would need it.
I know the problem is of a much greater magnitude, but it still doesn't require an instantaneous switchover.
(Yes, I know Firefox only just dropped Gopher support.)
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Whoops, kid, it looks like you're growing up! You're getting too big for your clothes. Don't worry, though, it's nothing a little surgery can't fix.
A /22 is pretty much nothing, so what you're saying is that an ISP looking for addresses can get pretty much nothing from APNIC. Thus, they're basically out.
Neither my ISP nor my tomato routers support in6 :(
(dd had issues and openwrt was a PITA to set up)
proud caffeine whore
4,294,967,296 ought to be enough for anybody.
I won't ever say that unless it involves physical things in numbers greater than the number of atoms in the universe. And damn, if we start making memory out of quarks I'll even be wrong there too...
At the IPv4 burn rate of the last month, Ford's space would last only another 10 days. IPv4's done; stick a fork in it and start moving on.
Gopher is not a good example. When a site already has an IPv4 address it has no incentive to offer it over IPv6 too, since v6 offers no technological benefit to the webhost. Conversely, a site that is only on IPv6 is not going to get any hits, so anyone that wants traffic needs an IPv4 address anyway. IPv4 is simply not going to go away because the people without an address are kicking up a fuss. I would guess that those people will be stuck in their own IPv6 world, while all the content worth viewing would still be on IPv4.
Please fall over and die. You are the kind of 'engineer' that holds back all of humanity. There's no reason to not implement IPv6, and 'user unfriendly' may be the very worst excuse, since implementing IPv6 doesn't mean you can support IPv4 too.
Doesn't work that way. IP numbers are not UUIDs. They have to be hierarchical to keep the routing tables from becoming unmanageable. You can't just hand them out randomly.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"""Network Address Translation [wikipedia.org] could provide some relief I think...no?"""
No.
BACKGROUND:
NAT, in the way which can be used by ISPs to reduce the need for IP addresses, works by mapping multiple internal IP addresses to a external one (or groups of external ones). So say you have a one thousand computers you need to keep online and you have only 100 addresses. NAT will allow you to logically map those 100 addresses to the one thousand computers.
NAT is able to do this by connection tracking. The router keeps in memory what connections were created with what external IP address and then routes the data from the reply back to the original host. So say my browser opens up a socket on 192.168.1.129:59343 and connects to Google on "www.google.com:80". The NAT router opens up a connection on 208.32.20.1:78190, connects to 'www.google.com:80'. When the machine listening on 'www.google.com:80' sends information back to 208.32.20.1:78190. Any data received on 208.32.20.1:78190 then automatically gets forwarded to 192.168.1.129:59343, which then is received by my browser.
WHY NAT IS FULL OF FAIL:
The reason that NAT + IPv4 is not a substitute for IPv6 is because the number of sockets that a router can open and manage is less then 16bits. That is the socket numbering scheme is 16bit scheme, of which a substantial number of sockets are reserved for specific protocols. That is less then 60,000 possible connections can be made by a router with a single public IP address.
Each new connection made by a machine behind a new router requires a new socket established. Just by having 3 tabs on my browser right now I am using roughly 20 connections. Each connection is going to a ad provider, google, different slashdot.org servers, etc etc.
Say that a internet user is using about 50 active connections at any one time then that means that 1 public address can only support about 1200 concurrent users. But it will break down long before that. People using bittorrent may use 300 TCP connections, which means that you can only support a 100-200 users.
The other aspect of this is that there is not enough IPv4 addresses for internet routers. That is a new ISP will run out of IP addresses long before they are even finish building their infrastructure!!! There wouldn't be enough addresses to even setup NAT routers!
This is taken care of by 'Carrier Grade NAT'. Which is you use NAT firewalls for your NAT firewall.
So....
Internet ----> NAT firewall -----(TCP tunnelled over TCP) ----> NAT firewall ----> Your home NAT router ----> Your PC.
Ever wonder why your bittorrent connections turn to shit!?
For Asia users this is already not good enough. They have RUN OUT. They cannot use NAT to extend it any further... they are over and done with.
Why not just make sockets 32bit or 64bit? Because that's retarded when you have IPv6, that's why.
I am currently running a IPv6 /32 network for my PERSONAL HOME NETWORK. All these are real, public, IP addresses.
79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336 addresses and 4,294,967,296 sub networks.
A subnet for IPv6 is a /64 network. 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses in a /64 subnet.
When IPv6 rolls around most people will end up getting a /48 network address. This is _only_ 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 addresses and 65,536 networks.
There are 281,474,976,710,656 /48 network addresses in total to give away. We will now only have to worry about IP address exhaustion when the human race becomes interstellar.
So, yeah, IPv4 luddites with their NAT savior complexes can go screw themselves. I want a efficient, open, and secure internet. NAT precludes this.
If the user has to enter an IP address they will simply enter their quad notated IPv4 address like they always did. In case they are interfacing with an IPv6 network, well, not supporting IPv6 at all won't make that any easier now, will it? "You sound like a clueless :)"
The vast majority of home PCs *are* behind a NAT. What the vast majority of home PCs are not going to work behind properly is a double NAT, and a trend towards that will fundamentally break the future development of a whole host of user-centric applications. You can more or less kiss the idea of peer-to-peer anything goodbye.
Yeah, that's what tends to happen when you get there first. It's not like they were going to reserve addresses on a per-capita basis.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
You must be one of those people who wants the Internet to be like TV -- for "consumers" and "viewers" only.
For people, like me, who have to actually manage networks, NAT is one of the worst things that happened in networking that we still have to deal with. You end up with two sets of DNS for each company, public and private IP networks to manage, firewalls and routers doing additional processing that is wasting CPU and memory.
NAT also severely restricts the capabilities of what are possible on the Internet. It firmly gives control to those with public addresses (big companies) and takes it away from individual users.
99.9% of mobile devices would be quite happy behind NAT.
No. Being behind NAT means the mobile device has to pull for messages. This means it will be slow at detecting new messages and it creates unnecessary traffic (expensive).
It also breaks the usual stuff - SIP (what, you don't want free internet calling just because it is a mobile device?). RTP (you don't want to watch video?).
In fact it seems there is perhaps more new inventive service that could be build on the open peer to peer network of IPv6 with mobile devices communicating directly with each other.
Before you go on the usual "but we have NAT hacks that allow some of that stuff to work anyway!", please learn a bit more about IPv6. It is more than just an extra long address field. For example there is something called Mobile IPv6 which could come in very handy for mobile devices. Also IPv6 multicasting is much improved - why, you could broadcast to the world directly from your camera phone.
If a website has an IPv4 address, it may want to maintain that. If it doesn't, and the IPv4 addresses have dried up, it may not be possible to get one (or at least, it may be royally expensive). Similarly, tunneling from IPv6 to IPv4 is still very imperfect, meaning that once new devices and connections are on IPv6, your incentive to serve IPv6 is to not tick off your new users (which are usually the most profitable).
I suspect we will hit a tipping point, where new devices and connections happen via IPv6, so content providers all dual-stack. IPv4 users will find themselves tunneling through an IPv6 world. Electronics have a 5 year lifespan anyway, so within half a decade IPv4 will have faded.
Really, it all depends on the pain. When does IPv4 not just run out, but get painfully expensive to acquire?
The ______ Agenda
They're the first to be forced into IPv6. So they'll be further along the learning curve. Welcome our new networking overlords indeed.
Have gnu, will travel.
NAT is a solution to address depletion in the same manner than increasing the debt cap is a solution to the US national deficit.
NAT, to a networking professional, is an abomination. It functions literally by breaking TCP/IP and lying to network neighbors. It functions by breaking the rules networks are designed and intended to play by, and overuse of NAT prevents any intelligence in routing and networking. Imagine if mailing addresses were limited in the same manner. Everything is a PO Box. Now imagine several layers of PO Boxes have to be traversed for anything to be delivered.
Moving to IPv6 is the right way to fix this. It's not easy, but it's the right way to do it.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
When does IPv4 not just run out, but get painfully expensive to acquire?
Indeed, at least in the west most home lusers still have public V4 IPs. I would expect ISPs to gradually reclaim those IPs for more lucrative customers and so it will be a while (possiblly a decade) before the shortage really bites on western ISPs.
It is over in the east that things are REALLY going to get hairy with so many new users coming online that I would expect IP values to dramatically rise. ISP level nat will help to an extent but there are limits on the ratios that can practially be used. I would expect them to try importing IPs but I don't know whether the IANA and the RIRs will let them get away with it.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
There are only 65536 ports, so you are limited to how many users you can stick behind NAT.
Address shortages are a very, very, very tiny, miniscule fraction of IPv6. If IPv6 was about address shortages, the IPng working group would have adopted TUBA.
You seem unwilling to even recognize any of the other features of IPv6:
Built-in device mobility
Don't even think of coming back with "but nobody uses these" - nobody was driving until the car was adopted either. Things have a habit of not being used when they're not available. When they are available, they are used. It's as simple as that.
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)
IPv6 doesn't have a lot of IPs to have a crap ton of devices, it has a ton of IPs to allow better organization of networks. In one breath you talk about how bad IPv6, and in another your praise NAT. NAT isn't even a standard, it's a hack of a bandaid for the problems IPv4 has caused. Claiming NAT works fine is like claiming IE6 works fine, it's insecure and breaks stuff.
Even without the extra addresses, IPv6 is at worst as good as v4 and at best slightly better. The only thing the IP protocol is used for is routing to and from. All that is required is a destination and a source. If you look at a packet, there's not too much to it.
IPv6 is different in protocol mainly because there is such a large address space to work with. Most of the "rules" of IPv6 are to make a strict adherence to allow easier and predictable management. Just like how strictness seems annoying at first with Java, it also becomes a great way to generate clean code. Same difference.
IPv6 makes routing simpler, faster, and easier to manage. But omg, something different!
You claim its acceptance will be painful, yet I know many Network Admins and they love IPv6 so much more so than IPv4. Heck, the entire internet backbone already supports it and has supported it for almost 5 years now.
But many IP devices do not have built-in firewall, so you -still- want to run a border router firewall right? And if every machine is behind your border router, then those limitations are still going to apply. So you want to let certain traffic in to certain hosts. Some hosts are dmz, some hosts are very private, and some are in the middle. Its still a lot to manage. The only thing it solves is peer-to-peer communications right? But you are going to have to deal on a host by host and service by service basis which peer to peer protocols will be allowed in and wont be.
Maybe NAT makes some kind of peer-to-peer relationships impossible. But, I dont think that IPv6 will make anything easy. And I think its going to permanently piss people off at the Internet and those responsible for the new design.
You've made some very important points however I would submit to you that when you look at the advancement of technology, specifically that which has widespread adoption, one clear pattern emerges. Better rarely beats more convenient. VHS versus Betamax, Laser Disc versus VHS, low quality MP3's versus CD's in the early days of Napster and the list goes on and on. IPv6 is superior in every way shape and form yet moving to IPv6 is a giant pain compared to keeping and in some way expanding on IPv4 and NAT in some fashion. Moving from IPv4 and NAT to IPv6 is a giant undertaking while continuing with IPv4 and NAT plus piecemeal advancement in technology as need arises is much easier. Remember that necessity is the mother of invention. I'm not saying it's the best path and I'm not saying widespread IPv6 won't be the eventual outcome, I'm simply saying due to the widespread adoption of IPv4 and NAT and the inconvenience of moving to IPv6 the trend will be to stick with IPv4 and NAT for as long as it's humanely possible and just when we get to the point when we think it's no longer possible there's a very good chance somebody somewhere will figure out a way to prolong it and as long as that road is easier and more convenient than moving to IPv6 then that's the road where history teaches us we'll eventually end up walking down ... better technology be damned ...
While I'm a fan of some of those arguments, a couple of them are horseshit. It would be good if the IPv6 fans stopped using the silly ones.
Built-in security: you're either referring to difficulty of scanning due to size (which few worms or attackers bother with anymore) or the notion of IPSec having its own header type (which is useless without a key distribution system). Neither is really worth writing home about.
Auto-configuration: Any actual operational network is going to need DHCPv6 anyway, so autoconf isn't a big draw. For example, any enterprise that wants to keep track of MAC->IP mappings is never going to use autoconf to assign addresses. Heck, if you just want DNS servers, you need DHCPv6. I really don't see why autoconf is a *good* thing. It's mostly just a pain in the ass if you want to do host configuration *right*, rather than the half-assed state that autoconf will leave you in.
native multicasting: this is available in IPv4 as well, and isn't used there either. Don't hold your breath assuming that multicast is going to amount to anything in IPv6.
The US invented the Internet. The Internet originally started as ARPANET a research network designed by DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency of the US Department of Defense. It started out as a link between a few US research universities and institutes. TCP/IP was then developed by Robert Kahn and Vince Cerf, working for DARPA. DARPA liked it and funded the development of the software to implement it.
After that various other government entities created TCP/IP networks based around ARPANET like the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and so on. Those unified in to what become the Internet.
Now that is not to say it did not become a global endevour. Around the time the Internet came to be, CERN made their own TCP network, CERNET, and then they started looking to link up with the US Internet and did so around 1989. Also CERN of course developed the basis of the world wide web. However the Internet itself started in the US.
That's why IANA, the ultimate top level controller of Internet numbers, is based in the US. It was created there to manage things on ARPANET.
You have to remember that nobody who was designing this was thinking "Global communications system that links every computer, every phone, every TV, etc on the planet." Such a concept was really pretty unimaginable. This was just an effort to get an efficient, interoperable network for linking big institutions.
So when IPs first started being handed out it was done inefficently. If you were real big, you got a Class A (/8, 16 million), if you were moderately sized a Class B (/16, 65 thousand) if you were small you got a Class C (/24, 256). Companies like AT&T and IBM got entire Class As for themselves. Most of that went to US entities, since they were the only ones who could get on at the time. ARPANET and some of the other research networks like NSFNET that started all this were only for research institutions and public entities. So only universities, research labs (like SRI), the military, and companies involved in the research could get on and thus get addresses.
Yes, yes, all bad in hindsight but who knew the Internet would become what it has? It also is just how shit goes. You invent something, you get to have it your way.
Neil Degrasse Tyson calls it "naming rights" and shows how it happens when various cultures are on the top of their game R&D wise. The US invented the Internet, so they got to have things like .gov for their government sites. The US invented the telephone system so they get 1 as their country code. The British invented the post office so they don't have to put their country on stamps, everyone else does.
The Internet shows a lot of slant towards the US because it started there, and developed most fully there first. The US by far had (and still has) the most advanced Internet infrastructure. The invented it, they were there first and best, that is why it is theirs in many ways.
And you think the ISPs care about your ability to run Bittorrent? I assure you the vast majority of them wish that protocol had never been invented. :-)
Bullshit.
I actually enable individual users to share their data, creating crowd-sourced systems.
1. Individual users have and will continue to have real IP addresses. Their toasters and refrigerators do not. Single IP address is sufficient for peer to peer communication, as countless products (that actually work) had shown.
No, absoultely incorrect. Out of IPs means OUT OF IPs... It means in some part of the world you may not even see a single address to run any servers of any kind... What you will get is a shared IP on a CGN with all incoming requests silently discarded by the ISP CGN... This will be reality for countless millions in the developing world in the next few years.
Scarcity principle at work sure, but the internet routing doesn't work nicely when networks start getting hugely segregated. If you start having thousands of different random IPs assigned to a provider rather than thousands of consecutive ones it leads to routing table madness. This barrier will likely prevent the cost skyrocketing quite as much as you imagine.
And why do they own ICANN, and most of the critical infrastructure? Because they got there first.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
Not really, X.25 networks had gone global (International Packet Switch Stream) at a time the Internet was still purely an American toy. The Internet became global because the rest of the world had got there first - hardware-wise, at least. All the early transatlantic links were IPSS lines re-purposed, as was all the early European Internet capability. The Americans got the software side first.
Since the modern Internet is a marriage between software and hardware, and not one or the other alone, the only fair conclusion is that it was a global invention with no nation being able to claim credit for being truly first.
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)
http://www.apnic.net/publications/news/2011/final-8
They are not allocating ipv4 to anyone but new ISPs and for IPv6 transition purposes. You cannot get IPv4 if for normal use if you are an existing account holder. Even if you are eligible the most you get is 4 /24s.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I love how decades later and faced with now total exhaustion people on slashdot are still claiming this isn't a problem. Cue the "we can simply use NAT" posts.
In a world where there are still installations running WordStar under CP/M (there are) you will never see V4 go away. Not in your lifetime, not in your kids lifetime, not in their kids lifetime.
Need Mercedes parts ?
A /22 is pretty much nothing, so what you're saying is that an ISP looking for addresses can get pretty much nothing from APNIC. Thus, they're basically out.
A /22 is probably enough for a moderate-sized ISP to run NAT for all of their customers. Which is the point: IPv4 addresses are being rationed to the point where end users won't be able to get them any more. That's not *quite* the same thing as being out. IPv6 transition won't be mandatory, as long as you can do everything you want to do from behind NAT (as most users can).
A /22 is pretty much nothing, so what you're saying is that an ISP looking for addresses can get pretty much nothing from APNIC. Thus, they're basically out.
A /22 is probably enough for a moderate-sized ISP to run NAT for all of their customers. Which is the point: IPv4 addresses are being rationed to the point where end users won't be able to get them any more. That's not *quite* the same thing as being out. IPv6 transition won't be mandatory, as long as you can do everything you want to do from behind NAT (as most users can).
NAT destroys the peer to peer nature of the network. It limits who can run servers of any type to those who are outside NAT.
Using NAT at the ISP level is basicly evil and should not be considered when we are going to need to deploy IPv6 anyway.
Unfortunately it's wrong in some places. Like listing the limitations based on the use of bittorrent. Bittorrent won't work if everyone in the swarm is NAT'd. NAT was the poor man's firewall for years because it hides the hosts. P2P can't work if everyone is hidden. There are some tricks that may work, but generally the actual number of people per address is higher than he indicated.
Additionally, if you read the article, they report that they are allowing 1000 addresses to new ISPs. If you can't set up a NAT-based ISP with 1000 addresses, then you shouldn't be setting up an ISP at all. You won't run out of addresses. In fact, there's nothing (other than violating the RFCs, which are as optional as the pirate laws) which would prevent you from setting up an entire ISP with millions of customers using one and only one public IP assigned to your equipment (the rest given RFC 1918 addresses). And even then, most often when you uplink you get the IP address from the carrier you uplink with. That leaves you with 1024 addresses to use for NAT (well, 1022 or less, depending on subnetting).
As such, his idealized 1200 per IP is probably closer to reality than his 100-200 number expecting everyone will be running P2P. So with 100 per IP, the worst case, they'll be able to handle 100,000 users. With the more realistic 1200, there can be more than a million users. They have more than 16k of those to give out, for a total amount of support with nat of 20 billion users. Oh, and if the worst-case 100 is used, that's still more than a billion people that could be supported on what's left there.
So yes, they are out, but it isn't the crisis of collapse yet.
Learn to love Alaska
It's necessary. There are still a lot of IPv4-only servers out there (like, for example, slashdot.org). If you deploy a v6-only network, then your users can't connect to them. You need something like NAT64 to allow v6 users to participate in the Internet. It's not a permanent solution, but it's better than just letting them communicate with the 0.02% of Internet hosts that have native IPv6 support...
Slashdot doesn't need more IP addresses, it already have enough IPv4 addresses. In any case we would likely get a better signal to noise ratio if slashdor was IPv6 only.
IPv4 has auto-configuration. It's not very good, and doesn't work for actually giving you a usable computer, but it was intended so that people setting up a LAN could do so without having a DHCP server. But in practice, people just use static addressing instead...
Learn to love Alaska
Yeah, while I hate being the part of the internet to first go through the crunch (though I've seen this coming for years), I am happy that IPv6 is finally going to be pushed through. Now that the Great Address Space Crunch is here!
I don't like your definition of out, since that's like saying "There's food in this cage, you can't eat it, but you're not out of food". To the hungry person, their effective quantity of available food, is nothing. Additionally, if we then implement APNIC's policy "Okay, it's not that you can't eat it. But we're going to give a tiny portion, to a few people, every now and then, such that this food may last an amazingly long time". By your measure, IPv4 may never run out. Sure, we can't get any more addresses, but there are addresses there, so, we're not out... right?
Their policy is to keep these allocations small, to provide for IPv4 to IPv6 services, so they are rationed out, this means that, IPv4 may NEVER run out, because by the time they go to allocate the last /22, which might be quite a long time from now (due to how slow this pool will drop), then IPv6 may be implemented and demand for IPv4 may dwindle.
But by your measure, we're not out. Sure, we're starving, but we're not out of food, it's just in that cage over there.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Yeah, my Pentium says the same thing.
Local music(to upstate NY). http://gnarfel.com/ radio.