RIPE Region Runs Out of IPv4 Addresses

The internet is full. Go away. by plover · 2012-09-14 03:40 · Score: 5, Funny

Don't we already have enough people on the internet? Why do we keep encouraging more? :-)

Note: to all you humor-impaired people, the smiley face indicates this is a JOKE.

--
John

Re:The internet is full. Go away. by daem0n1x · 2012-09-14 03:55 · Score: 2

I see a huge business opportunity!
1. Fuck IPv6. Let's keep the IP addresses a rare and highly desired commodity;
2. Charge an exorbitant fee every time a DHCP request is serviced;
3. Profit!
Re:The internet is full. Go away. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-14 04:12 · Score: 2

Wasn't Iran going to build their own Persian Intranet? Surely they have a few IPv4 addresses that can now be returned to the pool.
Re:The internet is full. Go away. by jonadab · 2012-09-14 06:25 · Score: 3, Informative

> 1. Fuck IPv6. Let's keep the IP addresses a rare and highly desired commodity;
> 2. Charge an exorbitant fee every time a DHCP request is serviced;
> 3. Profit!

The problem with this is, IPv4 addresses are not rare. They're not anything like rare. There are approximately ten thousand times as many of them as are actually needed.

We only ran out because they were systematically over-allocated, handed out like free candy, based purely on requests, with no regard for actual need or common sense. My employer, for example, currently has more _unused_ global IPv4 address than we have employees. Our upstream provider did not even inquire how many addresses we needed or even wanted; they just handed us a block of the things. Something like 80% of the allocated global IPv4 addresses are not currently being used on the public internet.

More to the point, in excess of 99.9% of the public IPv4 addresses that *are* actually being used on the public internet, in the sense of packets actually traversing public networks to or from systems assigned those addresses, aren't *needed*, because they're being used strictly for the client side of client/server networking (mostly in the form of DNS, HTTP, and HTTPS) and would if anything be better off behind NAT (because it would reduce the risk of worms, and there's no downside for systems that are not servers and do not actually need peer-to-peer, i.e., most home systems and virtually all business desktops).

IPv6 is not a solution to this problem. If we allocate IPv6 addresses the way we have allocated IPv4 addresses, we'll run out of them in just a few more years. Then what? IPv8, with 1024-bit addresses, so we can start allocating entire /256 blocks and run out again?

The correct solution is to stop allocating public IP addresses that aren't needed. This can easily be done by charging a *small* amount (per month or per annum) for each address. Honestly, as many addresses as there are available, a dollar a month retail, marked up from less than half that in bulk, would be more than enough to charge. That way people can go ahead and get addresses they *might* actually need and not feel too bad about the expense, but it's enough to keep most people from grabbing ridiculously more addresses than they could ever possibly find a use for, as has been the case so far.

When people sign up for the internet at home, the ISP can ask, "For an extra dollar a month, do you want a public IPv4 address for peer-to-peer networking or to access your computer remotely from another location?" Most people will say no and can go behind NAT. Small businesses, instead of getting a /24 just because they can, can get as many addresses as they actually need for their servers plus one NAT gateway to service all the desktops. (Business desktops *need* to be behind some kind of hardware firewall or gateway anyway, for security reasons. There's no reason it can't do NAT as well -- the extra 0.002% of CPU cycles will put the electric bill up by, what, three cents a month?) Large international megacorporations, similarly, instead of nabbing a /8 for each major national subdivision of their company just because it costs almost nothing to do so, can scale down their allocation request to something more in keeping with what they might potentially actually need.

I believe this will naturally happen over the next few years (assuming IPv6 adoption goes about as far as I think it will). Nothing particular needs to be done (other than perhaps the usual anti-trust stuff in areas where competition between ISPs is artificially restricted e.g. by only one local phone company being allowed to maintain lines). The situation will sort itself out. ISPs that try to charge completely unreasonable fees for public IP addresses will go out of business, because people will just go find another ISP (assuming there's another ISP to go find -- see previous note about anti-trust issues). ISPs that charge too little (which I think would just about have to be nothing at all) will run out of addresses to allocate. Sorted.

--
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Re:The internet is full. Go away. by joostje · 2012-09-14 06:44 · Score: 5, Informative

The problem with this is, IPv4 addresses are not rare. They're not anything like rare. There are approximately ten thousand times as many of them as are actually needed.
Well, with only 32 bits of address space, that's only 4,294,967,296 possible addresses, and there are already more people on the planet. We do need more.
Re:The internet is full. Go away. by shutdown+-p+now · 2012-09-14 08:28 · Score: 3, Insightful

Fuck NAT. Don't you dare preach that ugly hack as the Right Way to solve the problem.
Re:The internet is full. Go away. by Pseudonym+Authority · 2012-09-14 08:44 · Score: 2, Informative

NAT
Stopped reading right there. NATs break the internet at a fundamental level and make any peer-to-peer technologies unworkable without retardedly complicated security holes. No, no, no, this is a terrible idea and you should feel terrible for having it.
Re:The internet is full. Go away. by Dahamma · 2012-09-14 09:48 · Score: 2, Informative

IPv6 is not a solution to this problem. If we allocate IPv6 addresses the way we have allocated IPv4 addresses, we'll run out of them in just a few more years.
You make some good points, but this one is just silly. I think 10^38 IP addresses will last more than a few years, even if given out excessively. That's about 2 IP addresses for each cell in the human body for the entire world population. It's a big number.
Re:The internet is full. Go away. by Electricity+Likes+Me · 2012-09-14 20:14 · Score: 2

Seriously, NAT was a problem 10 years ago in the IRC age. My first exposure to it was trying to figure out why the hell I could chat to people but not send/receive files. I can only dream of how much better the general experience of using the internet might get for people if P2P would "just work".

time to do... something by alphatel · 2012-09-14 03:41 · Score: 5, Funny

I will soon run out of underwear (I have been told this since 2009). I still have not done anything about it despite holes in them. Count on my continued responsiveness to this problem.

--
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.

Re:time to do... something by petermgreen · 2012-09-14 04:39 · Score: 2

The trouble is there has been a chicken and egg problem.
The internet is mostly a network of buisnesses (with the occasional academic network thrown in). Some of those buisnesses sell service to other buisnesses and consumers, some just use it to support their main buisness.
There is basically no benefit and significant cost to an buisness in deploying dual stack while v6 only nodes are basically unheard of.
You can't really deploy v6 only nodes while there are a significant number of v4 only nodes*
So for each individual buisness (whether ISP or user) that makes up the internet the rational thing to do was to sit and wait and hope others would take the costs of being early adoptors of IPv6.
*unless you use something like NAT64 or DS-lite but if nodes were ok with being behind those they would probablly also be ok with being behind NAT44 so the only real benefit to doing it would be if your internal network was massive.

--
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register

IPv6? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-14 03:41 · Score: 2, Funny

There is no such thing as IPv6. Once we run out of IPv4 addresses, the internet will implode and everything will be lost.

The rapture is here!

Re:IPv6? by Dave+Whiteside · 2012-09-14 03:49 · Score: 2

2112 - end of the world!
oh wait

--
who where what when now?
Re:IPv6? by Blue+Stone · 2012-09-14 04:46 · Score: 4, Funny

>The rapture is here!
It's the IPocalypse!

--
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Re:IPv6? by kasperd · 2012-09-14 06:43 · Score: 3, Insightful

And since I'm running a small webserver from home, which I presume will remain IP4 indefinitely, what's the easiest way to tell if somebody with an IP6 address can access it?
If you don't know the answer to that question, then the answer is no. You need to actually update your DNS records for the domain to include an AAAA record with your IPv6 address. Without that record an IPv6 only client will have no way of even trying to reach your domain. So, you need to get an IPv6 address, and then put that IPv6 record in DNS. If your Internet provider doesn't provide IPv6, then you have three options. Use a tunnel (tunnelbroker.net is the one I have the best experience with), switch to a better Internet provider, or wait for your current Internet provider to catch up.

Users who have both IPv4 and IPv6 will be able to reach your website, even if your website only has IPv4. The users, which will experience problems, are those who have only IPv6. There is still a couple of ways ISPs can make those users reach your site, but they involve NAT, which will reduce the reliability. Those NAT solutions come in two flavours. There are the CGN solutions, which are just doing IPv4 and work similar to the typical NAT people have at home, just at a larger scale. The other option is NAT64, where the NAT translates between IPv6 and IPv4.

--

Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?

Recyle Recyle Recyle.... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-14 03:42 · Score: 2, Interesting

Time to crackdown and revoke/reclaim IP's

Re:Recyle Recyle Recyle.... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-14 03:47 · Score: 5, Insightful

or, you know, just use ipv6.
Re:Recyle Recyle Recyle.... by Kjella · 2012-09-14 03:59 · Score: 2

Time to crackdown and revoke/reclaim IP's
So there's 7 billion people and 4 billion IP addresses, how'd that work even if you could reclaim every range and achieve perfect routing and perfect efficiency meaning you couldn't be online at home or at work and on the phone at the same time. You'd just run into the same problem a little bit down the road as another billion people go online. Pretty soon there won't be any other choice.

--
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Re:Recyle Recyle Recyle.... by firex726 · 2012-09-14 04:02 · Score: 2

Yea, some still use apps written for IE6 and haven't moved since.
Redoing their network to accept IPv6 is not going to be high on their priority.
Re:Recyle Recyle Recyle.... by Kjella · 2012-09-14 04:33 · Score: 2

You blindly assume that everyone online on the net needs a seperate IP address. But that is clearly wrong. The place where I work has only 16 public IP addresses, yet there are about 500 PCs buzzing along with people surfing and mailing.
Considering that we're about 2.3 billion people online and we're already talking about running out, we're using considerably more than 1 IP/person today. And if the entire world eventually reach North American penetration rates there's another 3 billion coming online. And most now believe the world population will peak at 10 billion so there's another 2.3 billion as well. Yes, with enough NAT you could probably make it sort of work but it'd be the end of the Internet as we know it. Only ISPs, big companies and people with way too much money would have a public IP that others could talk to. The rest could only access Facebook and YouTube and such via NAT.

--
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings

Not unexpected by SmilingBoy · 2012-09-14 03:43 · Score: 2

I hope that this will serve as another incentive to move to IPv6. Allocations by RIPE NCC have already been very conservative over the last year (only allowing you to apply for new IPv4 space for three months of growth), so by the end of the year, there will be a real squeeze at the final customer level. I am lucky in that my ISP provides both IPv4 and native IPv6, so I will not be affected, but very few people are in such a position.

Re:Not unexpected by Cimexus · 2012-09-14 03:57 · Score: 4, Interesting

Yeah agreed. I've been on native IPv6 (dual stack, obviously) for, hmm, approaching two years now (I'm in the APNIC area so they ran out of IPv4 a while ago) and honestly I'm only reminded of the fact when someone brings IPv6 up in an article or something. The changeover was easy from the user's perspective - it just works. Indeed I suspect many users of my ISP don't even know they are on IPv6.
The resistance and heel-dragging on the changeover in many places/companies is a bit mystifying to me. It's not really that hard.
Re:Not unexpected by Kjella · 2012-09-14 04:17 · Score: 2

Yeah agreed. I've been on native IPv6 (dual stack, obviously) for, hmm, approaching two years now (I'm in the APNIC area so they ran out of IPv4 a while ago) and honestly I'm only reminded of the fact when someone brings IPv6 up in an article or something. The changeover was easy from the user's perspective - it just works. Indeed I suspect many users of my ISP don't even know they are on IPv6. The resistance and heel-dragging on the changeover in many places/companies is a bit mystifying to me. It's not really that hard.
Well as long as you are on dual stack you have an IPv4 address for everything that needs an IPv4 address, but it doesn't solve anything as no more people can run that than there are IPv4 addresses. How much would cease to work if you went IPv6 only? Because that's the only Internet connection they can offer soon. And if you don't see the problem you don't know the average company's pile of legacy/custom code that will all assume it's using IPv4 and nothing else that nobody knows or the vendor will charge a ton to fix. To rip out all the IPv4 code and go IPv6 you'd need another coding frenzy like y2k, and your chances to conjure that kind of doomsday scenario is nil. IPv4 was so good that there's now decades of old code that will assume an IP is always a dotted quad and can fit in 4 bytes. Nobody wants to be the one who breaks production systems just to go IPv6 for no tangible reason.

--
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Re:Not unexpected by Cimexus · 2012-09-14 04:25 · Score: 2

Well you're right of course - when they truly run out of IPv4, those that get connected after that date will only be able to 'see' the IPv6 portions of the internet. Which is why it's important that we get at least ~most~ of the net running IPv6 before that happens. Currently let's face it, most stuff is still IPv4 only (although the major sites - Google, Facebook, anything served from Akamai etc. are all nicely dual stacked now, and I'm noticing it increasing rapidly ... my router reports approx 15% of my total traffic is now native IPv6; a year ago it was ~1%)
And yeah I know what you mean about legacy code in companies...that's a big issue that everyone will have to deal with. But I was more referring to first getting ISPs and residential/home users up and running on IPv6 - they are much easier since all modern OSes, browsers, phones etc. support it. And increasing consumer/residential connections is the main reason for IPv4 exhaustion (rapid uptake of connections in Asia particularly), so if we can deal with that side of it, it leaves companies that need to remain dual-stacked for legacy reasons with that much more time to deal with the situation.
Re:Not unexpected by marcosdumay · 2012-09-14 05:00 · Score: 2

How much would cease to work if you went IPv6 only?
Less than what ceases to work by going in a NAT.
That's because nobody will go IPv6 only, they'll go IPv6 and get behind a IPv4 NAT. Well, at least the lucky ones will, others will have only the NAT.

--
Rethinking email
Re:Not unexpected by Lennie · 2012-09-14 07:09 · Score: 2, Informative

Here is a list of what works and does not work with CGN:
What NAT444 Breaks
We are left with a number of applications (and application types) that currently break when Large Scale NAT is introduced. To avoid the doom and gloom feeling that is sure to follow a list of just the broken stuff, let’s start with a list of what isn’t broken by NAT444/LSN:
Web browsing
Email
FTP download
Small files
BitTorrent and Limewire
Leeching (download)
Skype video and voice calls
Instant messaging
Facebook and Twitter chat
Not too shabby really, all things considered. That is quite a bit of functionality for being behind a fairly large kludge. If that were the end of the story I wouldn’t have written this article though. So, without further adieu, here is the list you’ve been waiting for; what NAT444 breaks:
FTP download
Large files
BitTorrent and Limewire
Seeding (upload)
On-line gaming
Xbox
PlayStation
Etc.
Video streaming
Hulu
Netflix
Slingcatcher
Etc.
Webcam
Remote viewing
Tunneling
6to4
Teredo
Etc.
VPN & Encryption
IPSec
SSL
VoIP
Limited ALG/SIP support
All custom applications with the IP embedded
Lack of ALGs
Wow, is it just me or is that list a bit longer? There’s that doom and gloom feeling creeping up.
http://chrisgrundemann.com/index.php/2011/nat444-cgn-lsn-breaks/

--
New things are always on the horizon

Personally? by kiriath · 2012-09-14 03:44 · Score: 5, Funny

I'm going to wait it out and skip straight from IPv4 to IPv8... IPv6 could be the Windows Vista of the IP world.

Re:Personally? by SJHillman · 2012-09-14 03:52 · Score: 4, Funny

Why not just use IPv9
RFC 1606: http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1606.txt
Re:Personally? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-14 03:56 · Score: 2, Informative

Actually, that was IPv5... so you see, you're the guy who skipped windows xp, vista, and windows 7, jumping straight into the broken windows 8 era.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv5
Re:Personally? by rickb928 · 2012-09-14 04:17 · Score: 2

Windows 8 is not broken. It will work as designed.

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deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Re:Personally? by marcosdumay · 2012-09-14 05:01 · Score: 2

That's a non-sequitur.
"It works as designed" does not imply "It's not broken".

--
Rethinking email
Re:Personally? by kasperd · 2012-09-14 07:59 · Score: 2

Which reminds me, whatever happened to IPv1, IPv2 and IPv3?
They are mostly forgotten. It is possible to find the version 2 specification on the web. It does differ en some important ways. For example back then the separation between IP and TCP had not yet happened. So the specification is actually called TCP version 2. The IP and TCP fields were not as clearly separated, and the version number was not even the first field in the packet. It is a bit tricky to find out what the version number is when its location depend on the version number. That is probably also the reason it isn't officially allocated in the registry.

I predict, that if there is ever going to be a successor to IPv6, there will be a worry that the version numbers will run out. Thus it will be decided to introduce a variable length version number field to ensure that never runs out. An agreement will only be reached after a heated discussion. The problem is, that people have an aversion against variable length fields in the IP header. And that aversion people have for a good reason. It is OK to change the length of fields between version. And some people will have a hard time understanding, that this means the version field itself can be variable length without problems, because within each version it is a fixed value and thus fixed length.

--

Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?

that's like five better by Thud457 · 2012-09-14 03:50 · Score: 2

Wouldn't you rather wait for IPv11 ?

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the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Re:spammers by doshell · 2012-09-14 03:59 · Score: 4, Interesting

Sigh. We've been over this countless times. Even if you managed to reclaim all IPv4 ranges that are not being completely used presently, you would buy yourself only a few more months (at current growth rates) until you ran out of addresses again.

I seriously have a hard time trying to understand why so many people on Slashdot seem to be militantly against IPv6. You'd expect more of an allegedly technologically literate audience.

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Score: i, Imaginary

Re:spammers by firex726 · 2012-09-14 04:08 · Score: 2

I doubt it'd help much.

Most spammers don't sit on a single range for a long time, it'd be easy as pie to block. Speaking with first hand experience they'll get some low end basic server/VPS, and multiple IPs across multiple ranges then spam as much as they can till they are caught by the DC or get the ranges blocked.

It's a big red flag when someone asks for a lot of IPs on a low end servers. Either they are a spammer or don't know what they are doing.

DC does not like it since you now have multiple ranges which are blocked by many ISPs and won't be usable by future clients, since there is often a good bit of red tape to get them unblocked and even then it's up to the ISPs discretion.

Re:spammers by omglolbah · 2012-09-14 04:16 · Score: 2

The time wouldnt be used for that though, it would be used to delay the rollout of ipv6.

Just like every excuse out there has been used... sigh

All cool sites are already running IPv6. by Mikaelk · 2012-09-14 04:23 · Score: 5, Informative

Like youtube, google, facebook and slashdot.
ok, all except slashdot.

I have the solution by Compaqt · 2012-09-14 04:23 · Score: 2

Party-line IP addresses

Yeah, sure, sometimes you might be trying to access /., and end up at teletubbies.com, but, hey, recycling.

--
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog

Re:spammers by JackieBrown · 2012-09-14 04:24 · Score: 2

The problem is we have been hearing we only have a few months left for years now.

Re:spammers by Nofsck+Ingcloo · 2012-09-14 04:29 · Score: 3, Funny

I guess the reason I'm dragging my heels is my complete mystification and annoyance that the designers of IPV6 didn't do something sensible like make some small corner of the V6 address space map to the V4 address space. So instead of being simple and seamless, I have to spend some time fooling around with my equipemnt and software to work around that omission. A pox on the designer's heads.

Re:Why aren't we on IPv6 yet? by Midnight+Thunder · 2012-09-14 04:45 · Score: 3, Interesting

This is something the ISPs, the upstreams, well the big guys in general have to do. As an end user I couldn't care less.

As an end user you shouldn't have to care, but when the upstream guys haven't done their work and you can't access newpopularsoscialsite.com, which is IPv6 only, then you start getting annoyed and start trawling the net to see why things are broken. The problem is many of up the stream guys, at least in North America, have dropped the ball and aren't even offering options for techs who do care and are interested in being early adopters of native IPv6. Just don't get me started on some of the incompetent replies I have got from some ISPs.

As a savvy end user, for my home network, I will want to continue to use NAT or something equivalent. I don't want my printer, my desktop, my laptop and my phone that connect to the WiFi to have an externally approachable address.

If you configure your devices to only use link-local IPv6 addresses, then there is no reason they will be seen by the outside world. Even then, with a routable IPv6 address you can configure you firewall rules to only expose certain devices to the internet. In the IPv6 world the firewall will be your friend and I believe as it becomes a more important component people will work out ways of making it simpler to configure.

--
Jumpstart the tartan drive.

We don't need IPv6! by Andrio · 2012-09-14 04:48 · Score: 2

Having 4.8×10^28 IP addresses for each person is just plain superfluous. We have about 7 billion, and IPv4 gives us some 4.3 billion IP addresses. So, the solution is obvious. We just need to double the IPs of IPv4, and we'll have everyone covered. We can do that by simply creating a second internet.

Problem solved.

--
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.

Re:Why aren't we on IPv6 yet? by Cimexus · 2012-09-14 04:51 · Score: 2

My ISP's done all the above (been using native IPv6 for >2 years), and you're right ... done properly it's transparent to the end user and everything just works as it always has. It was done as an opt-in trial for the first year or so (you just changed your PPP login details from user@isp.net to user@ipv6.isp.net). Then after ironing out any issues, they just turned it on for all new customers by default. The sky hasn't fallen in.

In fact I forget all about IPv6 most of the time, only to be occasionally reminded when I ping/tracert stuff:

C:\>ping www.google.com

Pinging www.google.com [2404:6800:4006:801::1012] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 2404:6800:4006:801::1012: time=11ms Reply from 2404:6800:4006:801::1012: time=11ms Reply from 2404:6800:4006:801::1012: time=10ms Reply from 2404:6800:4006:801::1012: time=10ms

Ping statistics for 2404:6800:4006:801::1012: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 10ms, Maximum = 11ms, Average = 10ms

But yeah, my ISP is in the minority and like you I wonder - why is this the case?

Re:spammers by kasperd · 2012-09-14 04:57 · Score: 2

If IPv4 addresses were used at 100% efficiency

100% efficiency is unrealistic. Once the HD-ratio reaches 80-90% the administrative overhead and routing overhead becomes problematic. I think IPv4 by now has been pushed over 90%, and the problems are showing. With 32 bit addresses an HD ratio of 90% means we can effectively use about 29 bits. In terms of addresses, IPv4 has about 3.7 billion addresses (once you take into account, that some are reserved). Now raise that to the power of 0.9 to find out how many you can use at a 90% HD ratio. 3700000000^0.9=408678275. So just over 400 million devices at 90% efficiency.

There may be people who tell you, that 90% efficiency would mean 3700000000*0.9. Those who says that, do not understand the problems they are talking about. HD ratio indicates how efficiently the bits in the addresses are used and not the number of addresses themselves. And the HD ratio turns out to be a much better measure to predict what is feasible.

--

Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?

Re:spammers by SmilingBoy · 2012-09-14 04:58 · Score: 4, Informative

Bullshit. I have followed IPv4 exhaustion in detail for the last 5 years. The prediction was always that IPv4 will run out at the global level between 2010 and 2013 (it happened in February 2011), and run out at the regional level in the years after that (it happened in April 2011 in Asia-Pacific and today in Europe-Middle East). So no surprises at all. If you are a European ISP, and you stuck to the rules of RIPE NCC, you now have IPv4 stocks that should satisfy your growth needs for the next three months. After that, you cannot grow your network anymore without resorting to the mess that CGN is.

Re:spammers by SmilingBoy · 2012-09-14 05:01 · Score: 4, Informative

Guess what, they did: ::FFFF:111.222.111.222 is IPv6 for 111.222.111.222. But you still need to "fool around" with equipment because there is no way that an IPv4-only device can address an IPv6 device.

Re:spammers by timftbf · 2012-09-14 05:22 · Score: 2

No, it isn't. It's easy. *Everything* is a /64 unless you have a really good reason why not. You should get at least a /56 for each site, for anything remotely "business-grade" a /48. You really don't have to care about numbers of hosts at all - start thinking in terms of what *networks* you need, how many of them, what your *subnet* addressing plan should look like...

It's not just more bits, it's a mindset-shift in how you design networks.

Re:spammers by doshell · 2012-09-14 05:27 · Score: 4, Insightful

I don't know where you get that IPv6 is a "full protocol rewrite" of IPv4. For the most part it does exactly the same as IPv4 except with more address bits, and in some cases it even simplifies its predecessor (e.g. no IP header checksum). Any person able to understand or implement IPv4 ought to be able to understand or implement IPv6, because there are no fundamentally new concepts. (I would venture that most people who criticise IPv6 don't even understand fully what IPv4 does, so they don't really know what they're talking about.)

I am also interested in hearing what a "simple extension of IPv4" would be, in your opinion. Odds are you will propose something to the tune of keeping the original IPv4 header and semantics, and tacking some extra address bits at the end. Except in that case you'd still have to teach every fucking router and end system in the world how to decode the new-fangled packets, which is not any different from IPv6 from a cost perspective. You might as well do it right and fix some of IPv4's warts (header checksum, autoconfiguration, node mobility, etc) instead of applying a band-aid solution.

NAT is hardly an acceptable extension of the IPv4 addressing space because NATted clients do not have the same capabilities of non-NATted clients. (Yes, I know about hole-punching techniques; they do not solve the problem fully, and in respect to what they do, they are defeated by many real-world NAT implementations.) If you don't understand the importance of this, I encourage you to read about the end-to-end principle. Finally, it is ludicrous to suggest that implementing NAT at the scale that will be required by the ever-growing Internet would be any cheaper than IPv6. Carrier-grade NAT doesn't exactly come for free.

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Score: i, Imaginary

Re:spammers by grumbel · 2012-09-14 05:38 · Score: 4, Insightful

how much longer would they have?

We currently use around 12 class A networks per year of which there are only 255 in total (many of which are unrelocatable due to being reserved for localhost, multicast and so on) . Whenever you hear people complaining about IBM or whoever holding a large chunk of IP addresses, that refers to a single class A network. So getting IBM, HP or Xerox to restructure their network and give back their IPs would buy you one month each time. There aren't a whole lot of companies holding class A networks, so you could at maximum get probably 2 years or so, realistically much less.

A little extra time to shake out the bugs from any infrastructure upgrade seems couldn't hurt, too.

We already had 14 years to do that, another one or two won't make a difference. IPv6 doesn't need time, it needs something that forces people to make the switch, running out of IPv4 seems to slowly building up to be that force.

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RIPE Region Runs Out of IPv4 Addresses

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