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ARIN Is Down To the Last /8 of IPv4 Addresses
An anonymous reader writes "On 3 February 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) issued the remaining five /8 address blocks, each containing 16.7 million addresses, in the global free pool equally to the five RIRs, and as such ARIN is no longer able to receive additional IPv4 resources from the IANA. After yesterday's large allocation (104.64.0.0/10) to Akamai, the address pool remaining to be assigned by ARIN is now down to the last /8. This triggers stricter allocation rules and marks the end of general availability of new IPv4 addresses in North America. ARIN thus follows the RIRs of Asia, Europe and South America into the final phase of IPv4 depletion."
They've been talking about this day for what seems like an eternity... Finally, we can start complaining about something else!
Pretty outrageous that the whole of North America has to go on a diet earlier because Akamai somehow needs a whole fucking /10.
ARIN's behavior has made it clear: you can get all the IPs you want as long as you're a big guy paying big fees. But a small company asking for a /22? Go away, small businesses don't deserve to be able to do business.
Now capitalism kicks in and people start buying and selling spare IP4 addresses.
Kinda like that other thing they ain't making any more of....land.
It's going to be interesting to see this year.
There's no place like ::1
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Years back, my boss got a whole class C for a company with ~5 employees and network footprint nothing more than one website. Maybe they can get some of the corporations with class As to give some back? (yeah yeah I know)
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
What comes first, a widespread NATed internet or IPv6?
285 million addresses reserved for no compelling reason. sure, let's push onwards to ipv6, but saying "our hands are tied" when over 1/16th of the entire space is still available is a bit irritating.
The IPv4 address exhaustion is a useful case study in human behavior in response to resource exhaustion.
http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html
Relevant quote: "Remember our conclusion from the cartoon of one person per square meter; we concluded that zero population growth is going to happen. Let’s state that conclusion in other terms and say it’s obvious nature is going to choose from the right hand list and we don't have to do anything—except be prepared to live with whatever nature chooses from that right hand list. Or we can exercise the one option that’s open to us, and that option is to choose first from the right hand list. We gotta find something here we can go out and campaign for. Anyone here for promoting disease? (audience laughter)"
In this case, fortunately, it's extremely unlikely that violence and death will occur as a result of this specific resource exhaustion, but the study of human behavior in response to the resource shortage is telling.
We've been aware for years that zero IPv4 address availability is going to happen. It's absolutely certain. The only way to make it not happen, or not *care* that it happens, is to do something about the problem. But of course, even for such a technically manageable problem, humanity on the whole chooses to do nothing. The exact same thing will happen for fossil fuel exhaustion, arable land exhaustion, etc.
And now nature will choose for us from the right-hand list of IPv4 exhaustion: here comes corporate greed, lawsuits, slow and inconvenient CGNs (one bad actor in your ISP's network causes you to be banned from the services you use), etc.
Humans are hard-wired to be reactionary, not proactive -- and at that, only reactionary to immediate problems. "Oh, I can't get a new IPv4 address. What do I do?" or "Oh, I can get a new IPv4 address, but it's too expensive. What do I do?" -- These are the kinds of things we will start thinking about, and making people start to care. NOT "Oh, we better deal with this problem that is likely to happen in 5 years."
As flawed as we are, it's probably a good thing that we won't survive long enough to leave our solar system and populate the cosmos. We don't deserve it. We're just too *dumb* as a species.
It didn't matter whether it was last year or next...IP usage was accelerating into the wall anyway. The GOOD part about this is that now the US is out of addresses certain parts of the Internet industry are more likely to take IPv6 seriously.
Sadly, ISPs in other parts of the world have proven adept at further avoiding the problem by downgrading consumer connections to carrier-grade NAT, so we have another 5 years of eking out of old order before people REALLY have to take notice.
NAT works great, no issues here [Ducks!]
Kidding guys :)
We're running out of free ones. And like any freely available resource, they've been squandered. Once the free supply is exhausted, they'll simply no longer be free - meaning that actual incentive will exist to conserve them and organizations will have incentive to sell unneeded blocks. Economics 101, people.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Now that addresses have run out, they have become a valuable resource for the ISPs that own them. If those ISPs implement IPv6 then there will be no shortage of addresses, and they will lose all their value.
So the monopolist ISPs will now do everything in their power to prevent IPv6 from being adopted.
I doubt the organizations with those large blocks will sell them unless they become very expensive (which I don't think will happen for a long time). The costs of restructuring the network for a lot of these companies would far outweigh the gains.
What I see as far more likely is ISPs implementing carrier grade NAT as the default, and potentially charging a small fee for those who need a unique IP. The vast majority of users won't care, and as long as getting an IP if you run a game server or use skype or whatever is an easy process, it's actually not a bad solution. I figure we've got 10 years or so before we actually see IPv6 really take off.
We're running out of free ones. And like any freely available resource, they've been squandered. Once the free supply is exhausted, they'll simply no longer be free - meaning that actual incentive will exist to conserve them and organizations will have incentive to sell unneeded blocks. Economics 101, people.
Why would you choose that option when we have a way of bypassing it? Isn't progress generally about creating plenty? We have the ability to create plenty, and not have to deal with buying and selling IP addresses. Just because you can create a market doesn't mean you should.
Clearly we should have invested years ago in finding renewable sources of IP addresses...
There are no languages where grammar and pronounciation rules are completely consistent. Spanish and Indonesian come close with regards to grammar, and Dutch and Czech, when it comes to spelling vs. pronounciation, but there just is no language which is completely consistent. Even artificial languages like Esperanto have their inconsistencies.
Because there is a very high one-time-only cost involved in switching to ipv6, compared to a small running continuous cost of continuing in ipv4, and for now, it is advantageous to become in ipv4. No one wants to be the one to switch first.
Just think of all sort of problems large ISPs will have to deal in terms of support if they switch to ipv6, in terms of phone service, visits, substitution of cable modems, support for old machines running none/bogus ipv6 implementation.
Just think of all the programs coded years ago, with ipv4 hardwired in (I know 4to6, but your client does not).
Not easy as flick a switch.
I'm glad to know I'm not the only one using the universal Klapagorg measurement system!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
As flawed as we are, it's probably a good thing that we won't survive long enough to leave our solar system and populate the cosmos. We don't deserve it. We're just too *dumb* as a species.
How is anyone supposed to take a person like this seriously?
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
So let's finally move on to IPv6. ISPs, I'm looking at you.
I refuse to sign
Most of the ISPs I've dealt with here in Canada do not offer routable IPv6 allocations to users. They certainly don't readily offer static ones for business use like they do with IPv4.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
$ host -t aaaa slashdot.org
slashdot.org has no AAAA record
You brightened my day.
Except this still won't fix the fact that v4 is simply too small.
so we have another 5 years of eking out of old order before people REALLY have to take notice.
Possiblly much more than that.
XP and andriod 2.x are dying. They aren't dead yet but in a few years time their relavence will likely have declined to the level where website operators think it reasonable to stop supporting their default browsers. Once that happens we will be able to use SNI (and tell the holdouts still on XP to "use firefox or chrome damnit")
Once that happens it will be possible to put multiple SSL websites behind one IP reducing the IP demand on the hosting side. With end lusers put behind CGN, SSL web hosting running multiple sites per IP and basic VM hosting using front end load balancers to let them share IPv4 IPs it should be possible to keep IPv4 going for a long time.
One interesting question is what price will IPv4 addresses reach, currently it seems to vary from about $7-$25 per address depending on block size (http://ipv4auctions.bstocksolutions.com/)
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Here at DHCP, we're committed to providing only renewable and conflict-free IPs.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Why would you choose that option when we have a way of bypassing it?
Because people will do what is individally best for them, not what is best for the community as a whole.
If I want to run a server for the general public to access over the internet it needs to have an IPv4 address until such time as the vast majority of clients can reliablly access IPv6 servers (I would not consider teredo to be "reliable", it's overcomplicated and fights against NAT rather than working with it).
Similarly if I want my users to be able to access resources on the public internet I need IPv4 addresses for the intent side of my nat boxes until such time as the vast majority of servers are available on IPv6.
If I deploy IPv6 it will not change whether those systems need IPv4 addresses. To do that requires OTHER PEOPLE to deploy IPv6 which they are often unintertested in doing.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Hey! I thought the ipv4 address space was running out... hmmm.. guess not.
Or maybe the vendor in question are doing it to "justify" getting a larger allocation from the RIR, once IP space really runs out they can reconsider their policy.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
A large number of companies from all over the world set up shell companies in Africa.
Newer mobile phones should have been IPv6 from the beginning. China mandated that years ago. T-Mobile is IPv6. (You can supposedly open up an end to end IPv6 connection between two T-Mobile phones). It's suprising that the cellular phone companies didn't fix this, since they have control of both network and handset.
Bulgarian doesn't even note emphasis in the writing, and also not the length of the vowels, thus it doesn't have a fully written pronounciation. It is still possible to follow the full set of pronounciation rules in Bulgarian and still read a text completely non-understandable for a native speaker.
That is wrong, first thing we learnt in class was (and from my textbook):
Slashdot doesn't support unicode, so, I'll be using romanization
@ = er golyam
j = i kratko
"In both e- and i- verbs, there is a lack of correspondance between pronunciation and spelling in the "I" and "they" forms:
cheta', cheta't are pronounced as if written chet@', chet@'t; /subota/, is often pronounced /supta/ (u in these examples are IPA (ram-horn)
pi'ya, pi'yat are pronounced as if written pi'jo, pi'jot
"
In addition to other irregularities: s@bota, nominally
We're running out of free ones. And like any freely available resource, they've been squandered. Once the free supply is exhausted, they'll simply no longer be free - meaning that actual incentive will exist to conserve them and organizations will have incentive to sell unneeded blocks. Economics 101, people.
There has been pressure for near two decades now in the form of allocation policy and documentation requirements where lack of plentiful IP resources has lead directly to proliferation of 1:Many NAT.
If you go by http://ipv4auctions.bstocksolu... a /8 is worth roughly USD 100M.
This assumes that either the seller is allowed to split the block or the price per IP for a /8 is comparable to the price per IP for a /8 block is comparable to the price per IP for the much smaller blocks you see sold on that site.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
remember, there were only 256 /8 nets. So a /8 is a lot of adresspace.
Because there is a very high one-time-only cost involved in switching to ipv6, compared to a small running continuous cost of continuing in ipv4, and for now, it is advantageous to become in ipv4. No one wants to be the one to switch first.
Nobody is switching to IPv6 they are *adding* IPv6. IPv4 is not being turned off by anyone well into the foreseeable future.
Most large content providers are already offering service via IPv6 and millions already have IPv6 access via their ISPs.
Just think of all sort of problems large ISPs will have to deal in terms of support if they switch to ipv6, in terms of phone service, visits, substitution of cable modems, support for old machines running none/bogus ipv6 implementation
The migration to IPv6 takes a while and does not involve turning off IPv4 anytime soon. There is no need to rush to replace gear. It will eventually break or become obsolete in the next few years anyway.
Not easy as flick a switch.
For most consumers it will be easier than a flick of a switch. They get it without having to expend any effort at all or ever even knowing they have it. This happens either immediately or after their old router or CE has broken and gets replaced.
I don't think that is a good technical solution. First of all, after everyone decides how best to change to protocol to use extended addresses, you still have the same problem of having to upgrade existing equipment. You say that is is just a "trivial mod," but it's not like implementing IPv6 is particularly difficult---rolling out any modification whatsoever will be about as hard as switching to IPv6. However, with your suggestion, the situation is must less predicatable for users during the transition phase. As it stands, if two hosts have routed IPv6 addresses, they can talk to each other over IPv6, assuming someone hasn't made a serious error. With the "extended address" scheme you propose, if I have an extended address and I try to talk to another host, how do I know if I should be able to? Does the other host support extended addresses? Does every piece of routing equipment between me and them support extended addresses? How would I know these things, and what's to stop the routing table from changing and breaking a previously working path?
Think of it. Here is this scare resource, IPv4 addresses, and no more are going to be allocated in North America. I see great potential in profit, online exchanges opening up allowing the trading of IP addresses, etc. etc. To quote the Ferengi, my lobes are tingling.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
We've been using IPv6 for about a decade now.
Didn't you get the memo?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Human beings are terrible at planning ahead. Just look at the financial condition of just about any modern nation. Knee deep in debt with only plans to spend more money without thinking about how to pay it off. It takes bankruptcy for them to change their ways.
Same goes for renewable energy - yeah there is some token adoption as long as it is heavily subsidized. It will take actual depletion of the current resource to drive full-scale adoption.
IPv4 is just another example of human-driven resource exhaustion with immense resistance to the future plan until the current resource is actually completely exhausted.
There is lesson to be learned here:
Every fix length field should have a reserved value for an extension. .
Without careful planning in advance of deployment reserved fields in protocols often go unused as subsequent modifications are not operationally viable.
Variable length addressing would have absolutely solved the problem only if it was defined from the beginning addresses may be between x and y bits in length and all systems handling addresses are expected to support the full range of address lengths.
The act of simply reserving a bit without defining what it does in advance solves NOTHING and does NOT result in a better solution than parallel deployment of IPv6.
By the time they are needed, namely in present day, it is a rather trivial mod to make network gear which reads another 32 bits past the end of the standard TCP/IP headers to collect the extended IP address, and presto IPv4 address shortage is gone.
Not on a production network it aint. You have no way of knowing what equipment along path supports what, which part of routing infrastructure does or does not support an extension, no way to understand a-priori which addressing system to use. You have no way of knowing whether that which touches an IP address supports the extended length. Without parallel deployment or flag day it is the same or worse than IPv6.
Sure do that if you want to break the whole fucking internet overnight.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
What! No way... Drill Baby Drill should be the new manta.
I think we can pipe some down from Canada.
Progress is about creating plenty, yes. However, the granparent specifically cited economics, which is typically about creating an artificial shortage and then profiteering.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
when we run out of IPv6 addresses? It's a serious and pressing concern, like what happens when Intel runs out of nanometres to cut off their processors. Fools, the lot of them!
I don't see any merit in your technical objections. Why would "everyone decide how best to change to protocol to use extended addresses"? What I'm suggesting is that the extension behavior should have been there from the get go,
Similarly rolliing at an extension is in now ay "about as hard as switching to IPv6". IPv6 was designed to be a flag day protocol. How is this about as hard as "extending in a minor way the current protocol without need for interruption?"
I can carry on, but all you are doing is pointing out minor technical issues which would have needed to be taken care of. Yup, so they would have. Still it would have been easier to use an existing protocol.
Without careful planning in advance of deployment reserved fields in protocols often go unused as subsequent modifications are not operationally viable.
Correct, which is why I did not propose an extension field, but rather a reserved value.
Variable length addressing would have absolutely solved the problem only if it was defined from the beginning addresses may be between x and y bits in length and all systems handling addresses are expected to support the full range of address lengths.
Sure, all you do is you define the behavior but do not require the devices to actually do anything about it. Only later do you require the behavior to take place.
Not on a production network it ain't.... Without parallel deployment or flag day it is the same or worse than IPv6.
Let me FTFY:
Without parallel deployment or flag day it is at worse the same but likely much easier than IPv6.
Seriously think about it. Every issue you have with extensible fields you would have with a new protocol, while by virtue of being fully backward compatible you would avoid some of the worst issues of "flag day" IPv6, which we haven't yet managed to roll out 16 years after first proposed.
Not sure whether this is a serious response or whether it's meant to be funny.
Finally we're ready to deploy IPv6 and you propose to invent a new protocol? I'm sure we can roll this IPv4 and IPv6-incompatible protocol in 10 years from now.
So what are those problems that we don't have anymore? And what are exactly those problems that IPv6 creates?
I love it when people who don't know anything about networking invent solutions to problems. As if actual IETF engineers were all idiots.
Making IPv6 work is basically their only option.
Trouble is "Making IPv6 work" requires other people to deploy it. I dunno what things are like where you live but here in the UK the only access providers that offer IPv6 connectivity are the boutique ones.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Fuck you. If you have or intend to have any children you'll change your tune very quickly. You MUST remain positive about the future of humanity or end up like one of those morons who thinks he knows better than everyone else but appears on the outside as a miserable cunt, someone no-one wants to spend any time with because they see the future as hopeless. Don't be one of those miserable cunts, please.
As flawed as we are, it's probably a good thing that we won't survive long enough to leave our solar system and populate the cosmos. We don't deserve it. We're just too *dumb* as a species.
As flawed as single celled organisms are, it's probably good that they will not survive long enough to leave our solar system and populate the cosmos...
Evolution is still happening. The "we" that you are postulating will not exist in a thousand years. If we were to separate 2 groups of humans for a thousand years, it is possible that they would be totally separate species if there were sufficient evolutionary pressure.
In other words, kill yourself* to improve the species if you think the current state of the human species is so terrible.
*not saying that to be a dick, just pointing out that is how evolution happens: death of the organism, growth of the new slightly different organism.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Phase 5: IPv6 or bust
Like I said elsewhere in this page, even if ISPs implement IPv6, they'll still need their IPv4 addresses for dual-stack connections, which will be needed as long as a majority of the customers are IPv4.
How is AFRINIC?
Most of the ISPs I've dealt with here in Canada do not offer routable IPv6 allocations to users. They certainly don't readily offer static ones for business use like they do with IPv4.
You can get IPv6 connections here in the UK so long as you pick your ISP carefully. Unfortunately, the last time one of my customers shopped for a new internet connection (i.e. expensive leased line), they directly asked the ISP if they did IPv6 and got a "yes" reply, and only after the connection was installed and paid for did it become apparent that the ISP lied. (unfortunately it wasn't important enough to the customer for them to kick up a proper fuss about the ISP mis-selling).
http://blog.nexusuk.org
I don't see any merit in your technical objections. Why would "everyone decide how best to change to protocol to use extended addresses"? What I'm suggesting is that the extension behavior should have been there from the get go,
Your "trivial mod" involves redesigning hardware, so not really trivial at all. High speed routers do routing in hardware - making them understand longer addresses involves building new hardware to handle it.
How is this about as hard as "extending in a minor way the current protocol without need for interruption?"
Because it isn't without need for interruption. Using IPv6 is only possible when all the network gear between the sender and recipient understands IPv6. In your scenario with an "extension", using the extended addresses would only be possible when all the network gear between the sender and recipient understands the extended address. So in short, you either have to specify the whole "extended address" system right at the start and ensure all the hardware supports it (which is basically the same as saying "we should've just used IPv6 from the start"), or you have to make everyone upgrade their hardware in exactly the same way as they do to support IPv6 anyway.
I can carry on, but all you are doing is pointing out minor technical issues which would have needed to be taken care of.
Sure, if you don't understand much about how networks work you can handwave all the problems away as "minor technical issues", but once you actually learn how networks work you realise that they aren't minor at all, especially when you consider that IPv4 was intended to run on the hardware that existed in the 70s, which would make most solutions way too expensive.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Your "trivial mod" involves redesigning hardware,
As does IPv6, but my mod is light years easier than those of IPv6 which is what you propose.
In your scenario with an "extension", using the extended addresses would only be possible when all the network gear between the sender and recipient understands the extended address.
Not at all. That is the only solution you could think of, but there are smarter, simpler solutions. E.g. route all 255:255:255:8 packets to an extended field aware router down-stream (not unlike 255:255:255:255 are "routed" to the DHCP local server).
You couldn't come up with a solution in five seconds and declare the whole thing impossible, which goes back to my point, you are raising minor technical objections and treating them as major showstoppers.
Sure, if you don't understand much about how networks work you can handwave all the problems away as "minor technical issues",
He he, kiddo the software developed by my team routed more traffic in a second than all the torrents you've ever downloaded in your lifetime put together, which explains why what looks as an insurmountable problem to you is just another day at the office for me.
That you do not see how to do something doesn't mean other people with more experience can do it either.
Seriously think about it. Every issue you have with extensible fields you would have with a new protocol, while by virtue of being fully backward compatible.
The core problem is all about ADDRESSING. What protocol headers look like is largely irrelevant.
Quibbling about approach x vs. y when both only result in different arrangements of fields appearing in a header very few actually touch is counterproductive.
Asserting "fully backward compatible" naturally implies maintenance of two separate address spaces given untouched gear would not be able to "do anything about" new unimplemented bits.
One might argue it would be better to deploy support for an extended address space and designate a flag day after which we would expect the new space to be globally open for business .. yet this isn't a serious option that can be deployed in the real world. It has to be done incrementally and at the end there has to be pressure on outliers to switch or be left in the dark.
Sure, all you do is you define the behavior but do not require the devices to actually do anything about it. Only later do you require the behavior to take place.
Don't know how one goes about asking the whole world to start "doing something about it" without incurring massive cost.
Every issue you have with extensible fields you would have with a new protocol
My assertion is playing games with protocol fields does not make deployment appreciably any different or better than IPv6.
What you suggest could have been done in IPv4 you could have used options field to define extended addressing without having to burn separate L2 protocol number. Yet we still would have had to touch everything which sees an address.
Most importantly to enable ADDRESSING of new space while maintaining a fully reachable network for all participants you still need to concurrently deploy parallel addresses in both current and extended address spaces for duration of transition period. This includes CGN to make up for lack of available address space.
When I connect to www.google.com my system does an AAAA query because it knows I have IPv6 connectivity. If the AAAA query returns an IPv6 address it also knows the remote system can be reached via IPv6. If there is no AAAA then it knows to use IPv4 instead. The incremental and easily understood rules for use of one address space over the other is a critical part of a successful transition.
Some of it is counter-intuitive requiring appreciation for operational requirements of content and eyeball networks. A number of smart and well-intentioned people invented all manner of transition technologies to help bridge communications between networks yet in the end they only got in the way hindering adoption.
While by virtue of being fully backward compatible you would avoid some of the worst issues of "flag day" IPv6, which we haven't yet managed to roll out 16 years after first proposed.
IPv6 is in production use by millions currently enjoying exponential growth. >40% of my Internet traffic by volume is IPv6.
given untouched gear would not be able to "do anything about" new unimplemented bits.
There in lies your key error. You can have those packets be routed to an extended-field capable router using existing BGP/IGP routing protocols. The switches do not need to know anything about the extended field behavior to do that.
My assertion is playing games with protocol fields does not make deployment appreciably any different or better than IPv6.
IPv6 was particularly badly designed in terms of ease of implementation. It has many other virtues but easiness of implementation ain't one of them. A Jackson-Pollock-design-style protocol is likely easier to implement than flag day IPv6.
This is exactly why we are running out of IPv4 addresses and we still do not implement IPv6. If you want to carry on arguing that IPv6 is the superior choice you are welcome to it, but you have a mountain of facts and 16 years of trying against you.
>40% of my Internet traffic by volume is IPv6.
Oh wow. You win then. An IPv6 fanboi,erh,sorry,strong proponent routes ~40% of his traffic using IPv6. Color me impressed.
Seriously dude, reread your statement. You are damning IPv6 with faint praise when even a proponent cannot get the count over ~40% the day before we run out of IPv4 addresses.
Globally IPv6 makes for ~2% of traffic sixteen years after it was first proposed.
Your mod is only "easier" in your head because you don't understand the issues. The hardware designs and network stack designs would be dramatically more complex and slower and still not backwards compatible, and even worse, ambiguous in some cases!
ARIN is not IANA.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
It already is! Along with all the other IP addresses in the range from 240.0.0.0 through 255.255.255.254. That's 268435455 IPv4 addresses reserved for extensions. But nobody has been able to come up with a way to utilize those reserved addresses to solve the IPv4 shortage. But that's not the only range that people have tried using in order to solve the problem. The 192.88.99.0/24 range is reserved as well, for a well-defined purpose, which was intended to help getting IPv6 deployed. It did not help, it may even have slowed down IPv6 deployment by 1-2 years because it lead to broken IPv6 connectivity for some users.
The list of header fields, where values have been reserved, in order to help in this upgrade is long.
The only gaining any traction was IPv6 and tunneling of IPv6 over IPv4. The lack of IPv6 adoption is not due to any technical issue with IPv6. And none of the other ideas have technical advantages over IPv6, which would have given them better traction. The lack of deployment is entirely caused by lack of incentive, which would be the same regardless of which technical solution was chosen.
By upgrading you are faced with some technical challenges, and there is little benefit to upgrading until a significant fraction of the Internet has upgraded. By postponing the upgrade you are hurting the entire Internet, but as long as you are hurting your competitors at least as much as you are hurting yourself, it still makes sense from a business perspective.
Rationing of IPv4 addresses should not have waited until 2011. Rationing of IPv4 addresses should have started way earlier, by 2004 it was already clear that lack of incentive to upgrade was the main blocker for IPv6 deployment. At that point rationing could have been introduced in such a way as to keep the installed base of IPv4-only hosts constant. The rule should have been, that you new networks could get the IPv4 addresses they needed for dual-stack deployment, and existing networks could get new IPv4 addresses only if they could document, that they had upgraded an equivalent number of IPv4 hosts to dual stack. Had that been done, there would have been 40% dual stack hosts by the time IPv4 addresses ran out.
But pointing out what could have been done smarter in the past is not very productive. I am very interested in hearing any suggestions on what can be done today in order to accelerate IPv6 deployments. What is clear today is that IPv6 is the future. There is no other viable option. The IPv4 network is going to fall apart slowly as more and more NAT is being deployed. And any other protocol, which is not IPv4 or IPv6, is not going to be a real option. Even if a technically superior protocol showed up, IPv6 would still have a 20 year head-start.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
And any other protocol, which is not IPv4 or IPv6, is not going to be a real option. Even if a technically superior protocol showed up, IPv6 would still have a 20 year head-start.
The IPv6 head start is so minimal that Linksys shipping a new shimming protocol with its NAT routers would exceed IPv6 usage within six months.
IMHO that is still the way to go, because IPv6 just isn't happening.
Wrong. Shipping routers with support for a new protocol doesn't make it happen. If that was all it took, we'd all have been running IPv6 years ago. Getting a new protocol deployed means deploying hardware and software, which can support it on the entire route from one end to the other. And it means network operators have to get addresses, setup peerings and turn it on for their customers. There is no way Linksys could achieve all of that within six months.
IPv6 is happening. It is happening 13 years later than it should have, but at least it appears it is not falling any further behind. At the current rate we'll reach 50% dual stack by 2018 (and by 2030 we'll probably be 50% dual stack again as IPv4 will be phased out). The question is how bad the network will get in the meantime. Users of any P2P service have already been experiencing problems due to NAT, and that will keep getting worse until those services move to IPv6.
Will it get so bad, that end users realize something has gone horribly wrong, and start demanding somebody take action? Or will ISPs manage to deploy IPv6 with the majority of users being blissfully unaware what is happening?
Suggesting another solution because "IPv6 isn't happening" makes no sense. By the time you'd have a working standard for any alternative to IPv6, you'd be up against IPv6 deployed to half the internet. And deploying it couldn't be significantly simpler than IPv6, which means ISPs would be waiting for a decade to see if anybody else was deploying it first. And why would any ISP want to deploy a competitor to IPv6 which was less tested than IPv6 and did not have nearly the same market share? It took more than a decade to get them moving on deploying one replacement to IPv4, they are not suddenly going to support two replacements.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
NAT breaks some applications. You cannot implement a NAT in a way that is guaranteed to not break any applications. Does that mean NAT is never done properly?
Some applications may work through a NAT automatically, while others may require lots of work. In certain situations it is just plain impossible to get an application working through a NAT at all. Application developers are not supposed to spend their time working around NAT. That time should be spend on building new features instead.
If an application works flawlessly without NAT, but fails in the presence of a NAT, that just demonstrates that NAT is a problem.
You can deploy a NAT and still have some applications work without changes. But lots of development time has been wasted the last two decades on working around NAT. NAT could be deployed without needing involvement from ISPs, which is why it is so widespread today. But that is also a significant reason why IPv6 deployment is going so slow. Had NAT never been invented, we could all have been running IPv6 today, and things would work much better than they do.
Are you asking for servers with IPv6 support? Google, YouTube, facebook, and Akamai are a few examples with IPv6 support. Were you never able to establish a connection with any of them?
I use IPv6 on a daily basis. Whenever I am on a network without IPv6 support, I realize how much more difficult it makes my work, not to have IPv6 access. Luckily Teredo works from most networks (but only for connecting with sites, that care enough about reliability to deploy their own Teredo relays).
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
All we need is some ISP competition...
And I want a pink unicorn.
Since when is a link local ip in ipv6 *not* localhost? Note, link-local, not site-local, the latter of which would correspond to a subnet.
What you are thinking about is 'Node-local', which is the loopback address - ::0 in IPv6. Note that this falls within the IPv4-compatible addresses, which is currently deprecated by the IETF. As Bengie pointed out, link-local is your subnet, where addresses are automatically assigned, and is fe80::/10. Unique-local addresses are fc00::/7, and a site-unique address fd00::/7 is also there: fc00::/7 is meant to be universally unique, but that would require the IANA or the RIRs assigning them, while fd00::/7 can be unique just to a site, or domain.
In IPv4, all of the above tend to get conflated under 'private addresses'. Here, link-local and Site-Unique addresses are clearly delineated. The link-local addresses are what are randomly assigned by stack, and visible throughout the subnet.
There are plenty of other dependencies (OpenSSL versions, Apache versions, Java versions), so it's even worse than that.
PS: I can't see what the hell you responded to -- it's not in the parent comment!