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Microsoft Runs Out of US Address Space For Azure, Taps Its Global IPv4 Stock
alphadogg (971356) writes "Microsoft has been forced to start using its global stock of IPv4 addresses to keep its Azure cloud service afloat in the U.S., highlighting the growing importance of making the shift to IP version 6. The newer version of the Internet Protocol adds an almost inexhaustible number of addresses thanks to a 128-bit long address field, compared to the 32 bits used by version 4. The IPv4 address space has been fully assigned in the U.S., meaning there are no additional addresses available, Microsoft said in a blog post earlier this week. This requires the company to use the IPv4 address space available to it globally for new services, it said."
So after years of panic, someone finally ran out of IPs. No, wait a minute... They still didn't.
OR they could migrate those services to IPv6??
Considering how much bashing MS gets for not being a leader, this would have made a really good opportunity for them.
(I hate it when people say they're doing something because they were "forced" or "had no choice", when in reality, they had aa choice, they made a choice, and now don't want to take ownership of the outcome)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I tried to use Azure, but all of my EU-hosted virtual machines geolocated to US, and I wanted none of that.
Underprovisioning your cloud service in IP addresses (or in servers, bandwidth, etc) causes people to think that your service is growing faster than you expected. Brillant.
It means that when I deployed a new virtual desktop in Azure and specified "East US" as the data center location, services that looked at the IP address thought I was in Brazil or Germany. Which played hell with Google when I started Chrome because it customized the language for the area it thought I was in. That explains a lot.
I pretty sure this just means Microsoft ran out of IPv4 addresses that they bought for the specific purpose of their Azure service, so they are now "borrowing" addresses from their other address pools. This also means their Azure services are no longer one continuous block of addresses.
They're only really memorable to computers. Which is fine as far as it goes but IP4 addresses were something you could sorta remember if you dealt with the same number over and over again.
Obviously for internal networks there's no need for IP6. But even beyond that... I wonder if we couldn't improve on the DNS system so that we could assign names to IP addresses differently.
I don't know... something so we never have to work with the IP6 numbers which are so large and random that a human being really has no chance at remembering any of them short of the old copy paste.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
IP blocks are meant to be a drill-down system. For example, 128.230.x.x is indicates it's on the Syracuse University campus.... with the 16 bits worth of addresses being spread out so that a specific x in the third position would indicate what building to send the packet to.
Microsoft's problem here is that their Azure service has used every one of the IP addresses allocated to it... and Microsoft doesn't have any subnets remaining in the "USA Block" of their IP addresses... so they have to move IPs that would have been used overseas back into the Azure datacenter. As IPv4 continues to be used we're going to start to see more of these "we're running out!" stories.
Amazingly IPv6 will be sufficient for a long time:
2^128 IPv6 addresses * (1 atom / address) / (7*10^27 atoms/human) = 48 billion humans.
It's never to late to procrastinate.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
If you called MS support you would have learned that you should have used Internet Explorer, not Chrome!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That is one of Googles great stupidities.
Just because I log in I via a French public hotspot, or a Dutch customers WLAN, doesn't mean I now magically speak French or Dutch, so why does Google switch everything to French and Dutch, despite all my OS and Browser settings still indicating German as primary language, with English as fallback?
If I used IE, I'd have to approve every single page and web site I went to. Yuck.
Maybe Amazon would be a better example, since you'd normally want to go by default to that country's store regardless of language.
Go to ipv6.google.com (obviously, requires IPv6), it doesn't do that annoying geolocation.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Amazingly IPv6 will be sufficient for a long time:
2^128 IPv6 addresses * (1 atom / address) / (7*10^27 atoms/human) = 48 billion humans.
Actually, why not solve it for all time? Given the estimate of 10^80 particles in the universe, then moving to 266 bit addressing (i.e. 80/log(2)) would allow each particle to be addressed individually. Bumping to 512 bit addressing would accommodate the typical logical addressing inefficiencies.
Turn that feature off it you dont need it, its there to specifically make web browsing hard on a server...
I'm currently building a new router, so I did some research thinking now might be a good time to make the switch to IPv6. I found this: http://www.kloepfer.org/ipv6-h... Is there really no way to implement IPv6 without making every one of my machines dependent on the DHCP whims of my ISP?
You can still get around the address space limitations of ipv6 with NAT... but unlike IPv4, with IPv6 it is possible to design a NAT system that you can route packets through via extension headers, so even on the other side of a ipv6 NAT (which acts technically more like an extra 128 bit prefix on the ip address than it does a conventional NAT, but it still essentially functions the same way in that it would still change ip address headers like current ipv4 nats do), a computer could still potentially directly connect to yours.
Of course, some people might scream about security issues if this is done, but bear in mind that NAT isn't really something that one should be using for security anyways.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
In fact I am pretty sure most Dutch people want the Internet and their computer systems to use English.
But Google and Microsoft know better and shove Dutch into our faces.
In case you are wondering every company you work for has the English version of Microsoft Windows installed on everyone's desktop. However it is almost impossible to buy an English consumer version from shops. I am glad Windows 8 finally allows you to freely install language packs so we can use Dutch.
Imagine you have a computer problem, even if you are able to find it on the Internet, it is going to be very difficult to execute the fix of the problem because of all the translations.
Actually, why not solve it for all time? Given the estimate of 10^80 particles in the universe, then moving to 266 bit addressing (i.e. 80/log(2)) would allow each particle to be addressed individually. Bumping to 512 bit addressing would accommodate the typical logical addressing inefficiencies.
Yeah, that'll work great, until we discover multiple universes...
This will only solve it for people who think that addresses should be assigned to objects.
I don't know about you, but every time I am communicating with something or someone, I am communicating with something physical rather than a location.
Do you have a use case for why we should be communicating based on locations rather than physical objects? Relativity would make your idea a real bitch. Furthermore, I don't care where my server is located (and I don't want to have to care, either), but with your idea our communication would involve constantly changing IPs for every Planck time (because, no doubt, both my device and my server are constantly in motion relative to your IP addressing scheme's frame of reference).
Yeah, that'll work great, until we discover multiple universes...
The question then becomes "if there is another universe we cannot communicate with, do we really need to be able to address their physical particles with our communication networks?"
If you called MS support you will think that you live in India.
If only your browser sent a header telling the server what your preferred language was. Oh, wait, it does, and Google still thinks that I want to go to their Japanese page when I'm in Japan. One of the many reasons I switched to DuckDuckGo a few years ago...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Hopefully everyone in this thread is joking, but it's worth noting that it's not quite that clear cut. The smallest assignment that an ISP can hand out is a /64, so you can really only have 2^64 sites. IPv6 has 2^128 addresses, but a lot of the design works around having sparse routing tables. You really want each /64 to correspond to a broadcast domain, and you don't want to fragment the routing tables too much to get to the /64, so you've actually got a lot fewer addresses. A /64 per human is not enough to assign one IP per atom in the person, but it likely is enough for every device that a person may reasonably want to own and give an IP to, even if that person has a lot of injected sensor nodes.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It is a sure bet that once it gets codified into a standard that we can only communicate with our universe and integrated into a host of products, we will discover that we can in fact communicate with multiple universes. Luckily, there is the likely possibility that there are a host of other universes won't make this mistake.
I think the deniers are the same people, with the same arguments.
It's easy to spot the people who don't know what they're talking about. Over the last few days:
1) Just re-assign multicast!
2) Hey, they don't appear to be using those addresses, let's take those!
3) Double/Triple-NAT is good enough for me and everyone else!
4) Let's give out one IP address to everyone and we'll be set for awhile!
5) Let's make a new protocol!
6) IPv6 addresses are too big to remember!
7) You just need to sell it better!
All of those show fundamental misunderstandings about networking. And that part is OK. The problem is that people think they know about flying a plane because they've flown a paper airplane.
Calm down people. Stop trying to barge into the cockpit.
or making certain features v6-only to penalise ISPs that don't provide v6 connectivity by making their customers complain.
"IPv6 is scheduled for testing in 2017. If you want it sooner, we don't have to care; we're the phone company." How many people are willing to move their family or their business from a city without an IPv6 capable cable, DSL or fiber ISP to one with one?
Leave it to Microsoft to screw up the map.
I agree that relativity would fuck that up, but do you seriously doubt that people want to communicate based on locations?
"There's a supernova nearby! Look out!".
But a perhaps better argument is that just because you can address every object, doesn't mean you're using the best addressing. Maybe with twice the address space you could implement multiple different hierarchies for different purposes, enabling more efficient multicast scenarios at the expense of memory-per-address.
Which would in fact be a large part of why we're jumping straight to 128 instead of just doubling to 64.
Google may not (yet) be doing evil, but more and more I find them Doing The Wrong Thing. As an example, I'm writing this on my desktop at home. If I go to Google Maps, my home address is my default location, which is what I want. It's also the default location on my laptop. However, if I'm traveling and change my laptop's default location, it's been changed on my desktop when I get home which is exactly what I don't want it to do. The right thing, of course, would be to store the default location on the computer, so that you can have several computers with different default locations, but I guess that's too obvious for Google.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
(think what happens with a Skype call in your house behind a NAT)
I don't use Skype, but I do use other things, such as SSH to my desktop from my laptop when I'm on the road, that need to connect to a specific machine. I do that by giving my desktop a fixed IP on the LAN and forwarding the appropriate ports to it, while allowing other machines, such as my laptop when I need it at home, to use DHCP. As long as Skype uses a consistent set of ports, there's no reason I can see that this wouldn't work, and it's not that hard to set up, either.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255 vs ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff
Which would you rather type, read etc.
Netflix is going to have fun with this!
"But I do live in the USA! Its not my fault I was issued an IP address out of a North Korean allocation block."
Have gnu, will travel.
I can't believe I haven't heard of this approach until now. That could really help to solve the problem with prefixes changing due to dynamic assignment. Basically each device can have both a globally routable address (which changes often), and a local address (which never changes).
Alas, this still means that I can't use the same DNS on the inside and outside of the network. It also means that I still have to deal with dynamic DNS updates for multiple hosts if I want them to have globally-reachable addresses.
I can see why a regional amazon store is a something you would want. However I liked google news better when it didn't automatically redirect you to a regional site, if I wanted old-fashioned parochial news I would go to an Aussie newspaper. I'm much more interested in the other half of the truth that local papers fail to provide because it might upset their sponsors or political benefactors.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
.... So I can get your IPV4 addresses!
IPV4 is like the fax machine... it will never go away :-D
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
I imagine that Google thinks it far more common for one person with more than one of [ PC | laptop | phone | tablet ] to have the majority of same in the country they are in, than to only take one of the above to another country.
If you took your laptop, phone, and tablet with you, you'd be thinking that you should only have to change your location preference on one.
Really, I think changing my 'home' location exactly once for each time I stay somewhere new is pretty much exactly what I'm looking for.
I'm not even talking about international travel. If I go to a convention and need to search, I want to look for things near the convention hotel; when I house sit for a friend in LA (I live in Ventura County.) I want to search for things near his home. And, when I get home, I want my desktop still set to search for things near where I live. For me, changing my settings for every single computer I have simply because I've changed it for one is Doing The Wrong Thing.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The sad part is, they can't really transition to IPv6 because their own OS doesn't really support it.
Sure, some groundwore is present, but there's something critical missing: Windows can't retrieve a DNS server over RA. That means, it can get an IP, but not DNS servers.
It is a sure bet that once it gets codified into a standard that we can only communicate with our universe and integrated into a host of products, we will discover that we can in fact communicate with multiple universes. Luckily, there is the likely possibility that there are a host of other universes won't make this mistake.
NAT. You know that would be the de facto solution, and I grin at the thought of future address space purists wringing their hands over the solution as much as their 21st century ancestors did...
You are still always communicating to objects, never locations. You described a scenario where you want to talk to physical objects (people) who happen to be in a location.
Have you ever walked into an empty room with the intention to communicate with a location? Because that's what addressing based on location rather than objects implies. Normal communication would involve going into a room that wasn't empty and talking to a person or people. You aren't communicating to space itself, but rather with physical objects.
Imagine if your phone number constantly changed based on which room of the house you were in, and it continued to change as you walked around while talking with someone.
There is no use case I can conceive of where addressing a location makes more sense than addressing a particular object/person. Communication is fundamentally about objects passing information. Location is metadata or is something that is incidental to the objects communicating. Locations don't communicate, objects/people do. Therefore, objects/people should be the basis for the addressing scheme.
And when I said relativity makes the proposed plank-length location addressing idea a bitch, I really meant that it is essentially impossible.
Rounding up to 512 bit addressing allows the ~266 bit identifier to be unique (ala the typical MAC aspect of IPv6) while allowing substantial overhead for logical addressing hierarchy based on some allocation system that makes sense.
No we won't. Anybody who thinks this doesn't understand how large 2^128 is.
(If you disagree with me, try to back it up with actual numbers.)
That's an odd definition of "already", given that it came years and years after v4 was extended to 128 bits. Also the 128-bit version is actually big enough to handle the number of hosts we need it to handle, and it has far wider support and deployment than that 64-bit extension.
So really, there's no point in it.
v6 doesn't require you to memorize 8 groups of 4 letters. You can put v6 addresses into /etc/hosts to avoid having to remember them... and if you find that syncing a huge /etc/hosts file around is a pain, then it also supports that newfangled "DNS" thing to save you the effort.
Plus you can set any bits in your allocation to zero, and your allocation should be at least /56 or so, which means the number of bits you actually have to remember is about the same as in the v4 case (where you have to remember a 32-bit RC1918 IP plus the 32-bit global IP), so it's not really any worse than the current situation.
Um, no. We're running out of addresses because we don't have enough addresses.
(And to address some of the other misunderstandings: ARIN still have a v6 printing press, v6 doesn't magically expose everything to the entire WWW, you can still run a central firewall in v6 (just without NAT, thankfully) and your IPs won't require memorizing 128 bits unless you're dumb enough to pick an address that uses all 128 bits, in which case you don't get to complain about it).
It's not that hard, but it's not that easy either. It's far simpler without NAT, where you just connect to the machine.
Also it suddenly gets very, very hard when your ISP puts you behind their own NAT, so you don't even have a "public IP" for your laptop to connect to.
Well, v4 doesn't require remembering IPv4 addresses either, but still it comes handy in a pinch to remember the gateway, the dns server, the WLAN access point, etc addresses. For some reason people really like to point out the Google's DNS server's IP, not its name.
Though remembering local gw and dns mostly comes to remembering the network prefix whcih won't be that large, assuming one has not used dynamic allocation for services in a network.
Except browsers can actually send a header that lists your preferred languages, in order. Chrome can actually does this, although it's buried away under "Advanced Settings". Google just don't pay any attention to it on their servers (apparently).
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Why the hell should the website guess where you want to go and what language you want to use?
If I want to go to the Swedish Amazon, I'll go to amazon.se, if I want to go to the Indian one, I'll go to the amazon.in.
This is already a solved problem.
This trend is annoyingly spreading to a lot of websites and software vendors. "Hey, I see you have a public IP that's located in some tiny country with an obscure language. Let's assume you want to use their language, never mind your preferences set in your web browser or the language setting of the OS you have installed." Naming and shaming here not just Google, but Adobe, LibreOffice and Avast as well. Got more offenders to add? Please do.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Actually, XP with SP3 has enough support for ipv6 with a nated ipv4 address to allow connecting to the local DNS cache server/firewall. We can connect to all of our XP machines via ipv6 from the internet. They can also connect to any ipv6 site through DNS assuming the connecting application supports ipv6. Unfortunately, ISPs would have a hard time making sure their customer's machines where setup correctly for ipv6. Getting it right for our sites wasn't difficult. You can install a working ipv6 for 95, 98, ME, NT, and 2000. I think there is even a stack for windows for workgroups aka 3.11. Unfortunately, it costs money and don't know how well applications support it.
This is how the transition will go. ISPs will soon default to issuing people ipv4 addresses that are nat'ed. That's what you'll get and it will work for 90% of ipv4 only users. If you need a ipv4 address, you'll have to pay up. Hopefully, a Class A will be converted to private or assigned as an ISP internal only addresses to avoid conflicts with people's intranets. If you're luckily they'll give you a website where you can setup some sort of port forwarding. Also,only ipv6 websites will get there own nat'ed ipv4 address which will be assigned when a DNS query is filled for ipv6 only site, it's called DNS-ALG. That's why we need to assign at least one class A for ISP to NAT ipv6 only address to. We might have to add more CLASS A subnets for nat forwarding as time progresses but since they'll be less ipv4 only users it might not even be a problem. We can only hope this starts sooner rather then later.
Migrating those services would mean shutting off IPv4.
That would mean that every customer that would want to access these services, would have to have IPv6 connectivity. If anything, MicroSoft should encourage their customers to get IPv6 connected, so they can eventually shut off the IPv4 connectivity for their services.
Given the time frame they'll have to observe for their Enterprise customers, an announcement to do the shut down would have to be at least 3 years prior to the shut down date. They can't get away with shutting off more than say 5% of their customers with an action like this, so they can't do that until they have a good indication at what date over 95% of the internet globally will have IPv6 connectivity. Even if the entire planet will start trying to accomplish that really hard all of a sudden, it will be at least two years before the bulk of it will have end to end facilities for IPv6 in place.
This puts a realistic time frame of at least 4, probably more like 5 to 7 years on your suggestion to "migrate to IPv6 so they can free up IPv4 space". That's hardly a solution for a problem they are facing right now, is it?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Very interesting graph! The increase seems to be pretty exponential, though perhaps a bit more linear at the very end? As you say 3.5% is already a significant number, so hopefully this will put a damper on the sale of ipv4-only home routers.
Does this solution exist at this time? If the answer is "Yes", than the OP was using the normal definition of the word "already".
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Except browsers can actually send a header that lists your preferred languages, in order. Chrome can actually does this, although it's buried away under "Advanced Settings". Google just don't pay any attention to it on their servers (apparently).
If a lot of browsers are getting it wrong in what they send, the incentive to support it is not strong. Guess what? A quick test with Chrome, Safari and Firefox indicate that they all get it wrong by default. Safari doesn't provide an option to change it that I can find; the other two pick the wrong default for me, instead of using the system language settings (which are correct and available for software to read) even if those are imperfect for the task. (I'm on the wrong platform for testing IE and I don't have Opera.)
Why would you make your website use a feature that no browser gets close to right by default?
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Again, that does not imply that communication is between locations. Communication is between/among physical objects/entities.
512 bit addressing allows over 200 bits of logical addressing to go with the 266 bits of unique addressing. If general location makes the most sense for logical blocks for routing, then use that. It still does not imply that the address itself should be some "absolute" (*cough*) location.
in gp example it would be: ::::::1.2.3.4 or ::::::1:2:3:4 or perhaps netname::1.2.3.4
there's tons of better ways then having to memorize 8 groupings of 4 letters.
The last one is already legal syntax:
baldur@ballerup1:~$ ping6 -c3 2a03:7900:64::8.8.8.8
PING 2a03:7900:64::8.8.8.8(2a03:7900:64::808:808) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2a03:7900:64::808:808: icmp_seq=1 ttl=43 time=28.7 ms
64 bytes from 2a03:7900:64::808:808: icmp_seq=2 ttl=43 time=29.0 ms
64 bytes from 2a03:7900:64::808:808: icmp_seq=3 ttl=43 time=29.7 ms
--- 2a03:7900:64::8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2002ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 28.737/29.158/29.730/0.419 ms
Oh and Living with wolves, https://www.youtube.com/watch?... , alpha beta gamma delta epsilon etc... and omega. Back 15 years ago I saw some PBS program showing the decisions of an alpha, and how he never made a mistake, in the dead of the winter, through choosing mountain passes, where to winter, for how long, when to move on, and how much rested on his shoulders, and how much the pack has grown from correct decisions.
Many end users have IPv6 support. Many servers are capable of it. The issue is mostly the US ISPs and middle-tier transit providers dragging their feet. My systems all support IPv6, my m0n0wall box supports it, but neither of the two ISPs I can buy service from support it. In fact they won't sell it to me even if I offer to pay extra money for it!
My pet theory is that Verizon et al wants to convert IPv4 address space into a "resource" they can buy/sell/trade. A bunch of lawyers and MBAs are rubbing their greedy fingers together, hoping we stay in a "resource shortage" for as long as possible.
We could switch over, probably within a year or two, but it would take a government-imposed mandate to force people to stop screwing around and make the change.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
I don't know about V7. But at the same time that V6 work was started, there was also work on a V8 system.
V8 was based on master regional gateways, if I remember correctly, called stargates. The central assumption in V8: Throw away the assumption that a single IP address always refers to the same machine everywhere. Within a single region, there is a mapping from name to IP to machine. But that mapping does not hold across stargates.
If I want to talk to a machine in my region, then getHostByName() returns an IP address that maps and routes just as normal.
If I want to talk to a machine in a different region, then getHostByName() returns a special 4 byte magic token that talks to the stargate that sits between me and whatever it takes to get to the destination.
It is another level of routers. Just as now, I can work within my regional area network -- perhaps I'm a comcast customer talking to another comcast customer -- or, I can go out over the "backbone" of routers that talk to routers with the special gateway router protocol (sorry, I forget the exact acronym -- BGP, I think?) to reach the final region for "last mile" delivery.
This extends it another layer. But at the same time, each region now has an independent IPv4 space.
Want to really enforce a "firewall of china"? V8 would actually permit it. If something like this was in place, then any attempt to talk to someone outside of china would have to send that hostname to a central authority router, which could then return either an accepted "cookie" (looks like an IP address, but treated special by the routers), or "no such host", or "here's the government re-education website".
What is the major compatibility problem? It is suddenly impossible to cache the outcome of "getHostByName()" across runs -- the cookie returned only has a lifespan as determined by the gateways.
===
There is a much better, much deeper question to ask.
** WHY THE BLEEP ** are we still using things like getHostByName()?
Why the bleep do we still expose struct sockaddr to programs? It's an OS internal.
Way, way, way back when, before there was an internet, when arpanet was just one of many networking protocols in use, networking changed far faster than BSD releases could come out. So a bunch of stuff that should have been OS internals were exposed, so network drivers could talk to application programs without an out-of-date kernel in the way.
Today, that should be gone.
Today, there should be a simple open() call that returns a network connection -- and for simple TCP streams, that's all you would need. Message-based (UDP/etc) would probably have a flag on open, just as we have for "read only", "create if not found", etc, there might be "best effort only". Heck, imagine a file system that could recover from "out of disk space" by eliminating old "best effort" files automatically. Sure, put up a warning on the console -- but programs can keep running.
All the issues we see from "How do we re-write all those programs from v4 to v6", all those "how do we migrate X from 4 to 6", etc. -- all come down to "Why do we even care?"
This is serious.
Why worry about the program ever knowing what address to talk to?
Why worry about the program ever knowing that port X is the destination?
Why would you ever want to say "This program/server can only run once on this machine because the port number must be reserved and known ahead of time to the users"?
Why not just say "Give me a channel to service X running on machine Y", and not worry about "I want a TCP channel over 4 bytes of address".
Why worry about "Hey, the TCP protocol fails spectacularly over networks that have a very high bit length wire" and "well, we'll fake the TCP protocol with a new one that looks sort-of like TCP, can handle high bit-length wires, but can be reset by a random packet from an attacker with a 1-in-4 chance of success". (High bit length wires == satellite links. TCP has a packet size, and a window size; put th
If you can't figure out how to manage addresses using practically enough bits to allow every particle in the universe to be able to individually directly address every other particle in the universe, You're Doing It Wrong.
Direct connection routing is n^2. 512 is close to allowing n^2, but the 10^80 is an estimate as well.
You don't think a future logical addressing scheme would be able to at least do as well, efficiency wise, as a directly connected, n^2 network?
N^2 is the trivial case, mind you, and is practically not even a network (if everything can directly communicate with everything else, then is it really a routing network?)
Don't Panic, or be afraid of IPv6.
People often talk of "switching" to IPv6. One does not "switch". You simply deploy it alongside IPv4. Right now my home network is happily running IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time, called a "dual-stack" environment. This sort of set up will be common for decades until IPv4 use dwindles to nothing, and people start turning it off.
Nearly all operating systems and devices supporting IPv6 have it turned on by default, so you're already running IPv6. You just don't have globally routable addresses assigned (most likely). You could actually use ping (windows) and ping6 (*nix) to ping other hosts on your LAN using link local addresses, which have automatically been assigned (see those addresses starting with fe80 on all of your interfaces?), if you knew how, right now. :-)
If you know IPv4 routing and subnetting, you already know most of what you need to know about IPv6. Except that IPv6 is simpler since there's no need to NAT. Just set up your firewall exactly as you would under IPv4 (same security policy), minus the NAT. Subnetting is also simpler, with no need to fret over "right sizing" your subnets so they're "just big enough" and don't use too much of your precious IPv4 space. Just assign a /64 out of your /48 (businesses will be easily be able to request multiple /48s) and you're done. Never run out of host numbers, or subnets.
Some folks are frightened by the use of hexadecimal for IPv6 addresses. No need to fret. It makes sense, and would have made sense for IPv4 also. Hex for IPv6 not only makes the IPv6 addresses more compact., it's also far easier to translate hex into binary, and work with prefix-lengths than decimal IPv4 address are. I can do it in my head all day with no issue. All you have to do is memorize 16 bin patterns from 0000 to 1111, each represents a hex digit from 0 - F. Piece of cake. No more annoying math and base conversion to try to figure out which subnet some IPv6 address belongs to like with IPv4. No more subnet masks either (which are also decimal), instead, just prefix lengths (although this is also true of IPv4 with CIDR, adopted long ago, many user interfaces still require a netmask for IPv4 instead of just a /prefix-length, sigh).
Anyway. Go play with IPv6. It will be an essential skill to add to your Resume/CV, and will only take a short time to figure out. Go set up an tunnel with Hurricane Electric or some other tunnel broker to get some globally routable IPv6s. It's simple and you'll learn a lot and quickly! And best of all, you'll stop being afraid of IPv6! :-)
(apologies to those who already have adopted IPv6 and know all this already ... this isn't addressed to you!)
Windows Home Server is even more aggressive at telling you not to actually use it as a desktop.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Sixty-four bit operations are beginning to be the normal thing now and 128 bit operations are not a big deal.
Does that show you simply enough that the use-case of fixed objects is not universal and that tracking moving ones is not such a big deal as to give up on them for arbitrary historical reasons?
The reason we have man in the middle cobbled together things like Skype is because we can't find the unique address of a device owned by the person we want to contact (mainly due to NAT, but there are other things in the way as well). IPv6 is about solving that. Halfway measures such as what you suggest, to be blunt, show a lack of thought about the issue before commenting.
It also seems I seem to have to remind you that people can travel far outside of the area in which they live so your "giant subnet per carrier" is yet another kneejerk with no thought of such things are people being able to travel long distances and still have others find them. Your suggestion is just exchanging a formal routing table with an informal one.
There is plenty of value for IP addresses to "roam" as telephone numbers are already doing.
Is that enough to aid understanding or were you merely pretending not to get the point earlier and have just been stringing me along as some sort of childish game?
Skype address are fine. Skype maintains a unique identifier and the device ties its IP to that unique identifier. My issue is not that people don't need to find devices, its that IP shouldn't be the mechanism for doing so.
As for the general rudeness in your post that's unnecessary. Believe it or not, people can have considered an issue and still disagree with you.
Not as such.
Your homepage implies you are some sort of computing professional. I can only assume that you are deliberately pretending to be more ignorant than a high schooler as some sort of game to wind me up.
Once again you've missed the point of the example - I can only assume by now deliberately as some sort of game.