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ARIN IPv4 Addresses Run Out Tomorrow

jcomeau_ictx provided that teaser of a headline, but writes: Not really. But the countdown at tunnelbroker.net should go to zero sometime tomorrow around noon, considering it's at 45,107 as I write this, it's counting down about one address every two seconds, and there are 86,400 seconds per day. Just happened to notice it today. Might be worth a little celebration at every NOC and IT enterprise tomorrow.

215 comments

  1. Wait Wait Wait... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I thought they ran out last year, until I saw the report of them running out last month.

    I thought they ran out last month, until I saw the report of them running out last week.

    I though they ran out last week, now I see they'll run out tomorrow.

    Perhaps someone should start reporting facts rather than what ever you call all these reports.

    1. Re: Wait Wait Wait... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      according to the ARIN website
      https://www.arin.net/resources/request/ipv4_countdown.html

      they have approximately 57,658 ipv4
      addresses available to deploy
      at this time. this number
      does not reflect that some addresses have been allocated but are still on a 60 day hold, so the number may be lower.

    2. Re:Wait Wait Wait... by RabidReindeer · · Score: 4, Funny

      I thought they ran out last year, until I saw the report of them running out last month.

      I thought they ran out last month, until I saw the report of them running out last week.

      I though they ran out last week, now I see they'll run out tomorrow.

      Perhaps someone should start reporting facts rather than what ever you call all these reports.

      Xeno's IPv4 Paradox.

    3. Re:Wait Wait Wait... by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In 2011, they ran out from IANA. Now they are running out in ARIN, which is the supply allocated to North America.

      After this the only way to get IP addresses will be to pay a broker. The cost will go up and up over several years, until IPv6 is adopted, then the price will go down. IPv6 is already being rolled out in several places, so it's not an impossibility. Your phone more than likely uses IPv6, for example.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    4. Re:Wait Wait Wait... by KGIII · · Score: 1

      I have three static IPv4 addresses oddly enough. I am not sure why. They are nice and I take advantage of two of them but I got them as default with my DSL service. They have not changed in years and I do not see a line item on my bill for them nor do I pay for business class service. I wonder if this will change in the near future?

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    5. Re:Wait Wait Wait... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      It depends on the ISP. Some managed to get a lot more assigned to them than they're actually using, some were requesting the assignments as they needed them. If your ISP has a lot of spare ones, then they might start advertising non-NAT'd service as a selling point. If they've just been handing out all of the ones that they had, then you might find that they go down to one per customer unless you pay more.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    6. Re:Wait Wait Wait... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have three separate lines (I have a house that was on the property and a large garage plus this house). I did pay for the line to be run and a CO to be placed as it was cheaper than an ISDN line and much faster. However, I am still classed as a residential customer. Of those that I have checked, none of my neighbors has a static IP address. It is dynamic after they cycle their router with a power-off of more than a couple of minutes. I did once call and get one changed but it has been static since.

      I think I am in some sort of limbo in Fairpoint's system. They are a pretty decent ISP though so I give them that. They bought the local carrier but the employees are the same and my service has improved steadily while price has remained the same. Oddly they send me three new routers as many as three times per year. I do not get that.

      KGIII - Posted too much. 50 posts is a silly limit, really. I can go no higher but I sometimes have more to say.

  2. wft ever dude! by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

    "Haha, four billion computers...four billion networked computers! That's almost as many people as on the planet! Each computer will have more than 640k, too! HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!111!!"

    --
    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    1. Re:wft ever dude! by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 2

      Yes, but there really isn't, since large chunks of those IP addresses aren't being used...

      And that is the problem with the system, lots of IP blocks are taken, but unused and hard to get back.

      Frankly, this is all pointless, IP6 fixes this for... more or less, ever...

    2. Re:wft ever dude! by bunratty · · Score: 3, Informative

      There aren't four billion public IP addresses in use. The problem is that in the early days they handed out class A subnets like they were candy, wasting millions of IP addresses with every one. Most computers don't have their own public IP address -- they have a private IP address and access the Internet via NAT.

      --
      What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
    3. Re:wft ever dude! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      they handed out class A subnets like they were candy, wasting millions of IP addresses with every one.

      I realize that IPv6 has an astronomically large number of addresses, but it still really feels like they are making this same mistake again when the smallest allocation that anyone seems to give is a /64 block.

    4. Re:wft ever dude! by binarylarry · · Score: 1

      340 undecillion address ought to be enough for everyone.

      --
      Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    5. Re:wft ever dude! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The company I work for, once a big company with over 8000 employees, now after 30 years ofdigital revolution we are only with 31 employees, still has 2 complete subnets of IP-addresses : 255.255.255.0 /24. That's 512 ip addresses or 16 IP-addresses each person. That's because they were appointed to the company when the Internet overlords still thought there would only be a few million computers hooked up to the internet. Note that we are not a hosting company, we need Internet to serv our customers but we would do fine with only 1 fixed IP-address. Our webservers and application servers are in a data-center with its own range of IP-addresses anyway.

      Whenever I see the amount of IP-addresses my small company still has, I always wonder how many companies there are out there in the world that also have so many unused IP-addresses.

    6. Re:wft ever dude! by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 2

      You joke, and you're of course right to a point, but there comes a point where you have enough IP addresses for every grain of sand on Earth.

      We likely won't care within our lifetimes :)

    7. Re:wft ever dude! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And in the UK SKY Broadband (One of the biggest ISP in UK) is offering a SINGLE ipv6 address to each customer. Wow, last of the big spenders.

    8. Re: wft ever dude! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Technically it's 508 IPs but who's counting. I think the fact your company went from 8000 employees to 31 is more relevant than this news story.

    9. Re:wft ever dude! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I believe that european rules for IPv6 allocation is that for always-on (adsl/cable) customers the ISP "MUST" forward a /48 block. UK SKY should be careful or they may loose their IPv6 routing privileges.

    10. Re:wft ever dude! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      http://www.universetoday.com/36302/atoms-in-the-universe/ says there are about 10e78 to 10e82 atoms in the universe.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address says there are 3.4e38 unique IPv6 addresses.

      Obviously IPv6 is obsolete, so we need 512-bit addresses to give us 1.3e154 unique addresses....

    11. Re:wft ever dude! by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 1

      That was by design. Leaving 64 bits for the host address lets them use the Ethernet MAC address (the most common hardware address) as the host address, which leaves only the local network prefix needed to complete configuring the interface and that can be gotten via the Router Advertisement protocol on the known link-local network (fe80::/10). And let's see. The public unicast allocation's 2000::/3, with a few exception blocks carved out for things like 6to4 and Teredo. That's roughly 60 bits for the unique network number, or not quite 268.5 thousand 4-billion+ blocks of network addresses. 0000::/3 and e000::/3 are already in use, but that still leaves us with 5 more /3 blocks we can assign for unicast use without conflicting with anything if the 2000::/3 block runs out. So I think that even with some inefficiency that'll hold us for a good while.

    12. Re:wft ever dude! by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

      Just to be "that guy"... no one is handing out single IPv6 addresses. Even if you need just one address, you're generally being given a /64 (or a /48).

      So the math people are generally using in these sorts of discussions is wrong.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    13. Re:wft ever dude! by Dracolytch · · Score: 1

      So... There are 10^38 IPv6 addresses. How many is that?

      The Earth is about 10^24 kg in mass. That means you could assign 100 IPv6 address to each nanogram of Earth.

      I think we'll be OK.

      --
      This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
    14. Re:wft ever dude! by Geordish · · Score: 1

      The specification defines a network as using a /64. Period. None of this altering the network size to conserve addresses we needed in IPv4.

      The smallest allocation any site should ever be given is defined as a /48. This give every site 65566 networks of size /64.

      What a lot of people seem to have problems understanding is the vast size of IPv6.

      Imagine that everyone on the planet is connected, and they each have 32 different ISPs (phones, home, work...) This is a gross overestimation.

      7 x billion people * 32 = 224 000 000 000 /48's required.

      This easily fits within a single /10. That is 1/1024 of the total address space.

      The current addressing policies were required due to the finite nature of IPv4. IPv6 is still finite, but the scale is vastly different.

      The current allocation policies only affect the first /3, or 1/8 of the total available space. If we manage to burn through that quicker than expected, policies can be adjusted for the next /3.

    15. Re:wft ever dude! by Geordish · · Score: 1

      Unfortunately there is no such policy (and if there were, it would be unenforceable)

      The RECOMMENDATION is to give a /48 per customer. This includes to things like mobile phones, broadband etc. This is fairly sensible.

      Unfortunately there are still people stuck in the 'we must conserve address space' mindset from IPv4.

    16. Re: wft ever dude! by bn-7bc · · Score: 0

      Well thar was the old recommendation from RIPE but it has bin changed now the minimum is /64 (well actually that is the max mask length but it results in the min numerous of subnet =1) I whish the wold have the max at a /56 then internal subneting would be possible without braking things like slaac

    17. Re:wft ever dude! by jbolden · · Score: 1

      You sure that's residential? Why would a home need 65k subnets?

    18. Re:wft ever dude! by Dr.Dubious+DDQ · · Score: 1

      Frankly, this is all pointless, IP6 fixes this for... more or less, ever...

      If my (insert profanity here) ISP ever gets off its cheap, lazy butts and makes IPv6 available to me...

    19. Re:wft ever dude! by Geordish · · Score: 1

      Why wouldn't they?

      The IPv6 address space is so huge that you can give every person on the planet multiple /48's, and barely make a dent in the free pool.

      Unnecessarily withholding address space may stifle innovation. A /48 is a lot of address space, but we will be kicking ourselves if we allocate less, and an application comes along that requires a load of networks.

      You can go to he.net, sign up for a free tunnel, and click 'Give me a /48'. No questions asked.

      FYI, I have native IPv6 connectivity at home with a /48 assigned.

      I also work for a (different) ISP, and our policy is every connection gets a /48.

      It simplifies addressing policies at the very least.

    20. Re:wft ever dude! by jandrese · · Score: 1

      While that's true, the number of /48 subnets is still almost unimaginably huge. There is effectively no chance of ever running out of IPv6 addresses.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    21. Re:wft ever dude! by Geordish · · Score: 1

      And from the RIPE address plan manual

      "So a /48 should be used when there is any doubt whether a /56 is sufficient in the long run. ISPs
      get much leeway in determining the prefix size they give to their customers up to /48–even in
      the case of home users"

      I would say there is always a doubt that a /56 may be insufficient. A /56 only allows for 256 networks.

    22. Re:wft ever dude! by jbolden · · Score: 1

      A local internet registry at smallest only gets a /32. Which means they can only do 65k homes which would be too small. Now admittedly if they are getting a /20 (maximum allocation) will be fine. But that means you can only have 256 locals in each regional (i.e. each /12) and that's likely too few. There is tons of room but it isn't infinite.

          I'm a fan of a /60 for homes. I guess you are right there is enough room to make a /48 work but that seems like needlessly throwing away a lot of bits.

    23. Re:wft ever dude! by ShaunC · · Score: 2

      The problem is that in the early days they handed out class A subnets like they were candy, wasting millions of IP addresses with every one.

      This is correct, and we should continue efforts to reclaim IPs from entities sitting on massive swaths of unused space. Eli Lilly surrendered part of their unneeded allocation, for example. I say forget the corporate blocks for now until the emergency is a bit more dire. While companies like Halliburton and Ford Motors can't possibly have a need for a full /8, trying to recover from them is likely to present legal challenges.

      Instead, why don't we take a look at how many /8s are reserved for militaries? 6.0.0.0/8, 7.0.0.0/8, 11.0.0.0/8, 21.0.0.0/8, 22.0.0.0/8, 25.0.0.0/8, 26.0.0.0/8, 28.0.0.0/8, 29.0.0.0/8, 30.0.0.0/8, 33.0.0.0/8. It goes on well through the IPv4 space but I got bored of looking them up, and just those represent more than 180 million IPs that could be released for public use. Networks like SIPRNET aren't publicly routed and don't need public IPs. Most of these blocks are entirely unused on the public internet. Of course the military has plenty of valid, publicly accessible services, but they don't have 180 million of them.

      As a taxpayer, I would much rather see these chunks of IP space SWIP'd out to ISPs who can justify their need instead of being destined to forever sit around dormant and registered to the military.

      --
      Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
    24. Re:wft ever dude! by Geordish · · Score: 1

      A local internet registry at smallest only gets a /32.

      This really depends on your region. My knowledge if from RIPE. The default allocation there is now a /29. But that is default. If you can justify more, you can have more.

          I'm a fan of a /60 for homes. I guess you are right there is enough room to make a /48 work but that seems like needlessly throwing away a lot of bits.

      Partially from a previous comment I've made:

      Imagine that everyone on the planet is connected, and they each have 32 different ISPs (phones, home, work...) This is a gross overestimation.

      7 billion people * 32 = 224 000 000 000 /48's required.

      This easily fits within a single /10. That is 1/1024 of the total address space.

      IPv4 currently has been around since around 1980 (Can't be bothered to get real dates). This means that it has so far had a life of around 40 years.

      IPv6 is not going to last forever. It is very likely we will hit some limitation of the protocol, but its not likely to be with the address space. Lets use the IPv4 life length as a ball park figure for how long its going to last us.

      Lets imagine in that time the population doubles, and the number of ISPs that everyone has doubles in that time.

      We now have 14 billion people and 64 ISPs

      14 billion people * 64 = 896 000 000 000 /48s required.

      This comfortably fits within a /8 or 1/256 of the available address space.

      Now we can do sparse addressing and leave big holes in the allocations "just in case" but we are still going to have a hell of a lot of address space left at this point.

      Since we don't expect this protocol to last forever, why potentially stifle innovation by limiting addresses, when even using really outlandish figures for what may happen still leaves us with huge swaths of address space unused?

      The current best practice allocation policies only affect the first /3, or 1/8 of the total available space. If we manage to burn through that quicker than expected, policies can be adjusted for the next /3.

      I will begrudgingly accept for an ISP to hand me a /60 or a /56, but personally, I will be giving all my customers a /48. The space is so massive it seems rude not to.

    25. Re:wft ever dude! by Geordish · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Back before the exhaustion policies kicked in, ARIN were burning through a /8 every couple of months.

      This is why taking back the legacy address allocations will not really be worth the time or effort. There is more demand than availability. If there was free reign allocation over it all, it would be gone before the year is out.

      Move to IPv6 already.

      Oh, and 11/8 recently became routable.

    26. Re:wft ever dude! by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      I hear you...

      I've been on Verizon FIOS for 5 years now, never had IPv6 at all...

      A few days ago, switched to AT&T GigaPower... IPv6 came right up...

      Why did I switch you ask? FIOS was stuck at 150 megabits up and down for $105 a month. AT&T offered 1 gigabit up and down for $110 a month.

      Ok, ok, I have to agree to let them track what I search for, but I figure they are doing that anyway (I know Google does, so what is the difference?). I also may pay up to $30 more per month max if I use a ton of bandwidth...

      But lord oh lord... my web connection is now as fast as my local Ethernet connection, that is nuts! Of course, I've found the limits of that, some servers can handle it, many can't. My speed is now much more variable depending on who I'm connected to.

      ---

      Back to the point, nice to see AT&T has IPv6 up on their fiber...

    27. Re:wft ever dude! by Bengie · · Score: 1

      We don't need a /48 per person, just per household. With 3 people per household, that's saves you almost 2 bits! Meant to be funny. 1 bit isn't that useful of a difference.

    28. Re:wft ever dude! by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      You're right of course... And the intent of the IPv6 space is not to use all the numbers, but rather to give every device its own number, do away with NAT and DHCP, and to make routing of traffic faster and easier.

      So the percentage of "used" space will likely always be low with IPv6, but the total address space is so big, it probably won't matter.

      At least, it won't matter in our lifetime...

    29. Re:wft ever dude! by Bengie · · Score: 1

      HTTP1.1 is a huge limitation. You need a lot of connections to make any decent use of your bandwidth. I find that even slow websites are mostly a latency vs throughput issue. The data comes in bursted at 1Gb/s, but there are large gaps between the responses.

    30. Re:wft ever dude! by Xtifr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      For the moment, I think we can limit ourselves to the number of atoms in the solar system. One rough estimate is that there are 10e29 stars in the universe. If the atoms were divided up approximately evenly between these star's systems, then there'd be 10e82/10e29=10e53. So we have one IPv6 address for each cluster of 10e15 atoms.

      Except! I've heard it estimated that about half the matter in the solar system is in the sun, and we don't want to use up the sun to build computers, because we need it to power the computers. So, 10e14 atoms per IPv6 left to work with.

      So the question before the audience is:can you build a device that implements an IPv6 stack and a minimal radio transmitter that allows it to communicate with other, similar devices, using only 10e14 atoms? If so, or if it can be done in less, then we may have a problem*. Otherwise, I think we should be fine for now.

      (To give you a rough estimate of what you're working with:10e14 atoms of silicon would mass about 46 nanograms.)

      Submit your solutions to iwannahelpdestroytheworld@weregonnafreakingcreatethesingularity.com :)

      * Although the problem may not be manifest until we convert the *entire* Earth, core and all, into these devices, along with all the other planets, and colonize the Oort cloud, and do the same there. :)

    31. Re: wft ever dude! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Kodak?

    32. Re:wft ever dude! by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      Interesting point you make... When I move a large file, give it some time, and the speed tends to go up over time... It often takes 15 to 20 seconds before full speed is attained...

      Honestly, I'm considering dropping it back to 300 meg, it saves $30 a month and I suspect I won't notice a difference...

    33. Re:wft ever dude! by sjames · · Score: 1

      Now if Comcast would FINALLY fix their broken route to the 6to4 transition space...

    34. Re:wft ever dude! by sjames · · Score: 1

      Name and shame.

    35. Re:wft ever dude! by leegaard · · Score: 1

      Reclaiming the early A class subnets and similar allocations would not give us that much extra addresses - maybe just enough for us to burn through in a year or two - it does not solve the fundamental proble: that the IPv4 address space is too small for the size the internet has grown to.

      Reclaiming is impossible by the way. Much of that space is in use in those corps. Some internally - some externally. Migrating to a smaller address space is going to be a huge and very complex and expensive project ie. it is not going to happen - there is no incentive. IPv6 enabling services is easier and has a lot more future perspective.
      Forcfully taking it back and distributing it anew will only break stuff both for the new and the old holders.

    36. Re:wft ever dude! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm beginning to think we need better home routers. Sure with IPv6 every one of your appliances could be directly on the internet, but I just don't think that is sane in today's threat rich environment. Here is some of the things I'd like to see.

      1) A spot for a 2.5Inch Sata drive, either SSD or regular. Ideally there would be some built in encryption somewhere here too.
      2) Built in caching proxy server, but obviously it will only serve the home network. The caching will of course use that drive.
      3) DHCP, Caching DNS, and a trivial web server to auto server the proxy.pac file as needed.
      4) Wireless Encryption using current standards as being the only supported mode.
      5) Multiple private subnets, and say about 16 ports so you can actually run a decent house. A key thing we want here is for every dedicated devices, such as the phone adapter, or roku box, sat receiver, etc, etc, to be able to be placed on a semi isolated network. In short if they only need to access the network, then they should be prevented from accessing anything else in the home lan.
      6) Obviously you still need some mechanism to pass through limited ports for those who care, but that should be off by default.
      7) Some devices may need to bypass the proxy, but the main PCs should likely use it. Somehow windows/linux updates must be cached. It seems Windows 10 may share updates across a lan, though I'm not sure I like that approach.
      8) The device needs a real time virus scanner that is automatically updated. It won't replace pc based ones, but could still be part of a defense in depth strategy, and might occasionally spot if say your phone adapter has been compromised.
      9) The device needs to be able to handle at least a few standard network printers such that you can trivially print from android without having to keep a computer on to do so.
      10) Must of course include basic traffic shaping and other useful stuff. In particular we may want something such that if a very high priority port seems to need bandwidth (i.e. phone), then filtering does what it can.
      11) The system should ideally support a second ISP, though that feature may get little use.
      12) Some home devices may be just that, home devices. Access may be limited to only home pcs, or only home pcs connected to the wired lan, or only a specific computer. Just imagine what would happen if say every internet connected house in the united states had insecure programmable thermostats. All we would need is some kind of worm or similar to spread the instructions to turn up the heat to maximum, and maybe the AC at the same time. That kind of thing might even be enough to take down a good junk of the power grid.
      13) For those who still really want to access home resources abroad, you could then VPN into your home network. You could even use VPNs to link two homes together so that computers can be remotely maintained.

      At any rate, so ends my random wishlist for a home router. I rather suspect it would cost a fair amount...

    37. Re:wft ever dude! by mcrbids · · Score: 1

      Right!

      Because in 1981 or so, everybody was pretty sure that this fairly obscure educational network would *never* need more than about 4 billion addresses... and they were *obviously right*.

      The discussion about grains of sand or atoms is pretty silly. The reality is that the idea of 1 item, 1 address is already hogwash. It's very typical for one address to host *many somethings* (EG: websites, NAT, etc) and the opposite is also equally true: it's very typical for one something to respond to many addresses.

      There are many applications that we likely can't even consider due to today's limitations that may well depend on or benefit from a large address space. IPv6 is a definite step in the right direction, but having seen the transition from 8 -> 16 bit computers, 16 -> 32 bit computers, and the transition from 32 -> 64 bit computers, the reality is that **growth is exponential**.

      When 2% of your address space is consumed, you are just over 6 doublings away consumption. Even if you assume an entire decade per doubling, that's less than an average lifetime before you're doing it all over again.

      IMHO: what needs to happen next is to have a 16 bit packet header to indicate the size of the address in use. This makes the address space not only dynamic, but MASSIVE without requiring all hardware on the face of the Earth to be updated any time the address space runs out.

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    38. Re:wft ever dude! by fisted · · Score: 1

      A /56 only allows for 256 networks

      With 4e21 addresses each.
      Or four billion networks with 1e12 addresses each
      Or...

      It's not like you couldn't subnet your address space if you wanted. You only need to stick with the 64/64 split if you want everything(*) to automagically configure itself

      (*) hosts, anyway. not routers.

    39. Re:wft ever dude! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Reclaiming IPv4 space will only buy another year at most. The real solution is to get over to IPv6.

    40. Re:wft ever dude! by fisted · · Score: 1
    41. Re: wft ever dude! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      508 because broadcast addresses and network addresses are not IP addresses? wtf?

    42. Re:wft ever dude! by jandrese · · Score: 1

      One of the design goals of IPv6 was to simplfy the routing logic so we could make faster and cheaper hardware. That's why there is no more IP fragmentation for example. Making the fields variable size defeats that. It's much easier to build hardware for fixed field sizes.

      Plus you can't project exponential growth out to infinity. It is inevitable that some factor will come to limit the growth. It has been really incredible how long transistors have maintained their growth, but even that seems to be coming to an end.

      Also, we're probably not going to have a 64->128 bit transition. Not without a fundamental change in the way we do computing.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    43. Re:wft ever dude! by CSMoran · · Score: 2

      s/10e/1e/g

      --
      Every end has half a stick.
    44. Re:wft ever dude! by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      Am I the only one that sees IP V6 as a "cure" worse than the disease? From everything I've seen it looks like a police state and media cartels wet dream, the ability to assign a unique address to every.single.device like a digital fingerprint so they can trivially trace back every statement, every video watched, every move, for later prosecution? Am I the only one having a problem with this idea, or is the idea of always being under the all seeing electric eye something the young folks simply accept and don't care about?

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    45. Re:wft ever dude! by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      Eastman?

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    46. Re:wft ever dude! by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      Am I the only one that sees IP V6 as a "cure" worse than the disease? From everything I've seen it looks like a police state and media cartels wet dream, the ability to assign a unique address to every.single.device like a digital fingerprint so they can trivially trace back every statement, every video watched, every move, for later prosecution?

      I'm sure others see that too... but what I'd suggest is that you not pirate media and then the media cartels won't care about you. :)

      In fact, if you're not a pirate, then the unique IP for every device can come to your defense, since I'm sure some people are unfairly targeted now thanks to NAT and the like.

      Am I the only one having a problem with this idea, or is the idea of always being under the all seeing electric eye something the young folks simply accept and don't care about?

      I'm 40 years old, while I have a vague sense of unease with it, the 20 year olds don't seem to care much. My parents and their generation largely don't seem to understand or have given up and accept they won't be around long enough to care.

      Those are broad brushes of course. :) There will always be exceptions. I'm sure you can live a more disconnected life, there are other options... but many people want to be wired up 24/7...

    47. Re:wft ever dude! by RR · · Score: 1

      There aren't four billion public IP addresses in use. The problem is that in the early days they handed out class A subnets like they were candy, wasting millions of IP addresses with every one.

      Incorrect. Getting an address should be cheap like candy, but that is not the problem. Even if they practiced austerity from the beginning, killing Internet adoption before it could start, there would still be a problem.

      The actual number of public addresses that can be used is much less than the 4 billion that you get by raising 2 to the 32nd power. Addresses are allocated in power-of-two groups, so an organization that needs 127 computers online and an organization that needs 250 computers will require the same 256-address amount of space. And each network that joins the Internet increases the global routing table that is copied to every important router in the world, so there is an incentive to allocate larger address groups. You can’t just take one address from one 256-address group and give it to another group; you have to transfer an entire group. I think the actual occupancy of addresses is closer to 50%, or 2 billion. We obviously need more than 2 billion computers and devices online, so that’s where NAT comes in.

      NAT works because there is a separate pool of 65 thousand port numbers per IP address for individual application connections. Essentially, your computer does not have an IP address, but it has access to another machine that does, and that machine is dynamically allocating its port numbers to your computer’s applications. Each application uses multiple ports. Web browsers, especially, use a lot of ports. To work, your computer eventually needs access to a public address with enough open port numbers to work.

      And this particular tactic to stretch out IP addresses is already stretched about as far as it will go. Servers don’t share ports because client programs use the port to find the server program. And the more smartphones and smart TVs and stuff that go into homes, the fewer the number of homes that can be supported on a single real IP address.

      No, on a planet with 7 billion people and having a use for multiple addresses per person, IPv4 is just at least a couple orders of magnitude too small. We need to move to IPv6.

      --
      Have a nice time.
    48. Re:wft ever dude! by knorthern+knight · · Score: 1

      > You're right of course... And the intent of the IPv6 space is not to use all
      > the numbers, but rather to give every device its own number, do away
      > with NAT and DHCP, and to make routing of traffic faster and easier.

      There are tons of hacks available.

      If things get bad, an ISP could use CIDR on IPV6 for all their customers in a given city. A million customers in a big city could fit into a /64 with 2^44 addresses for each customer. If they're all in one city, routing would not be an issue for routers outside of the ISP's system. And, yes, I'm aware there's no provision for such stuff in IPV6... but then again, CIDR wasn't in the original IPV4 spec.

      There's always the UUID bits to play around with.

      And to really mess with IPV6 fanbois' minds, we could try NAT on IPV6.

      --

      I'm not repeating myself
      I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
    49. Re:wft ever dude! by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Behind a single IP address may be many computers - let us not forget that. I have all sorts of them and businesses have far more. I would not be totally surprised to hear there were 4 billion connected devices.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    50. Re: wft ever dude! by bbn · · Score: 1

      Its 512. Come, count with me:

      1
      2
      4
      8
      16
      32
      64
      128
      256
      512

    51. Re:wft ever dude! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Because in 1981 or so, everybody was pretty sure that this fairly obscure educational network would *never* need more than about 4 billion addresses... and they were *obviously right*.

      Well, maybe. Back then home computers were already a growth area and so it was obvious that one computer per household would eventually become the norm. If you wanted to put these all on IPv4, then it would be cramped. The growth in mobile devices and multi-computer households might have been a bit surprising to someone in 1981, but you'd have wanted to add some headroom.

      When 2% of your address space is consumed, you are just over 6 doublings away consumption. Even if you assume an entire decade per doubling, that's less than an average lifetime before you're doing it all over again.

      With IPv6, you can have 4 billion networks for every IPv4 address. Doublings are much easier to think about in base 2: one bit per doubling. We've used all of the IPv4 addresses. Many of those are for NAT'd networks, so let's assume that they all are and that we're going to want one IPv6 subnet for each IPv4 address currently assigned during the transition. That's 32 bits gone. Assuming that we're using a /48 for every subnet, then that gives us 16 more doublings (160 years by your calculations). If we're using /64s, then that's 32 doublings (320 years). I hope that's within my lifetime, but I suspect that it won't be.

      In practice, I suspect that the growth will be a bit different. Most of the current growth is multiple devices per household, which doesn't affect the number of subnets: that /64 will happily keep a house happy with a nice sparse network, even if every single physical object that you own gets a microcontroller and participates in IoT things using a globally routable address.

      IMHO: what needs to happen next is to have a 16 bit packet header to indicate the size of the address in use. This makes the address space not only dynamic, but MASSIVE without requiring all hardware on the face of the Earth to be updated any time the address space runs out.

      This isn't really a workable idea. Routing tables need to be fast, which means that the hardware needs to be simple. For IPv4, you basically have a fast RAM block with 2^24 entries and switch on the first three bytes to determine where to send the packet. With IPv6, subnets are intended to be arranged hierarchically, so you end up with a simpler decision. With variable-length fields, you'd need something complex to parse them and that would send you into the software slow path. This is a problem, because you'd then have a very simple DoS attack on backbone routers (just send them packets with large length headers that chew up CPU before they're dropped). You'd also have the same deployment headaches that IPv6 has: no one would buy routers that had fast paths for very large addresses now, just because in 100 years we might need them, so no one would test that path at a large scale: you'd avoid the DoS by just dropping all packets that used an address size other than 4 or 16. In 100 years (i.e. well over 50 backbone router upgrades), people might start caring and buy routers that could handle 16 or 32 byte address fields, but that upgrade path is already possible: the field that you're looking for is called the version field in the IP header.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    52. Re:wft ever dude! by bn-7bc · · Score: 0

      Well yes ara maximum but you never have thar many hosts in a layer 2 domain to mouch all node multicast for things like nd and dad) I seem to remember reading a Cisco recommendation ones to limit the number of hosts in a layer 2 domain to ~100

    53. Re:wft ever dude! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      I found that above about 10Mb/s you start to hit diminishing returns. The jump from 10 to 30 was barely noticeable. The jump from 30 to 100 is noticeable with large downloads, but nothing else. From 100 to 1000, the main thing that you notice is if you accidentally download a large file to a spinning-rust disk and see how quickly your fill up your RAM with buffer cache...

      Over the last 10 years, I've gone from buying the fastest connection my ISP offered to buying the slowest. The jump from 512Kb/s to 1Mb/s was really amazing (though not as good as moving to 512Kb/s from a modem that rarely managed even 33Kb/s), but each subsequent upgrade has been less exciting.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    54. Re:wft ever dude! by ruir · · Score: 1

      There is a thing called privacy and another more specific called VPN or Tor. So basically you waived you right to privacy and to take preemptive measures to shield your activity from the local ISP and from the any minion of the government at large, and gave your search data for them to sell to others, for "marketing" purposes. How nice and patriotic of you.

    55. Re:wft ever dude! by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      Are you sure about that? This presentation says they're allocating a /56.

    56. Re:wft ever dude! by bn-7bc · · Score: 0

      Well 6to4 via any cast has been requested to be deprecated so don't get your hopes up ref https://tools.ietf.org/html/rf...

    57. Re:wft ever dude! by bn-7bc · · Score: 0

      Nice list but 8 is totally unrealistic remember these router need to be cheap if you are for widespread adaptation, and with more and more traffic m moving to https that means ssl/tls intercept at liberates thar are 10s if not 100s of Mbps. Hvis that can handle tat are not cheap, the rest of the list is almost (-the drive bay and the wireless) met by Ubiquiti edgerouter products ( even dual WAN) hver it comes to være less i actually prefer thar dom py a separate ap as that can be placed for best coverage inipendently of where the rest of the wired network infrastructure is ( esp with PoE)

    58. Re:wft ever dude! by Rising+Ape · · Score: 1

      Actually, Sky aren't offering any IPv6 yet, except to a small trial.

      But for the trial customers, they're handing out /56s.

    59. Re:wft ever dude! by jbolden · · Score: 1

      You can change the MAC address (last 64 bits) your system advertises. If you don't like consistency, change addresses daily or whatever. Of course once systems start using your MAC address as a sort of username...

    60. Re:wft ever dude! by jbolden · · Score: 1

      There are at least 3x that many. There are huge blocks of unused space but then used space if often being crowded in tightly. We are long past when we should have switched.

    61. Re:wft ever dude! by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      This already happens automatically. With privacy addresses enabled (which is the default on pretty much everything), your system will automatically generate itself a new random address every 24 hours. The GP's worry about being able to trivially identify which device was using each IP will not actually happen (unless you've specifically gone and disabled privacy addresses...).

    62. Re:wft ever dude! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Still have the incessant need to have the last word in, eh troll?
      (Oh yes, I realize that *I'm* having the last word (as of this moment), but then I'm not part of this discussion thus far.)

    63. Re:wft ever dude! by sjames · · Score: 1

      Essentially, all it says is that hosts and routers (meaning end user's routers) should not default to using 192.88.99.1 as a 6to4 router if they don't get a prefix. The reason for that is too many firewalls and clueless network people were breaking the mechanism and causing long timeouts as hosts assume they have v6 connectivity and use it in preference to v4 (as they should).

      The mechanism itself and the associated address space are explicitly not deprecated.

      That is, they absolutely DO need to cease black holing customer traffic bound to 2002::/16. All that does is make the sorry state of IPv6 adoption even worse. Since the route exists in their public rviews server, I suspect it is unintentional breakage affecting only some customers, but since their entire support structure is designed to make sure nobody can ever talk to anyone with a clue, I have no way to alert anyone who actually knows how a router works that there is a problem.

    64. Re:wft ever dude! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They can already track you under IPv4. Your internet browser and mobile apps leak more useful identification parameters than your IP address.

    65. Re:wft ever dude! by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 1

      Amusingly most home routers already support most of that. #8 isn't feasible, a router doesn't have enough of a view into the traffic to do that kind of thing in real-time. And IMO #9 is better done on the printers. My laser printer's got Ethernet and a built-in print server (actually several, for the different protocols used by different operating systems). The rest is already a standard part of the firmware most router vendors base their own on. It's just that the vendors have disabled/removed a lot of the useful bits, or at least removed any access to them in their UI. Reflash your router with stock DD-WRT and you get pretty much everything you're asking for. Even the firewall. Every device on your network may have a public IPv6 address, but that doesn't mean the firewall will let inbound traffic through to them. The stock settings on mine are to allow established/related traffic through inbound, allow DHCPv6 traffic in to the router only, allow ICMPv6 traffic, and drop everything else. The IPv6 side follows the same rules as the IPv4 side: I can connect out, but nobody else can initiate a connection in. Oh, and for #5 I wouldn't build a big switch in, you aren't going to be rate-limited by the bandwidth to the router so use one LAN port to feed a larger switch that your network hangs off of. That also removes intra-LAN traffic from the router's switch.

      Supporting multiple ISPs is an intricate bit of work, but it's mostly an extension of what's done to support the current WAN port. The biggest problem is that with 2 WAN connections you need a routing daemon and it's configuration has to be coordinated with both ISPs and that's going to be a nightmare.

      If you don't care about keeping power consumption to a minimum, there's a lot of fun you can have with a mini-ITX or smaller board, a managed switch and an x86_64 build of DD-WRT.

    66. Re:wft ever dude! by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      So "as long as you do nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about"...is that REALLY your position? You DO know you are a felon, right? You are, I am, pretty much everybody is as You commit three felonies a day and the ONLY reason they do not go after you is how much work it would take. Now you have all these SJWs pushing for pretty much anything they find personally offensive (oh I forgot "trigger warning") to be labeled as "hate speech", you have people being investigated by Homeland for making a bad joke or daring to be seen with a sign at a protest, you have CEOs of media cartels saying every song you listen to without giving them money is theft...you really think we should make things EASIER for the state and the cartels?

      If you are gonna keep that position I hope you are VERY careful with what you say, what you write, and watch, because all it will take is someone with a tiny bit of power deciding they do not like you. I personally don't have nearly as much faith in the government and cartels as you do, so I'll pass for as long as I can and buy a VPN to idoncareistan when I no longer can, thanks anyway.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    67. Re:wft ever dude! by fulldecent · · Score: 1

      This is a weak retort to a sticking argument. From grandparents to teens, people have quickly learned that you need to:

          - use VPNs to access sports channels that are blocked in your region

          - use VPNs and common sense to access social media that is blocked in your country

          - use strong encryption to protect discussion of drugs that aren't legal yet

          - block ads / use incognito mode to avoid letting websites you visit learning your sexual orientation or other potential secrets

      People will be quick to learn:

        - use IPV4-style addressing (one per house) when voting, or accessing media you already purchased, the "wrong" way, to stay out of jail

      It

      --

      -- I was raised on the command line, bitch

    68. Re:wft ever dude! by Bengie · · Score: 1

      I have a 1Gb link that is rate limited to 100Mb. When I download files, wireshark shows a 1Gb burst of 30 1500 byte packets back-to-back, then my ISP's rate limiting starts to clamp down and the traffic shaping starts to space out the TCP flow and dials down to my 100Mb provisioned rate. This all happens in the first second, not 15-20 seconds. Although I have an 10ms RTT to every major datacenter in Chicago via Level 3 Comm. Low RTTs allow TCP to quickly ramp up. My ISP does have one CDN on their network, akamai. 1.5ms ping.

      10ms to Chicago, 30ms to New York City and Atalanta and Washington(AWS), 40ms to Texas and Florida, and 60ms to Cali. Short RTTs help a lot with TCP.

      Bandwidth isn't everything, ping, jitter, and loss are also important. Jitter typically indicates congestion and so does loss. I can reach every major datacenter in the world with under a 250ms RTT. That includes Moscow, India, China, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia. Also, all under 1ms of jitter.

    69. Re:wft ever dude! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You current router can almost certainly do almost all of that. USB ports for external drives and printers are pretty common on routers. Most of the rest is software that's available in DD-WRT or similar.

    70. Re:wft ever dude! by Bengie · · Score: 1

      "Slow start" is relative. It is much slower than going strait to line rate, but it is an binary search that increases bandwidth exponentially per RTT. Many TCP implementations start off with a window size of 8 segments or more at full line rate. Most TCP implementations coalesce ACKs to reduce the number of ACK packets. This would mean every 2 segments gets an ACK. 8 segments sent means 4 ACKs which means 4 doulbings(16x) in just the first RTT. 16x 8 segments is 128 segments. a 20ms RTT with 128 1500 byte segments is 76.8Mb/s in the first 20ms, and will continue to double every 2 segments ACKed per RTT. By the time you are 40-60ms in, you should be at almost 200Mb/s. His 15 seconds is forever.

      My example is a little bit simplified because once a TCP stream gets moving, the packets are spaced apart, only the initial transfer will burst all segments in the window at line rate. A bit of trivia. Google modified their TCP stack to increase the number of initial bursted segments because most responses are quite small, and if you can fit the entire response in the initial burst the client only needs to wait one RTT, but if there are any more segments to be sent, the client now has to wait at least 2-RTTs, even if it's one more segment.

    71. Re:wft ever dude! by Bengie · · Score: 1

      Many set-top boxes like Roku support streaming from your home media server. They'll need LAN access in those cases.

      "Built in caching proxy server" - Doesn't help with HTTPS and with just around the corner 10Gb internet, I challenge you to make a cheap device that can handle proxying data at 10Gb/s.

      "The device needs a real time virus scanner that is automatically updated" - Not so much a virus scanner, but an IDS. Can't virus scan at 10Gb/s.

      "Must of course include basic traffic shaping and other useful stuff" - Even professionals get Traffic shaping wrong most of the time. An AQM like Cake or fq_Codel is all that is needed. Fair queueing and flow isolation to combat bufferbloat.

      "You could even use VPNs to link two homes together" - More features!

      You have a lot of great ideas, but as it is, even $400 consume grade routers are riddled with security holes that never get fixed. They can't even get NAT or UPNP right, what makes you think they can do some of the more complicated features in a secure way? Remember, most of these devices are EoL by the time they can be purchased. Supporting devices is a cost and most companies don't want that.

      Either people need to take responsibility for their own security or we need a better open source security framework and support that allows for companies to make the devices and let the opensource community handle the software side of things. We cannot trust companies to maintain bug fixes for their devices.

    72. Re: wft ever dude! by Bengie · · Score: 1

      You can't use the high and low IPs and you at least need a gateway ip. 3 IPs per subnet are lost. I'm not sure what the 4th IP gets lost to.

    73. Re:wft ever dude! by oobayly · · Score: 1

      Andrews and Arnold have given me a /48 for my VDSL connection, whereas BT have "only" given us a /56 for our leased line.

    74. Re:wft ever dude! by fisted · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say.

      a Cisco recommendation

      Maybe here's our problem? :-)

    75. Re:wft ever dude! by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      Now you have all these SJWs pushing for pretty much anything they find personally offensive (oh I forgot "trigger warning") to be labeled as "hate speech"

      That is not a technology problem, that is a socity problem. If we don't fix that, nothing we do with technology will matter.

      We're doomed as a race if we don't figure out how to stop fighting each other.

      If you are gonna keep that position I hope you are VERY careful with what you say, what you write, and watch, because all it will take is someone with a tiny bit of power deciding they do not like you.

      But that is already the situation, it has been for awhile, and nothing I do is going to change it.

      I personally don't have nearly as much faith in the government and cartels as you do, so I'll pass for as long as I can and buy a VPN to idoncareistan when I no longer can, thanks anyway.

      I don't have faith in them either, but I think you're kidding yourself if you think a VPN is going to help you. You're wired into the government approved Internet, using devices you don't really control, on connections that you don't either, paid for with electronic money that you don't control.

      Bin Laden survived for a long time only because he was TOTALLY off the grid, and had a lot of people around him protecting and covering for him. You, living in the US? No chance.

      Your idea of "security" is an illusion in my opinion, you aren't nearly as "hidden" as you think you are.

    76. Re: wft ever dude! by bbn · · Score: 1

      Network, gateway and broadcast are still IP addresses so the company does indeed own 512 addresses.

      Second, it is not true that you can not use 3 IP addresses. The most obvious is the gateway address - can the computer doing the routing not also run a web server? Does in fact not most home routers run various services, including a web server, dhcp client, NAT etc?

      The subnet would be routed and usually the IP address used for routing would be provided by the IP transit company. As a routed subnet there is nothing that forces a particular subnetting scheme. They could deploy it as a big /23 subnet. Or as a bunch of /30 subnets, allowing only 128 "usable" IP addresses.. But they could equally also deploy /32 addresses and this technique would allow you to use all 512 IP addresses for hosts. Or it could be used as a NAT pool, again allowing you to use all addresses including the first and last address in the series.

      As to how you deploy /32 addresses you can do that by DHCP or manually - on Linux eg:

      # add the /32 address
      ip addr add 123.1.2.0/32 dev eth0
      # add a host route for the IP that will be used for gateway
      ip route add 10.0.0.1/32 dev eth0
      # add default gateway route
      ip route add default via 10.0.0.1

      Notice that you can use a completely different subnet for gateway, such as 10.0.0.1.

    77. Re:wft ever dude! by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      This is a weak retort to a sticking argument. From grandparents to teens, people have quickly learned that you need to:

              - use VPNs to access sports channels that are blocked in your region

              - use VPNs and common sense to access social media that is blocked in your country

              - use strong encryption to protect discussion of drugs that aren't legal yet

              - block ads / use incognito mode to avoid letting websites you visit learning your sexual orientation or other potential secrets

      Wow, that is really out there... I'm not even sure what to say to all that, other than I think you're way, way out on the fringe.

      What you describe is not normal, not common, and not a concern of the vast majority of people. It verges on the tinfoil hat arena...

    78. Re:wft ever dude! by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      Interestingly enough, I have the reverse problem... Mine starts out at 100meg or so and slowly ramps up in speed...

      That being said, very little outside the Texas area gets above 500meg no matter how big the file and some stuff within 50 miles is still not that fast. Downloading Steam games for example, the server is within 50 miles of me, but it is rare to get more than 300 meg from them. I've seen bursts higher, but 35 megabytes per second is about as good as it gets.

      I've seen nearly 100 megabytes per second, once, from Amazon's servers, but it seems that either the servers aren't designed to handle the speed or I don't have enough open connections, or perhaps the backbone is busy.

      Or perhaps the local connection AT&T is providing to the final mile isn't enough. That seems odd, since this has only been online for about two weeks, I doubt I'm sharing it with very many people yet.

      Bandwidth isn't everything, ping, jitter, and loss are also important. Jitter typically indicates congestion and so does loss. I can reach every major datacenter in the world with under a 250ms RTT.

      Likewise, I've tested those with pingtest and the connection is very good just about everywhere. The bandwidth for large files has just been disappointing. I honestly feel that I could downgrade to 300 megabit and wouldn't notice any difference.

    79. Re:wft ever dude! by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      There is a thing called privacy

      Sure, but I believe that you think you're more private than you really are.

      If anyone really cared about you, all the privacy settings in the world wouldn't amount to anything.

      another more specific called VPN or Tor.

      Those aren't as private as you think, since you're using a computer that you don't REALLY control, on a connection to an Internet that you DON'T control, all within a county that has a government that is fine to spy on its own citizens, who appear to not care.

      All trying to be private does is make you stand out, if a three letter agency cared about you, none of those things will help you when you're sending it all over government sanctioned internet connections. Encryption works, so long as you have no gaps in there, but few people are that good and you only have to mess up once. Plus, if you were of serious interest, they would simply infect your machine directly and bypass the encryption completely.

      If they can infect air gaped computers in Iran, you would pose no challenge to them.

    80. Re:wft ever dude! by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      Oh, I'm sure there are indeed billions and billions of things that could use their own IP address...

      The jump from 32 bit to 128 bit is so large however that it should cover us forever. You could assign an IP address to every atom on the surface of the Earth and have used less than 1% of the IPv6 address space.

    81. Re:wft ever dude! by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      Consider for a minute that you could just assign every man, woman, and child on Earth a /64.

      That would give each person 18 quntillion addresses to pick from, and you'd have enough /64 address space to cover the likely population of Earth for the rest of its entire existence.

      Yes, I'm aware that some bits are reserved and that it isn't really as clear cut as that. But it doesn't matter...

      You can cut huge numbers out and it still becomes a stupid big number.

      And every doesn't need 18 quntillion addresses, that too is silly.

      The whole space is huge and unless we're complete morons, we're done with IP address space for the rest of human history.

      ----

      As a side note, this is similar to 256 bit encryption being enough forever. No computer will ever be powerful enough to brute force it. Unless there is a flaw in the program of course, but you can't try all possible keys in a 256-bit encrypted file. There isn't enough energy in the universe to flip the bits.

    82. Re:wft ever dude! by AdamHaun · · Score: 1

      From everything I've seen it looks like a police state and media cartels wet dream, the ability to assign a unique address to every.single.device like a digital fingerprint so they can trivially trace back every statement, every video watched, every move, for later prosecution?

      That was supposed to be the case with IPv4, and for a long time it was. If you want point-to-point communication, you need some kind of unique address on each end. It doesn't matter whether it's an IP address or a TCP port number. What makes it traceable is logging. Logging might be easier if every device actually has a pre-assigned static IP, but I suspect that for technical reasons ISPs will continue to prefer dynamic IP assignment. Tracing will probably be easier, but I doubt it will be "a police state and media cartel's wet dream".

      Of course, inventing imaginary villains "SJWs" will ruin your mood regardless of technological infrastructure, so maybe you should work on that before worrying about IP addresses.

      --
      Visit the
    83. Re:wft ever dude! by hr+raattgift · · Score: 1

      Note that there is a difference between routing logic and forwarding logic.

      The latter is arguably simplified in IPv6; the former is essentially identical.

      Variable Length Addresses were demonstrated by the TUBA team in 1994, with both Cisco and Proteon demonstrating slow and fast CPU paths and hardware assistance. The cost of handling fully variable lengths was noticeable, but vanished when a common length was chosen with uncommon lengths gated, rate-limited, quenched or otherwise controlled sourcewards.

      In modern forwarding engine implementations using a dual between an m-way trie and associative real memories, the cost of a full VLA is now in the noise even for arbitrary streams of random-length VLA headers; the hard part is *still* the generation of the associative arrays from the routing tries. That is, the *routing* problem is the hard problem, not the forwarding. And VLAs can simplify the routing problem if they are designed with involuntary (proxy) aggregation in mind.

      The early 1990s rejection of ideas from various IPNG proposals did not anticipate a mult-decade roll-out of the minimal changes settled on in SIP+PIP (which became IPv6), nor did it have any stubs whatsoever for adjusting the on-the-wire format in the future.

      This exposes the biggest single problem with the ROAD/IPNG/IPv6 process: there was almost no thought in the working groups (which became increasingly detached from operators and middle-box vendors, and were dominated by systems vendors) to deployment scenarios that were very gradual and very local, with n-level enclaves of systems with just one protocol stack (e.g., an IPv6 only bubble inside an IPv4 only bubble attached to a the Internet via an IPv6 only gateway), and the hacks that have been developed to deal with such situations (which have arisen in real life) are at least as awkward as IPv4 NAT+address overloading.

      IOW, it was all end-system-software-think and little to no thinking about broader issues on end systems (ones that are multiply attached to the rest of the world, notably, or ones that migrate from one network to another rapidly), and even less about routers (especially not routers that are themselves mobile).

      The slogan, "every client is also a server" should have been extended to ".. and also a first-class router", which likely would have arrived at a better overall design for IPv6, and faster deployment.

    84. Re:wft ever dude! by ruir · · Score: 1

      I know pretty well the limitations, but anyway you did not bothered to ask if I did not know them, and that is why I really hate the slashdot crowd. As other things in life, those things are not perfect, but they are better than nothing, and whilst they are not enough for a three letter agency, they are more than enough for my ISP not to collect metadata about my activities, for my work not to have logs of what I do in my iPhone, how to be more secure when I access data in wifis at home, specially in the FON network which is pretty ubiquitous here. As for standing out, the time is past that. Too many people using enterprise mandated in some corporate phones, commercial or free VPNs nowadays. As for air gapped computers, that is bullshit talk.

    85. Re:wft ever dude! by Aqualung812 · · Score: 1

      The smallest allocation any site should ever be given is defined as a /48

      I really struggle with that large of an allotment for homes, by default. I think that a /64 is fine as the default if the SOHO router doesn't ask for anything more, and a /60 if they request it through DHCP-PD.
      I do agree with a /48 for anything outside a home user, though.

      --
      Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
    86. Re:wft ever dude! by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      they are more than enough for my ISP not to collect metadata about my activities, for my work not to have logs of what I do in my iPhone

      Fair enough...

      So let me ask you an honest question... Why do you care?

      Please note, I'm not suggesting you shouldn't care, I'm asking why you do? I suppose for me, I've decided I don't care, it doesn't really make any difference to me.

      But if you care, fair enough, I can respect that, I just am curious if there is a specific reason for it.

    87. Re:wft ever dude! by jbolden · · Score: 1

      Good point.

  3. The nearly-dark legacy Class-A blocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Time for some recycling?

    1. Re:The nearly-dark legacy Class-A blocks by supremebob · · Score: 1

      I wonder if a company like IBM could make good money reselling unused IP addresses in their 9.x.x.x block until everyone finally migrates to IPv6. There is no way that they need that many public facing IP addresses.

    2. Re:The nearly-dark legacy Class-A blocks by myowntrueself · · Score: 1

      I wonder if a company like IBM could make good money reselling unused IP addresses in their 9.x.x.x block until everyone finally migrates to IPv6. There is no way that they need that many public facing IP addresses.

      I heard that ARIN will be taking measures against people profiteering from this.

      --
      In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
    3. Re:The nearly-dark legacy Class-A blocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How could they? They _OWN_ their IP space.

    4. Re:The nearly-dark legacy Class-A blocks by Bengie · · Score: 1

      They don't "own" them, they have a civil contract that says ARIN has granted them the right to use them and ARIN can't forcefully take them back as long as the original contract is valid. As soon as the IP blocks transfer owners, they are no longer grandfathered in. There have been a few exceptions to this rule early during the transitional phase, but ARIN is locking down on any more exceptions.

  4. Slashdot crying wolf again... by Lumpy · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I have heard of a monthly "running out of IpV4 addresses" on slashdot since 1998.

    And this story has zero meat to it just like the last 690 stories here about it.

    How about someone forcing HP to give up their gigantic chunk that they have been camping on unused for 40 years?

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    1. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      HP actually currently has 2 class-A subnets (15.x.x.x and 16.x.x.x), the only corporate in that situation, and is haemorrhaging employees....

    2. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by whoever57 · · Score: 1

      Didn't Sun Microsystems also have a large block of addresses? What happened to those?

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    3. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Lumpy · · Score: 2

      They also are just being sat on. Corperations need to have them forcibly taken back as those asshats will never give them up willingly.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    4. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by whoever57 · · Score: 1

      Also Prudential Securities has a /8 block. What for? Probably they had an IT guy with some forethought in the early days of the Internet.

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    5. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ARIN won't ever run out of IPv4 addresses in the sense that they won't get any more addresses to assign, as long as IPv4 is in use. But those addresses haven't been coming out of the pool of previously unassigned addresses for quite a while. Only AfriNIC still has fresh addresses and is still in normal allocation mode. Everybody else, including ARIN, has stopped allocating new addresses under normal allocation rules, which means they are recycling the few addresses which are returned to them or they are managing a very small amount of fresh addresses under very strict contingency rules to keep the IPv4 internet accessible to newcomers.

      While you can technically still get IPv4 addresses, it is now so difficult and the amount you can get so small that any new project which needs even just a few thousand IP addresses has to divert them from some other use or do without, and new businesses can only get enough IPv4 addresses to facilitate schemes like CGNAT. New server farm with public IPv4? You better know people, because you're not going to get these addresses from ARIN.

    6. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      By the time you finished with all the lawsuits/etc the addresses wouldn't be useful. We need to get past IPv4. Putting it off for another few months won't help that.

      That said, there are a lot of things about IPv6 that are rather annoying. There aren't really a lot of good DHCP options if you want to use NAT, and if you don't want to use NAT then anytime your router prefix changes the external IPs of all the hosts on the network change. That is a fairly big change from how things work today, and I think most early adopters don't notice because they tend to have static IPs, but that is unlikely to be the case once it is mass-adopted.

    7. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 1

      Who got Nortel's?

    8. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Geordish · · Score: 1

      What is the point? Under the 'normal' allocation policy a /8 was being burned through every few months per region. The demand is still there (RIPE, LACNIC, and APNIC haven't had any addresses for ages). You can 'take back' the 20 or so /8s, and that will buy us a year at most.

    9. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ford used to have at least one class-A as well ( and were doing some really stupid things with it back in the early 90s, that i wont get into in case they still are ). They give it back, which your statement 'only corporate' would imply?

    10. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by jbolden · · Score: 1

      You really shouldn't be using NAT with IPv6. The idea is one machine, one address. Given DNS I'm not sure why you would want fixed fully external IPs. But if you do you want to have some fixed external addresses do it via. some sort of relay where you have an external server at a telco colo with a very long term address and then the telco wires it back to your server (or just host your server with the telco). I think part of the idea of IPv6 is simplifying the routing tables so the old any address can go to any physical location should die. Routers should as much as possible be making routing choices not based on lookups buy literally picking one or more address bits and assigning them to a physical wire, very low latency routing.

    11. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Geordish · · Score: 1
    12. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But my DNS server just crashed....

    13. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by jandrese · · Score: 1

      Yeah, HP could give back both of its class As (minus a few /16s for their use) and buy us...a scant few more months before we're in the same situation again. The real solution is to finally get off our asses and switch to IPv6.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    14. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by DeadBeef · · Score: 1

      Check out the IPv4 address space consumption graphs at http://www.potaroo.net/tools/i..., there is no new space for you in North America. In fact the only place there is still new space for you is in the African region.

      See the 1 /8 remaining red line, that's where most of the RIR's started their run out policy which for APNIC at least this means you can only get space if you are using it to transition to IPv6.

      Noone is going to make anyone give up their old /8 IPv4 allocations and if they did it, would delay this date by a couple of months.

        It's all over man.

      --
      I am a lawyer and this constitutes legal advice and I shall indemnify you against any losses arising from taking it.
    15. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      hmmm but those 667k addresses don't sound like it is a /8

    16. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Geordish · · Score: 1

      If you run a business and need your address space to never change, like when changing ISP, then PI (provider independent) address space is the way to go. The address space will always be yours, and you can take it with you.

      For residential users who like to know where their devices are... that one is a bit tougher. Really DNS is your friend. How often do you change ISPs anyway?

    17. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by jbolden · · Score: 1

      AFAIk the 2001:678::/29 provider independent space are just supposed to be a bunch of /48 relays.

      For residential users on IPv6 they can likely now have a fixed IP (or a /60) now. So it would only change when they their home ISP.

    18. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Geordish · · Score: 1

      AFAIk the 2001:678::/29 provider independent space are just supposed to be a bunch of /48 relays.

      What now? PI space is normal routable space that you take between providers. Nothing to do with relays...

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    19. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Bengie · · Score: 1

      But my router and switch and computers just crashed, how does IPv6 handle that? DNS servers are critical infrastructure. Shit will break when they go down, get used to it.

    20. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Bengie · · Score: 1

      The idea is one machine, one address

      More like 5 IPs per computer. Each for different usages.

    21. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Geordish · · Score: 1

      Only 5? You're not thinking big enough!

      As many IPs as you want per computer. Go nuts!

    22. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by jbolden · · Score: 1

      Why do you need multiple IPs on a machine with 1 nic? Besides the last 64 is going to be the MAC address.

    23. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 1
      • fe80:: prefix, link-local address, used within the network segment for things like autoconfiguration, DHCP, DNS when the router's acting as a caching DNS server.
      • Public fixed unicast address based on the MAC address (SLAAC, except that Windows 7 and up use a random number rather than the MAC address by default) or assigned by DHCPv6.
      • One or more temporary unicast addresses, used for a limited time each for outgoing connections to help obscure your fixed address. The privacy gain here is mostly canceled out for consumers by the fact that it's one /64 per subscriber and that /64 doesn't change very often.
    24. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by NormalVisual · · Score: 1

      Why do you need multiple IPs on a machine with 1 nic?

      Having VMs on the machine is the first that comes to mind for me.

      --
      Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
    25. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by jbolden · · Score: 1

      That's true. One big advantage of IPv6 wii be the ability to create an essentially infinite number of external IPs associated with VMs / containers / microservices.

    26. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      How about someone forcing HP to give up their gigantic chunk that they have been camping on unused for 40 years?

      And do what? Split it into thousands of of small chunks further compounding the problem that is incredible bloat in routing tables?

      Better still I say HP offer to return the addresses but only to those companies which can be shown to have 100% IPv6 compliance.

    27. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If it has zero meat to it, then why is it impossible to get a non-NAT'ed public IPv4 address? Answer: because for all intents and purposes, for consumers the addresses have already run out and it's been that way since at least 2000 (when I first got internet access and couldn't get an IPv4 address).

    28. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      And you don't see a PROBLEM with this? You DO know you are advocating giving every single device a "digital fingerprint" which will be trivial for the governments and media cartels to use against you, yes?

      You say something that offends a special snowflake of a protected class (thereby committing thoughtcrime...err "hate speech") online, watch a video some cartel thinks you should have paid them $$$ to watch (which is very likely they shared for that very reason) and no problem, simply look at the IP V6 and you'll know exactly who that evildoer was and what device they used at the time!

      I'm sorry but with all the truly evil fascist shit we've seen from our corporate overlords and their government puppets I really do NOT trust them with that kind of power. Remember citizen you have committed three felonies today and the only thing stopping them from busting you for it and ruining your life? Is how much resources it would take to prove it. Lets not make it any easier for them,mmkay?

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    29. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      An IP is not a "digital fingerprint". Knowing the v6 address won't let you figure out who was using it at the time, or even what device it was assigned to.

      With privacy extensions (which are on by default in basically everything), knowing the v6 address is about as useful as knowing the v4 address. Removing NAT from your network doesn't affect governments or media cartels -- but meanwhile it makes your own life much easier, so you're being dumb if you insist on using it when it's not necessary.

    30. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Geordish · · Score: 1

      Why do you need multiple IPs on a machine with 1 nic? Besides the last 64 is going to be the MAC address.

      The real question is "Why wouldn't you?"

      Giving machines the ability to have multiple IP addresses opens up possibilities for people.

    31. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      MSFT

    32. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      For residential users who like to know where their devices are... that one is a bit tougher. Really DNS is your friend. How often do you change ISPs anyway?

      How exactly do you set up internal DNS when all your IPs are subject to change?

      You don't have to change ISPs to have your IPv6 prefix change. Your ISP need only assign you a new one. It is in their interest to do so often so that you have an incentive to pay more for a non-residential connection, and also because it gives them more flexibility in renumbering.

    33. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      You really shouldn't be using NAT with IPv6. The idea is one machine, one address. Given DNS I'm not sure why you would want fixed fully external IPs.

      Ok, so how do I set up my internal DNS server so that everything works fine when my ISP gives me a new prefix every 24 hours, or every time the router is rebooted, or every time they feel like changing my prefix?

      The advantage of private addresses is that they're handed out by a DHCP server that you can control, not by your ISP.

      Again, I think IPv6 users today are spoiled by tunnel brokers and the like who are giving out static prefixes. I don't think that the likes of Comcast are going to be going that route when they finally embrace IPv6 fully. If nothing else a static prefix is something they can sell, and you could also argue that not having static prefixes makes life easier for them if they want to change their internal network topology.

    34. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Lumpy · · Score: 1

      There are comments here on slashdot from 10 years ago that are EXACTLY like yours.

      "put it off for a few months" turned into 10 years.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    35. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      What's the difference between this and the IPv4 crap that goes on? Typically, the ISP will keep a record of what IP address you were using at a given time, and they have to turn that over given a subpoena. That's probable cause for a search warrant or subpoena to you directly. IPv6 cuts one step out of that, but does that matter?

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    36. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by jbolden · · Score: 1

      so how do I set up my internal DNS server so that everything works fine when my ISP gives me a new prefix every 24 hours, or every time the router is rebooted, or every time they feel like changing my prefix?

      They don't do that either. They no longer use DHCP either so you have a fixed (and often more than one) IP as well. No more contention for you, no more contention for them. Remember even a midsized ISP now has more IP addresses in an allocation block than the entire internet is under IPv4.

      I'm sure they might change your static address if they want to change their topology say once every 5 years or so. That's different than every boot.

    37. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Reclaiming all those class As would really only delay IPv4 exhaustion by a few months. That was true 10 years ago. That was true 20 years ago. That will be true 30 years from now, when we're all on IPv8.

      It wasn't reclaiming class A space that got us 10 years, but rather NAT and the existing pool lasting as long as it did.

    38. Re:Slashdot crying wolf again... by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      It isn't like they mail the prefix to you and have you hand-type it. They're handed out by NDP, which effectively works the same way as DHCP - the ISP will give you a prefix.

      Even if they don't need to change prefixes, they still have incentive to do so. If you want a static prefix you will have to pay them more. If you don't care, they can give you a new one frequently.

      That is what most ISPs do today with IPv4. Why wouldn't they do the same with IPv6? There is no technical reason why ISPs couldn't give all their customers static IPs (via DHCP), and just renumber them when there is a need to redo their network. They just prefer not to do it this way.

  5. Africa has all the addresses by frambris · · Score: 1

    AfriNIC has a shitload of addresses it seems. Maybe they could surrender some or start setting up huge IP infrastructure and capitalize on it.

    1. Re:Africa has all the addresses by Geordish · · Score: 3, Interesting

      AfraNIC do not have a shitload of addresses. They have around 2.5 /8's.

      Back before the exhaustion policies kicked in, ARIN were burning through a /8 every couple of months.

      This is why taking back the legacy address allocations will not really be worth the time or effort. There is more demand than availability. If there was free reign allocation over it all, it would be gone before the year is out.

      Move to IPv6 already.

    2. Re:Africa has all the addresses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/fig02.png, from http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/

      Short history lesson: On 3rd of February 2011, ICANN allocated the last five /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses to the regional internet registries, AfriNIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, RIPENCC. You can view a recording of the ceremony. This event was triggered by the normal allocation of two /8 blocks to APNIC, after which ICANN was left with only five /8 blocks which then automatically got allocated to the five regional registries. Nevertheless, APNIC hit IPv4 exhaustion first. AfriNIC still has IPv4 addresses, but not unusually many and certainly not a shitload of them. It's just a matter of how fast the regions allocate the remaining resources, and AfriNICs share wasn't even the biggest, neither in total nor as far as the final allocation goes.

    3. Re:Africa has all the addresses by danomac · · Score: 1

      I'd love to! Oh wait, my ISP still doesn't support IPv6...

    4. Re:Africa has all the addresses by myowntrueself · · Score: 1

      AfriNIC has a shitload of addresses it seems. Maybe they could surrender some or start setting up huge IP infrastructure and capitalize on it.

      I imagine that there will soon be a few Murcan carrier battle groups off of Africa, this stuff will be more precious than oil!

      --
      In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
  6. The sky is falling! News at 10. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    IPv4 should just go away already. Linux, Mac, and WinDOS had had IPV6 forever. Whatever doesn't support IPv6 should just go away as well. All that old shit is hackable virus prone garbage anyway.

  7. Re:IPv4 is for 32-bit cows. by ArcadeMan · · Score: 5, Funny

    (to the tune of "99 bottles of beer on the wall")

    4,294,967,290 cows in the field, 4,294,967,290 cows...
    Move one aside, add one more cow, 4,294,967,291 cows in the field...

    4,294,967,291 cows in the field, 4,294,967,291 cows...
    Move one aside, add one more cow, 4,294,967,292 cows in the field...

    4,294,967,292 cows in the field, 4,294,967,292 cows...
    Move one aside, add one more cow, 4,294,967,293 cows in the field...

    4,294,967,293 cows in the field, 4,294,967,293 cows...
    Move one aside, add one more cow, 4,294,967,294 cows in the field...

    4,294,967,294 cows in the field, 4,294,967,294 cows...
    Move one aside, add one more cow, 4,294,967,295 cows in the field...

    4,294,967,295 cows in the field, 4,294,967,295 cows...
    Move one aside, add one more cow... hey, where did all my cows go?

  8. No, it won't be a problem. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yes, it is the exact same behavior. But it won't be a problem, because unlike IPv4, IPv6 isn't going to see any significant adoption, ever.

    1. Re:No, it won't be a problem. by Bengie · · Score: 2

      Some CDNs are seeing 18%-40% of web requests from AT&T, Verizon, or Comcast are over IPv6. IPv6 is still growing at an exponential rate for almost a decade now, about 100% per year. At the current about 10% of all USA, given 100% growth that hasn't shown any signs of stopping, we'll be at 40% in two years and 80% in 3 years.

  9. Re:IPv4 is for 32-bit cows. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    sexconker's mother says "OOOOOOOOO!". "OOOOOOOOOO!!!" says the cow.

  10. Re:The sky is falling! News at 10. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yea. And old people should go away too. They suck. Anyone over 30 should just FOAD.

  11. Well it is half true by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 1

    Slashdot has been crying wolf since they are a geek site and geeks seem to like that kind of thing and also like new technology, no matter the cost and issues.

    However there have been actual depletions of IPv4 space of various kinds. First it was that all available networks were allocated to regional registrars. Now some of those regional registrars are allocating all their remaining addresses.

    That doesn't mean doomsday, of course, it means that for any additional allocation to go on, something would have to be reclaimed. That has happened in the past, organizations have given back part of their allocations so they could be reassigned. It may lead to IPs being worth more. Company A might want some IPs and Company B could cut their usage with renumbering, NAT, etc so they'll agree to sell them.

    Since IPs aren't used up in the sens of being destroyed, there'll never be some doomsday where we just "run out" but as time goes on the available space vs demand will make things more difficult. As that difficulty increases, IPv6 makes more sense and we'll see more of it.

    We are already getting there in many ways. You see a lot of US ISPs preparing to roll it out, despite having large IPv4 allocations themselves, because they are seeing the need for it.

    1. Re:Well it is half true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The thing is that it is still just alarmist headlines and fear-mongering.
      Running out of IPv4 addresses won't mean that IPv4 stops working. All devices that have an IPv4 address will keep having that address and work just as usual.
      The only thing that happens is that everything new added needs the IPv6 support and things that doesn't support IPv4 won't be able to connect to those new things without going through a translator.
      Sure, it doesn't hurt to be prepared or to do the change to IPv6 before we run out of IPv4 addresses, but the sky wont fall down when it happens.

    2. Re:Well it is half true by sjames · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Actually, it was never crying wolf. The wolf was actually there, it's just that it was a long way off in the '90s. It has been headed our way in a strait line ever since. You needed a telescope to see it in the '90s, now you don't even need to squint.

      And apparently, a warning that far in advance wasn't enough since there are still a lot of organizations with their pants down. How pathetic is that?

    3. Re:Well it is half true by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      And apparently, a warning that far in advance wasn't enough since there are still a lot of organizations with their pants down. How pathetic is that?

      It isn't a surprise to anyone who was working in the last few years before 2000, in which people suddenly started realizing that the century actually would end and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    4. Re:Well it is half true by sjames · · Score: 1

      Sadly true, it's not a surprise.

  12. IPv6 sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If IPv6 was any good everyone would have been using it for years. I'm holding out for IPv7.

  13. Issue of addresses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ARIN is due to run out sometime around the end of August...

    Date.....No of /24 left
    20150713 400
    20150714 393
    20150715 372
    20150716 357
    20150717 335
    20150720 328
    20150721 307
    20150722 305
    20150723 292
    20150724 265
    20150727 253
    20150728 245
    20150729 240
    20150730 232
    20150731 227

  14. Since we keep talking about the same thing.... by haus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...I may as well just refer to an old comment...

    http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

  15. Slashvertisement: Legacy ARIN /16 available by legacyslash16 · · Score: 1

    Anyone want to make a good offer for a clean legacy /16 assigned by ARIN? It has recently become available... legacyslash16 at gmail

    1. Re:Slashvertisement: Legacy ARIN /16 available by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Um, how is it legacy if it's assigned by ARIN?

    2. Re: Slashvertisement: Legacy ARIN /16 available by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because it is a North American address provided before the legal paperwork signing was required.

  16. Re: The sky is falling! News at 10. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is that 30 in hexadecimal?

  17. But 32 bits is enough for anybody by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 1

    I am wondering whether at this point ARIN would be justified to raising the price for remaining IPv4 addresses and offer IPv6 addresses at a lower cost? And then raise cost as a ratio of remaining IPv4 addresses available to hand out? I am sure this would change business perspective on how much to delay IPv6 adoption?

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
    1. Re:But 32 bits is enough for anybody by jbolden · · Score: 1

      They did that. ARIN didn't want to raise prices they just blew through their IPv4s. So ISPs will need to buy them from each other rather while IPv6 addresses will given out for free.

    2. Re:But 32 bits is enough for anybody by Bengie · · Score: 1

      ARIN already laid out several phases. A few months ago they started to limit how many IPs they handed out, a month ago they started to reject some requests. We're reaching the end game, which includes reclaiming IPs. You will need to prove every year that you still need your blocks more than others, and every year ARIN will get more strict and refuse renewal for some customers so other customers that are more deserving get some. It will start to get painful.

    3. Re:But 32 bits is enough for anybody by jbolden · · Score: 1

      I hope ARIN doesn't reclaim. Let the shortages create the pain.

    4. Re:But 32 bits is enough for anybody by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They did that. ARIN didn't want to raise prices they just blew through their IPv4s.

      ARIN (and the other RIRs) was never (and never intended to be) a marketplace based on supply/demand. It was to provide numbers (IPv4, IPv6, and ASNs) to those with a demonstrated need based on community policies. The prices reflect operational requirements for the RIRs, not how much you can charge to reduce demand.

      So ISPs will need to buy them from each other rather while IPv6 addresses will given out for free.

      IPv6 numbers are not free, but their cost (per allocatable unit) is low. The future is IPv6, and those that move will experience lower costs in the long run.

    5. Re:But 32 bits is enough for anybody by sjames · · Score: 1

      The problem there is it will cause pain to all the wrong people. New business, need 5 IPs? That'll cost ya! Go with IPv6, half your customers ISPs haven't crawled out of the slime yet and so they won't be able to reach you at all.

      The ISPs themselves? They have a massive pool of IPs and they aren't afraid to NAT them.

      Until major sites start having v4 blackout days, the pain won't hit the right people.

    6. Re:But 32 bits is enough for anybody by jbolden · · Score: 1

      True. But other than outright regulation / fines... I'm not sure how to hit the right people. Right now we have:

      a) ISPs being sluggish
      b) Some network people at companies being obstinate
      c) Companies being irresponsible about their own conversion
      d) The government not leading the effort (though in all fairness the Obama administration is better than I would expect on IPv6 issues).

    7. Re:But 32 bits is enough for anybody by LVSlushdat · · Score: 1

      A good example of this is where I needed a small cheap Linux vps with ipv6 for reasons.. I found one with a small Dutch vendor with 256mb of ram, ipv6 support, and a fair amount of diskspace for $4.00/YEAR.. I knew they were getting cheap but not THIS cheap.. anyway I'm probably not going to need it for more than a few months, so I signed up for one and when I went to provision it, the provisioning config page showed it came with 2 ipv6 addresses included, but if you wanted a v4 address it was an additional $2/MO for each v4 address, making the vps cost $27/year vs $4/year...Since the need for the vps only entails ipv6, I skipped adding a v4 address....

      --
      THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
    8. Re:But 32 bits is enough for anybody by sjames · · Score: 1

      One approach would be via the FTC. Simply offering connectivity to IPv5 is no longer connectivity to 'The Internet'. Perhaps the ISPs should be forced to either get v6 up and running or cease advertising themselves as an ISP. Instead, they should be forced to call themselves deprecated ISPs. Perhaps we should legally define provision of v4 only as 'shitty service' and force them to advertise that. As in, Ajax ISP, shitty service for $60/month.

      b and c are difficult, but take care of a and d and the pressure on them will mount rapidly.

      As for d, actually there has been a big push for government to make sure their public facing servers are available over v6. The mandate extends to government contractors as well. They really do need to expand that mandate to all hosts within government networks that are allowed access to the public internet at all.

    9. Re:But 32 bits is enough for anybody by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 1

      If the ISP is able to get one IPv4 address, then they can NAT64 the rest of their network. Sure there will be a lot of software that breaks, but that is going to be a growing reality for many people.

      --
      Jumpstart the tartan drive.
    10. Re:But 32 bits is enough for anybody by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What's the name of the company?

    11. Re:But 32 bits is enough for anybody by jbolden · · Score: 1

      That would be good. I assume you meant FCC and not FTC. I'm not sure FTC has that power.

      I agree there are government mandates and some serious work. There are also some exceptions being made that shouldn't exist. The government for example could move many of their commercial EDIs to IPv6 only and forcing companies (and thus their ISPs) to be at least partially on IPv6.

    12. Re:But 32 bits is enough for anybody by jbolden · · Score: 1

      All the ISPs that are going to switch to IPv6 are going to offer IPv4 for sites that don't support v6.

    13. Re:But 32 bits is enough for anybody by sjames · · Score: 1

      It could be either agency really. In theory, the FTC can get involved in cases of false advertising (such as claiming to offer internet access when offering only a portion of the internet).

      In reality though, they've been asleep at the switch for a long time, so probably it will have to be the FCC.

      Agreed, A government phase-out of v4 would speed things along.

  18. Re:The sky is falling! News at 10. by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 1

    IPv4 should just go away already. Linux, Mac, and WinDOS had had IPV6 forever. Whatever doesn't support IPv6 should just go away as well. All that old shit is hackable virus prone garbage anyway.

    The problem is that numerous companies haven't invested the time or money in ensuring their network can speak IPv6 or to the IPv6 world. The main issue has probably been that it was cheaper to do business a usual. Until major services do an IPv4 blackout day or ARIN raises the prices of the remaining IPv6, companies will be dragging their feet.

    One site amongst the feet draggers is /. Sure there was a bug in some of the Perl code used by /. a number of years back, that apparently prevented supporting IPV6, as an excuse, but should that still be a reason today?

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
  19. ARIN is incompetent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Evidenced by the fact that they are utterly incapable of effectively managing the IPv4 space. Perfect example: I was a network administrator at the Prudential Bank in Atlanta in the early 90s. The Bank was given a full class B address (158.221.0.0/16). By 2000, the Bank ceased operations completely. So there is an entire class B sitting unused, and never will be. I tried no less than 5 times over the years to get ARIN to do something about reclaiming it, and they gave absolutely zero fucks. That's it. The record for that address space is incorrect now too, as it lists the Banks old address which doesn't exist, phone numbers that are disconnected, email addresses that go nowhere... Talk about waste.

    1. Re:ARIN is incompetent by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      ARIN doesn't care. At this point, they would just prefer to push everyone over to IPv6, so what's the point in getting a few extra addresses, if it just delays what they want?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:ARIN is incompetent by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      Yeah, let's get that block back. That should buy v4 about two hours or so. That'll totally save us.

    3. Re:ARIN is incompetent by LVSlushdat · · Score: 1

      Until *some* carriers (I'm looking at YOU, Cogent) stop playing silly network peering games, widespread use of ipv6 isn't gonna happen. For example, at home I'm on Cox, who doesn't seem to even know ipv6 exists, so if I want to use ipv6, I'm stuck with using a kludgy HE tunnelbroker 6to4 tunnel. I also have a Linux vps with a vendor who provides TWO ipv4 addresses and three ipv6 addresses. I told them I only need one v4 address and they could take back the second one, but they said "no problem, we have plenty" (????) Anyway, at least on ipv6, this vps vendor is single-homed to Cogent, so they say (and traceroute shows). This is important, as I'm trying to access said vps via ipv6 from home and guess what? No can do!!! ... You CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE... Seems there is a long-going peering dispute between Cogent and HE, thus Cogent does not have a full v6 network view, Googling this shows this dispute has been going since at least 2008..

      --
      THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
  20. Except that seveal /8's are wildly underused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There are a number of /8's which frankly don't need to exist. The organizations involved use intelligent load balancers and proxies on their external gateways, *except* for a few low security, old-school idiots whom I've tried to educate in the past that "the Internet of Everything" does not have to include every deveice in your building, running public NFS, because you believe in "openness" that doesn't match the political scheming I see them pulling in their own offices.

    The /8's to throw out tonight include:

                            GE
                            MIT
                            HP
                            Ford
                            Haliburton
                            DOD (Has *13* class A addresses, that's over 5% of the world's IPv4 address space)

    Check out RFC 790 for a more detailed list.

    1. Re:Except that seveal /8's are wildly underused by Bengie · · Score: 1

      Except they legally own those IP blocks because of contracts when rules were different a long time ago. Mob rule, steal people's property!

    2. Re:Except that seveal /8's are wildly underused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Except they legally own those IP blocks because of contracts when rules were different a long time ago. Mob rule, steal people's property!

      While some claim that, there are others that dispute it. Having never been resolved in a court of law, it is all just posturing.

    3. Re:Except that seveal /8's are wildly underused by RR · · Score: 1

      There are a number of /8's which frankly don't need to exist.

      Human brains just don’t get exponentials.

      We’re in the exponential-looking part of the growth curve of the Internet. That means even 5% of a resource that has lasted for 30 years is now only enough for maybe a few months. And all it would take to win those few months is convincing some famously risk-adverse organizations to take new risks. The thought of just scheduling the necessary meetings makes me shudder.

      On the other hand, the vast address space of IPv6 means, for those of us who do understand it, it’s a no-brainer. Why fight for scraps in the wilderness when you can have a feast in a buffet?

      We need to switch to IPv6.

      --
      Have a nice time.
  21. Re:The sky is falling! News at 10. by jbolden · · Score: 1

    The first step is the carriers / ISPs getting everyone an IPv6 address. The first thing to break after that will be geolocation as the carriers start pooling their home / small business IPv4 addresses and allocating them from a single common pool (so all Verizon originates in West Virginia). That will give companies a reason to switch their consumer internet.

    In terms of B2B... I suspect most companies will change most stuff. However longer terms routing tables are getting too fragmented for some many routers and there are overlapping addresses (i.e. we don't have 1 address goes to one place anymore, especially in the 3rd world). As that gets worse IPv4 will break and companies will change.

    The big question is: why haven't the telcos moved home / small business over yet?

  22. Re: The sky is falling! News at 10. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Quaternary.

  23. Re:The sky is falling! News at 10. by phantomfive · · Score: 2

    The big question is: why haven't the telcos moved home / small business over yet?

    I asked the owner of an ISP that question. The answer was basically, money. The transition will cost money, and there is zero upside to spending that money before you have to.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  24. Re:The sky is falling! News at 10. by jbolden · · Score: 1

    Makes sense. This is where I wish ARIN were pushing much harder to break the chicken and egg issue.

  25. ipv6 tunnels by The_Dougster · · Score: 1

    I've had an ipv6 tunnel (mostly) up and running since 2010 just for experimentation. Now my router brings up the tunnel and enables stateless auto configuration for the entire LAN. Lazy ISP is no excuse.

    --
    Clickety Click ...
  26. Slashdot degraded into clickbait? by mysidia · · Score: 1

    ARIN IPv4 Addresses Run Out Tomorrow

    Not really.

    WTF?

    Tunnelbroker or whatever site's "countdown gadget" is only an illustrative approximation anyways. The only entity that can really say ARIN IPv4 addresses run out is ARIN.

    We are also guaranteed they won't run out tomorrow, since ARIN doesn't make allocations on non-business days.

    It's also pretty unlikely there will be 200 /24 requests answered on Monday.

    And even after that, there are certain reserved ranges that won't be run out.

    As for having "unmeetable requests", the unmet requests policy first activated at the very beginning of July, that ARIN had requests for IP addresses that could not be met.

    1. Re:Slashdot degraded into clickbait? by jcomeau_ictx · · Score: 1

      not clickbait. I was just playing around again with ipv6, as I do every year or two, and noticed tunnelbroker's countdown timer rapidly approaching zero. I thought it would be fun to celebrate it, like watching the silly countdowns on new year's eve. and in my experience, on Sunday there usually aren't any bosses around to squelch merrymaking.

  27. Re:The sky is falling! News at 10. by RR · · Score: 1

    The first step is the carriers / ISPs getting everyone an IPv6 address.

    ...

    The big question is: why haven't the telcos moved home / small business over yet?

    Probably one of the biggest problems for IPv6 is Amazon. Total apathy, there. Amazon.com is not accessible via IPv6, and last I checked, AWS isn’t available over IPv6 unless you go all-Amazon with your DNS and Elastic Load Balancers.

    North America is just so awash with IPv4 addresses that businesses don’t suffer from lack of IPv6. I was hoping that the threat of inevitable pain would get American businesses to switch, but it looks like we’ll just have to wait for actual pain.

    --
    Have a nice time.
  28. sheeeeit by jcomeau_ictx · · Score: 1

    they bumped the counter back up. I should have looked at the source before; it's probably been at zero for some time now, and just keeps getting reset daily. sorry about that.

  29. Internet of things by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You can implement v6 when you are connecting up my gravestone!
    Until then, i'll use v4 and thats the way i likes it!

  30. XKCD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Obligatory xkcd

    https://xkcd.com/865/

  31. Re:The sky is falling! News at 10. by jbolden · · Score: 1

    I'm going to assume that AWS can move very quickly once their customers start demanding IPv6. It wouldn't shock me if AWS's problem is that many of their carriers (remember they use tons given Direct Connect) don't support IPv6 and thus... So again they are one of the chicken & egg type problems.

    AWS as a website though is a perfect point of attack. Once geolocation breaks (or there is a serious threat) I'm going to assume they go aggressively towards offering IPv6.

    . I was hoping that the threat of inevitable pain would get American businesses to switch, but it looks like we’ll just have to wait for actual pain.

    Yep. Given how long everyone is waiting by the time the change starts happening it might happen rather quickly. Many businesses that have done full conversions find it is a multi-year process as there are thousands of places where they make IPv4 assumptions without realizing it. Doing that at the last minute is going to hurt.

  32. Pigeonhole Principle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's time to institute a major push to overturn the pigeonhole principle. After all, it's just a theory which for too long has held up progress on a lot of fronts.

    There have already been exciting results in string theory which give hints about how we could do this. Let's get our brightest and best on this and settle the matter once and for all.

  33. Re:The sky is falling! News at 10. by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 1

    The USA will face a different problem: inability to vote connect to new services that only exist on IPv6. Maybe some of the big players, such as Google and Facebook could add some features that you only get through IPv6 and then leak the info about it. I wonder how much noise will then occur on the web?

    BTW Netflix supports IPv6 via AWS.

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
  34. First, a question: Can v4 devices talk to v6? by Keybounce · · Score: 1

    So first, a question: Can v4 devices talk to v6 devices?

    If I have an older device, such as a printer, that can only talk v4, then in order to talk to it, I need a v4 address.
    Given that there will be some devices out there that can only talk v4, then there needs to be some way for v4 machines to talk to v6 machines.

    So, is it possible for a v6 host to initiate a connection to a v4 device by using some magic prefix to indicate "the bottom 4 bytes contain a v4 address, and you, router, are supposed to pretend that you are talking v4 using that"?

    If so, the next question is: when the v4 device wants to respond, what does it put into it's destination IP field to get back to the v6 device?

    If I cannot talk to a v4-only device from a v6-only host, then I need to have a mixed 4/6 machine.

    The need for routers to be able to translate between v4 and v6 to support old hardware leads into the question about V8.

    1. Re:First, a question: Can v4 devices talk to v6? by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      So first, a question: Can v4 devices talk to v6 devices?

      Not without one of the transition mechanisms (NAT64, 6to4, Teredo). There's no space for a v6 address in the v4 dest header field.

      If I have an older device, such as a printer, that can only talk v4, then in order to talk to it, I need a v4 address.
      Given that there will be some devices out there that can only talk v4, then there needs to be some way for v4 machines to talk to v6 machines.

      Generally this is done by not removing the v4 address from your v6-capable machines. The v6-capable machines are inevitably also capable of talking v4, and they're hooked up to the same ethernet segment as your v4-only devices, so they'll also be getting v4 addresses. They just use those when they want to talk to a v4-only machine.

      So, is it possible for a v6 host to initiate a connection to a v4 device by using some magic prefix to indicate "the bottom 4 bytes contain a v4 address, and you, router, are supposed to pretend that you are talking v4 using that"?

      This is roughly what NAT64 does. (I will note however that NAT64 has all of the problems that NAT44 does, plus a few extra of its own.)

      If so, the next question is: when the v4 device wants to respond, what does it put into it's destination IP field to get back to the v6 device?

      It uses whatever was in the source field, which will be the v4 address of the NAT64 gateway. The gateway is responsible for maintaining state for each connection, so it knows what the original v6 src address was.

      If I cannot talk to a v4-only device from a v6-only host, then I need to have a mixed 4/6 machine.

      Yep. Dual stack is the expected (and easiest) migration method.

      The need for routers to be able to translate between v4 and v6 to support old hardware leads into the question about V8.

      This isn't really necessary. As I say: dual stack is the expected way to deal with old hardware.

    2. Re:First, a question: Can v4 devices talk to v6? by Keybounce · · Score: 1

      But if dual-stack is the expected norm, that kinda makes the "push to move everyone to v6 to solve the network address issue" a bit of a fail.

      I thought one of the goals of the v6 addressing space, at least initially, was that there would be a "v4 compatibility" built into the V6 addressing space, at least for some sense of local addresses -- so that you could talk to a v4 device that was on the same local network.

      You mention that there is a NAT64, and I can make some guesses as to how it operates, at least if the V6 machine is initiating the connection. You also mention that there are multiple ways to make this work; so why not have a single standard that works?

    3. Re:First, a question: Can v4 devices talk to v6? by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      But if dual-stack is the expected norm, that kinda makes the "push to move everyone to v6 to solve the network address issue" a bit of a fail.

      Not really: the v4 side will end up behind piles of NAT and generally suck, but that doesn't matter anywhere near as much if it's just for backwards compatibility rather than being all you've got.

      I thought one of the goals of the v6 addressing space, at least initially, was that there would be a "v4 compatibility" built into the V6 addressing space, at least for some sense of local addresses -- so that you could talk to a v4 device that was on the same local network.

      And it does have that. The main backwards compatibility method is to just use the v4 stack as-is. It's the easiest possible way to do it (you don't even have to do anything: your existing network does the job already) and it's guaranteed to be the most compatible (because you're already using it). It's also the only way to do it on a LAN, where you're talking directly to the other machine without a router in the way to translate.

      You mention that there is a NAT64, and I can make some guesses as to how it operates, at least if the V6 machine is initiating the connection. You also mention that there are multiple ways to make this work; so why not have a single standard that works?

      Roughly the same as NAT44 does, except with v6 addresses on the local side. You're right, it'll be outbound only, unless you configure a "port forward" (more of an IP forward).

      ("Roughly" because there is the issue of getting client programs to connect to 64:ff9b::203.0.113.1 instead of 203.0.113.1. Normally you do this by inventing fake DNS responses -- this is the "a few extra problems of its own" part.)

      There are multiple transition methods because they target different scenarios. 6to4 allows a v6-capable device with only a (public) v4 address to talk to v6 hosts (and it gives you a /48, so you can do v6 for an entire network behind you). Teredo is similar, except it works for clients behind NAT, at the cost of only giving you a single address rather than a /48. NAT64 lets v6 clients talk to v4 servers (but not the other way around), even ones that aren't v6-capable. They're all useful in different cases.

  35. Second: What happened to V8? by Keybounce · · Score: 1

    What ever happened to the IP V8 protocol?

    This was a system that would have extended the V4 addressing system in a manner that scaled. Really scaled.

    The fundamental idea is that there are multiple different V4 addressing pools.
    When you ask for the address of a host, you do not automatically get the address of the host. You get a cookie that can be used to reach the host, with a short timeout (perhaps a few hours).

    Now, if you are on the same v4 pool, that cookie may very well be the host's address (And even have the normal TTL). Otherwise, it's a cookie that tells the network how to route to a gateway router that knows where to send it next -- either to another gateway router, or to the destination if you are at the final v4 pool.

    Never mind the big questions: why do programs have to deal with "get_host_by_name()" at all (never mind a DNS system that needs to return two pieces of information -- address and TTL -- and a calling convention that can only return a single datum and most programs assuming an infinite TTL anyways); why do programs have to deal with a struct sock_addr at all; why do programs not just say 'open("net://example.com:3327", O_RW)', and get a file descriptor that can be read and written like any other file descriptor. The people behind v8 concluded early that that level of change was beyond what could be pushed, and compatibility with older programs that didn't do this was a design goal. (Never mind that when I participated -- early -- in the v6 mailing lists and brought up this same issue, I was told that the goal of v6 was to get a 64 bit version of v4 with all its warts and known problems as soon as possible for business reasons).

    Today, we have NAT's as a very, very common way of doing half of this sort of routing.
    Today, if you want to talk to someone behind a NAT, you are using a cookie that is half the NAT's IP, and half the port number -- with the restriction that initiating connections from outside is highly restricted.

    V8 -- gateways and special routers -- is a system that is extensible. Does China want a real network firewall? Then take an entirely separate address space. Does Mars Colony want to control the expensive bandwidth to Earth? Heck, why can't Mars operate it's own network independently -- fighting for rights (and no longer being effectively slaves to the corporations that built the place two generations back) was hard enough, why does Earth still control Mars' data network?

    1. Re:Second: What happened to V8? by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      What would this gain us? Networking equipment has had IPv4 built in, not IPv4 and cookies. If we have to change all that, it's about as easy to change to IPv6 (and there's a not of networking equipment with IPv6 built in now). That's been the big problem with any simple IPv4 extension: it would require the scrapping of most of the IPv4 equipment anyway.

      It isn't scalable. Somebody has to keep track of what is an IP address and what is a cookie on the given IPv4 universe, and clearly we can't have more than 4 billion IP addresses addressed in one universe. We're not going to be able to have all that many IPv4 universes, unlike, say, IPv6 where we can just give everybody an incredible number of direct addresses without problem. IPv6 can handle far more addresses than any version of IPv8, and therefore is far more scalable.

      It breaks the net. Suddenly, when I'm following a web link to that Russian site, I find it'll take hours to get there. As far as I'm concerned, that site has ceased to exist.

      So, given that it has few if any advantages over IPv6, and works a lot worse, why are you wondering why it went precisely nowhere?

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    2. Re:Second: What happened to V8? by Keybounce · · Score: 1

      What would this gain us? Networking equipment has had IPv4 built in, not IPv4 and cookies. If we have to change all that, it's about as easy to change to IPv6 (and there's a not of networking equipment with IPv6 built in now). That's been the big problem with any simple IPv4 extension: it would require the scrapping of most of the IPv4 equipment anyway.

      The point of V8 was that all existing V4 clients are still 100% compatible -- all of the magic is in the routers and gateways that know about the V8 extensions.

      For everything else, as long as the TTL fields returned from the DNS lookups are honored, everything just works.

      It isn't scalable. Somebody has to keep track of what is an IP address and what is a cookie on the given IPv4 universe, and clearly we can't have more than 4 billion IP addresses addressed in one universe. We're not going to be able to have all that many IPv4 universes, unlike, say, IPv6 where we can just give everybody an incredible number of direct addresses without problem. IPv6 can handle far more addresses than any version of IPv8, and therefore is far more scalable.

      Only the gateways between the universe would need to have tracked what's what, and only to the extent that they are tracking what they issue out. It's as scalable as NAT.

      It breaks the net. Suddenly, when I'm following a web link to that Russian site, I find it'll take hours to get there. As far as I'm concerned, that site has ceased to exist.

      ... How?

      How do you get to "it'll take hours"?

      So, given that it has few if any advantages over IPv6, and works a lot worse, why are you wondering why it went precisely nowhere?

      Advantages: 100% compatible with V4.
      100% extensible to multiple planet-sized, or country-sized, networks.

      Disadvantages: Lacks the concept of a globally unique address.

  36. Re:IPv4 is for 32-bit cows. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You hit ctrl-A

  37. Re:The sky is falling! News at 10. by Bengie · · Score: 1

    I assume the money issue is more of a legacy system issue. Some hardware that an ISP purchases is very expensive and you only replace every 8 years. Maybe the last time they ordered some hardware, they wanted to save 20% to get some older equipment that didn't support IPv6. I know I can purchase a Layer 3 switch that does not support IPv6 for a decent chunk less than one that does.

    All new equipment for a long time has supported IPv6, but why purchase new when you can purchase a generation or two old and get liquidation prices? When my ISP purchased all new gigabit fiber and replaced their core router with a new shiny one that has more 10Gb and 100Gb ports than they'll need for a long time, I'm sure it supports IPv6, but there is bound to be a few pieces of old gear that needs to go away. Then they need to get training and do planning before they attempt to roll it out.

  38. pfSense by Aqualung812 · · Score: 1

    I normally have AC filtered so I can't even see them, but I saw the responses and had to come here to tell you about pfSense:
    https://pfsense.org/

    Seriously, this would take care of almost all of the items on your list, and you can get the hardware new for $200-$300, or just re-purpose an old PC for free.

    Have fun!

    --
    Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
  39. Re:The sky is falling! News at 10. by jbolden · · Score: 1

    Netflix I don't think uses AWS. In any case Netflix uses more bandwidth than most carriers they can get anything they custom they want from the people handling their data.

  40. Re:The sky is falling! News at 10. by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 1

    Netflix does use AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/solutio...

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
  41. /10 reserved by shalomsky · · Score: 1

    So the counter at he.net goes up and down it seems. More reliable is what ARIN posts on their website. As of today they show 0.00333 of a /8 left. So a little less than 56,000. Arin seem to be giving out a few /24s every day. But ARIN also set aside 4194304 addresses to facilitate moving organizations to IPv6. Earlier this year the counter at he.net showed about 4.8 M IP addresse left, then it jumped down to a couple hundred thousand. They took that 4.1 M out. So probably in a few weeks or about a month, they will run out.