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America Runs Out of IPv4 Internet Addresses
FireFury03 writes: The BBC is reporting that the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) ran out of spare IP addresses yesterday. "Companies in North America should now accelerate their move to the latest version of the net's addressing system. Now Africa is the only region with any significant blocks of the older version 4 internet addresses available." A British networking company that supplies schools has done an analysis on how concerned IT managers should be. This comes almost exactly 3 years after Europe ran out.
As most people do not type these number and do not need to remember these numbers, I do not see any problem with longer numbers. Especially when there are methods to write them shorter than that: 0000::0000::0000::0000::0000::0000::0000::0000
For example zeros ca be omitted. see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If you are typing or using IP addresses for ANYTHING other than you primary DNS servers, you're doing something wrong.
Seriously - set statics on your DNS servers (which can even be IPv4!), plug that into your DHCP etc. servers. Done.
This is the problem with IPv6 - those people whining about it aren't in charge of networks where it could be an issue anyway.
P.S. likely your mobile phone and maybe even your cable setup has been using IPv6 addresses for a few years now. They are specified and necessary in related standards. Did you notice? No. Because nobody types in IP addresses any more, not even on their home networks, work networks, thousands of servers, etc.
To be honest, MAC addresses are much more problematic to me, but I barely ever have to type those either.
The problem with switching is IMHO three fold, 1.- It is gonna cost probably a couple hundred million in routers and modems that cannot support IPV6, in fact if you look at places like Amazon and Newegg there are more routers being sold that doesn't support IPV6 even today than not, 2.- Years of treating IT workers as disposable means we simply do not have enough workers that can support all the headaches that are gonna happen with the switch, I know in my area most of the greybeards simply went into other fields because they were tired of being fucked by the MBAs, and my own personal beef 3.- Assigning everyone a unique IP means it will be trivial to track everyone, its gonna be meat on the table for your *.A.As and copyright trolls.
So you can see why switching hasn't bee a priority for most, its gonna cost a mint, shit is gonna break everywhere, and I wouldn't be surprised if it will end up with a shitload of requests from the *.A.As spamming the ISPs as they will be able to argue that "IP address does not equal individual" no longer applies.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This is actually a good study in human nature. A resource exhaustion (with a solution already in place) we could see from a mile off, but will do nothing about until it becomes absurdly painful to continue. Already we see monstrosities like carrier grade NAT which breaks many applications, rather than moving to IPv6 which nearly every device supports.
We'll see this same procrastinating with AGW, fossil fuels, everything else - we won't do anything about it until the economic damage is already being done and the pain level becomes extreme.
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No thanks. IPv6 addresses are a mouthful, typically 3x as long when printed. We should move to a version that makes them 1 byte longer.
IPv6 was a poor decision. It's like someone who ran out of toilet paper once so they went and filled their entire basement full so they won't accidentally run out again. 192.168.23.17 compared to AB34:34ED:AB34:34ED:AB34:34ED:AB34:34ED
As we're now pretty much stuck with ipv6, they would be better off locking out all the later bits until the transition is complete and make the ipv4 directly translatable. I.e. 192.168.25.25 becomes just FFFF:C0A8:1919 and all other ipv6 numbers are off limits until the transition is complete.
FFFF:C0A8:1919 isn't much more difficult than 192.168.25.25 and would make the transition much simpler than giving everyone a ipv4 number and a completely different ipv6 address.
Doing it this way, everyone could still access the websites via either their ipv4 or ipv6, it would only be the higher order ones that you would need to upgrade in order to access. Similar things have happened with phones and websites. When new area codes were introduced or new top level domains, a few people had problems accessing the new areas with older equipment if the older equipment was hardcoded somehow.
If you have trouble remembering IPv6 addresses, you can write them in a text file, like this :
1234:5678:9ABC:DEF0:1234:5678:9ABC:DEF0 mycomputer1
1234:5678:9ABC:DEF0:1234:5678:9ABC:DEF1 mycomputer2
Let's call this file "hosts". But I understand that copy-pasting can be annoying, it would be so much better if the system could use it natively...
But we can go even further! Instead of copying this file between computers we could make some kind of way to synchronize and distribute these files so that it could be always up to date and accessible from anywhere, like some kind of distributed naming scheme (we could call this DNS). If only we had this...
IPv6 was a poor decision. It's like someone who ran out of toilet paper once so they went and filled their entire basement full so they won't accidentally run out again. 192.168.23.17 compared to AB34:34ED:AB34:34ED:AB34:34ED:AB34:34ED As we're now pretty much stuck with ipv6, they would be better off locking out all the later bits until the transition is complete and make the ipv4 directly translatable. I.e. 192.168.25.25 becomes just FFFF:C0A8:1919 and all other ipv6 numbers are off limits until the transition is complete. FFFF:C0A8:1919 isn't much more difficult than 192.168.25.25 and would make the transition much simpler than giving everyone a ipv4 number and a completely different ipv6 address. Doing it this way, everyone could still access the websites via either their ipv4 or ipv6, it would only be the higher order ones that you would need to upgrade in order to access. Similar things have happened with phones and websites. When new area codes were introduced or new top level domains, a few people had problems accessing the new areas with older equipment if the older equipment was hardcoded somehow.
The stuff you are describing was initially contemplated, which is why we had IPv4 compatible addresses (::192.168.2.5) and IPv4 mapped addresses (::ffff:192.168.2.5). Problem was that that wasn't a simple way to resolve the addresses due to NAT in IPv4 among other things, which is why you have different transition mechanisms. Some of them have been used, like 6rd, Dual-Stack lite, Teredo, et al.
The toilet paper analogy is not quite correct. Rather, it's more like a case of discovering a new fuel that's a million times cheaper than gasoline, doesn't emit greenhouse gases, but which would require all engines worldwide to be changed. Since that would be an expensive process, the guys who design the replacement engines are working w/ the fuel engineers to ensure that the engines would never need to be redesigned again. In the case of IPv4, even making it 33 or 40 or 64 bits would have required an overhaul of all the world's networking gear, which is why the jump was made to 128 bits.