4 ms·

What kind of company need more than 16M IPs for private adressing?

by Thaxll 11y ago

wmf 11y ago
A company with more than 16M cable modems, for one thing.
- tedunangst 11y ago
  But do they all need to be on the same logical network?
  - mburns 11y ago
    They need to be logically accessible because they are managed devices. NAT doesn't work in this case. Of course, IPv6 is the more correct solution, if you can manage it (no pun intended). See Comcast's presentation about their motivations: http://meetings.ripe.net/ripe-54/presentations/IPv6_management.pdf http://meetings.ripe.net/ripe-54/presentations/IPv6_manageme...
    - tedunangst 11y ago
      Thanks, that's interesting, but doesn't explain why "federated net 10 islands" can't work, except to say it can't. New York (time warner) and Chicago (Comcast) are obviously managed separately. Why can't Comcast manage Boston and Chicago as separate networks? Is every single customer nationwide working off the same dhcp/update/management server, etc.?
      - wtallis 11y ago
        Based on the kinds of multi-state outages they suffer from, I'd say they often are all having all modems hitting the same auth/DHCP/DNS servers. Back when I was on BellSouth DSL, every time they had a DNS outage everybody would reboot their modem and that would bring down the DHCP server, but if you used third-party DNS you could remain online while the entire SE US lost DSL for an hour or two.
api 11y ago
It's not just about number of addresses. It's also about preventing conflicts. Let's say my company uses 10.0.0.0/16. Now let's say I set up a VPN. Half my users will be on local networks that are also 10.0.x.x. Fail. Even worse, let's say my company has two locations and both use 10.0.0.x and now we want to link them on a common network using a VPN or virtual Ethernet bridge. Have fun renumbering one of these two sites, or setting up abominations like internal two-way SNAT/DNAT. The reason IPv6's address space is so huge is to allow relatively stateless assignment of addresses with extremely low probability of conflicts. An IPv6 address is basically a UUID. That's going to make lots of things easier and eliminate the need for a huge number of nasty hacks.
- developer1 11y ago
  "An IPv6 address is basically a UUID." This is the reason why I can't believe we're not all on IPv6 yet. You would think that the online advertising industry would have done everything in their power to push IPv6, at any cost. 90%+ of people on IPv6 will literally have a unique identifier FOR LIFE on every device they own. Marketers can now pinpoint down not just to an IP address that identifies a single NAT interface, but each individual device. I hope that operating systems and/or routers will provide the option to rotate each IPv6 address on a routine basis. It would also be nice if ISPs would rotate the block that is handed out to each customer, but this is unlikely to happen. Every phone, every tablet, every PC, every thermostat, every door lock, every fridge... uniquely identifiable from the day it is hooked up to a network. :(
  - jlgaddis 11y ago
    Related: "Why the FBI wants IPv6: It's better [than CGN] for tracking criminals" [0]. [0]: http://gcn.com/articles/2012/06/07/fbi-wants-ipv6-hard-to-track-ipv4-with-nat.aspx?m=2 http://gcn.com/articles/2012/06/07/fbi-wants-ipv6-hard-to-tr...
  - mjcl 11y ago
    Good news, privacy addressing (ex. RFC 4941) exists and is enabled by default on OS X (10.7+) and Windows 7. Privacy addressing rotates the host section of the IP address by default once a day, leaving IPv6 host detection similar to IPv4+NAT. It seems like Linux may be a mixed bag (by distro) w/r/t it being enabled as default. I could definitely see cheap embedded devices based on a current Linux distro not bothering to change defaults to enable it.

What kind of company need more than 16M IPs for private adressing?

by Thaxll 11y ago

What kind of company need more than 16M IPs for private adressing?

wmf 11y ago

A company with more than 16M cable modems, for one thing.

tedunangst 11y ago
But do they all need to be on the same logical network?
- mburns 11y ago
  They need to be logically accessible because they are managed devices. NAT doesn't work in this case. Of course, IPv6 is the more correct solution, if you can manage it (no pun intended). See Comcast's presentation about their motivations: http://meetings.ripe.net/ripe-54/presentations/IPv6_management.pdf http://meetings.ripe.net/ripe-54/presentations/IPv6_manageme...
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    Thanks, that's interesting, but doesn't explain why "federated net 10 islands" can't work, except to say it can't. New York (time warner) and Chicago (Comcast) are obviously managed separately. Why can't Comcast manage Boston and Chicago as separate networks? Is every single customer nationwide working off the same dhcp/update/management server, etc.?
    - wtallis 11y ago
      Based on the kinds of multi-state outages they suffer from, I'd say they often are all having all modems hitting the same auth/DHCP/DNS servers. Back when I was on BellSouth DSL, every time they had a DNS outage everybody would reboot their modem and that would bring down the DHCP server, but if you used third-party DNS you could remain online while the entire SE US lost DSL for an hour or two.

api 11y ago

It's not just about number of addresses. It's also about preventing conflicts. Let's say my company uses 10.0.0.0/16. Now let's say I set up a VPN. Half my users will be on local networks that are also 10.0.x.x. Fail. Even worse, let's say my company has two locations and both use 10.0.0.x and now we want to link them on a common network using a VPN or virtual Ethernet bridge. Have fun renumbering one of these two sites, or setting up abominations like internal two-way SNAT/DNAT. The reason IPv6's address space is so huge is to allow relatively stateless assignment of addresses with extremely low probability of conflicts. An IPv6 address is basically a UUID. That's going to make lots of things easier and eliminate the need for a huge number of nasty hacks.

developer1 11y ago
"An IPv6 address is basically a UUID." This is the reason why I can't believe we're not all on IPv6 yet. You would think that the online advertising industry would have done everything in their power to push IPv6, at any cost. 90%+ of people on IPv6 will literally have a unique identifier FOR LIFE on every device they own. Marketers can now pinpoint down not just to an IP address that identifies a single NAT interface, but each individual device. I hope that operating systems and/or routers will provide the option to rotate each IPv6 address on a routine basis. It would also be nice if ISPs would rotate the block that is handed out to each customer, but this is unlikely to happen. Every phone, every tablet, every PC, every thermostat, every door lock, every fridge... uniquely identifiable from the day it is hooked up to a network. :(
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  Related: "Why the FBI wants IPv6: It's better [than CGN] for tracking criminals" [0]. [0]: http://gcn.com/articles/2012/06/07/fbi-wants-ipv6-hard-to-track-ipv4-with-nat.aspx?m=2 http://gcn.com/articles/2012/06/07/fbi-wants-ipv6-hard-to-tr...
- mjcl 11y ago
  Good news, privacy addressing (ex. RFC 4941) exists and is enabled by default on OS X (10.7+) and Windows 7. Privacy addressing rotates the host section of the IP address by default once a day, leaving IPv6 host detection similar to IPv4+NAT. It seems like Linux may be a mixed bag (by distro) w/r/t it being enabled as default. I could definitely see cheap embedded devices based on a current Linux distro not bothering to change defaults to enable it.