6 ms·

There are at least a million IPv4 not in use here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks#List_of_assigned_.2F8_blocks https://e

by ck2 11y ago

There are at least a million IPv4 not in use here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks#List_of_assigned_.2F8_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre... Possibly 100+ million. What the frack does Halliburton need with 16 million IP addresses? On that note, US Department of Defense apparently does not just consume most of the US budget, it also consumes over 210 MILLION ip addresses. There are also a quarter billion ip addresses in the E block, which is probably easier to reprogram all routers than get all consumer devices to support ipv6 properly.

ju-st 11y ago
The problem with this is that you will get X million "new" IP addresses. But in Y years you will have the same problems as we have now again, because the X million IPs are again consumed. So it is much better to focus on the implementation of IPv6. The E block is a lost cause: http://packetlife.net/blog/2010/oct/14/ipv4-exhaustion-what-about-class-e-addresses/ http://packetlife.net/blog/2010/oct/14/ipv4-exhaustion-what-...
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > But in Y years you will have the same problems as we have now again, Note that Y in this case is significantly less than 1.
mrbill 11y ago
I was a sysadmin for a division of Halliburton for over a decade (until this past January) and word came down the pipe that they were going to retire/give-back 134.132.x (owned by Landmark Graphics subsidiary) and work on moving off 10.x in the next few years. Keep in mind that a lot of these allocations were made in the 80s and 90s when nobody worried about running out of IPv4 addresses; in addition I saw what we paid to ARIN every year just to "have" 10.x and it was an insane amount (I remember it being more than my yearly salary).
- swinglock 11y ago
  You paid for using 10.0.0.0/8? Am I reading this correctly?
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    Possibly meant 11/8 which has been abused as an extension of 10/8.
    - mrbill 11y ago
      Typo; I meant 34.0.0.0/8.
  - freehunter 11y ago
    Probably just a placeholder number used by someone who didn't think about what 10.x actually is.
  - mrbill 11y ago
    Typo! 34.0.0.0/8. Sorry.
- mrbill 11y ago
  Typo; they have 34.0.0.0/8 and were discussing moving to 10.x internally last I remember.
linkregister 11y ago
To be fair, US DoD was the first organization to use TCP/IP. Perhaps these 210 million addresses are a legacy of ARPAnet. I agree that they should probably be returned to IANA.
semi-extrinsic 11y ago
A lot of this is down to history. Way back when lots of these blocks were allocated, not only was IPV4 exhaustion a non-issue, but allocations were either in /16 or /8. So if 65 000 adresses (a /16) was too few, the next step up was 16 million.
- astrodust 11y ago
  There was a time when simply having a .net domain, which was free to register, entitled you to a free Class B /16 allocation. If you were a company with any degree of credibility, it wasn't too hard to petition for a Class A allocation, /8. Apple and MIT managed. Then CIDR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing) came along and we had more than three sizes to offer, which really eased up on the crazy allocations. All those /8 allocations created chaos in the routing tables. Now they're usually sub-allocations from larger blocks which makes the routing tables much more orderly. Anything in the 192.x.x.x range was once called "the swamp" since it was full of so many routes.
msbarnett 11y ago
> What the frack does Halliburton need with 16 million IP addresses? Who cares? If they gave them back to IANA tomorrow, IANA would be out again in 2 weeks, at the rate of demand they were seeing the last time they had any blocks to assign. It would probably last even less time, now. Do the class A allocations suck in retrospect? Sure. Is it worth flushing time, effort, and money on trying to recover them? Hell no. Whatever amount of money it would cost Haliburton to restructure all of their internal networks and rewrite their applications to compactify their IPv4 usage would be far more efficiently spent if they simply used it to upgrade their infrastructure to IPv6. Putting any money into IPv4 is just throwing good money after bad at this point.
- astrodust 11y ago
  Keep in mind when IPv4 was introduced the number of computers on the internet could be measured in the hundreds. I really hope people don't shit on the original engineers. A 32-bit address space probably seemed stupidly, uselessly huge at that point in time.
  - msbarnett 11y ago
    I don't think anybody's out to shit on the original engineers. That the decisions they made at the time made sense doesn't make them any less regrettable in retrospect. Either way, it's a pointless argument anyways. There is no point to fixing those allocations because if you could snap your fingers and efficiently allocate IPv4 address today, we'd still be out and still have to switch to IPv6.
    - bsder 11y ago
      > That the decisions they made at the time made sense doesn't make them any less regrettable in retrospect. They really couldn't have made any better decision at the time--TCP/IP dates to 1974! Bits were expensive back then. Backbone links were 56K. The Intel 1103 1K DRAM was the biggest selling semiconductor in 1972 and had just replaced core memory. The fact that they even allocated 32 bits (the wastrels!) was amazingly forward thinking.
detaro 11y ago
Funnily enough, people have used DoD space internally, since large parts of it never where publicly announced. Until DoD gave some of it back... (granted, the people pulling such stunts probably still run it internally. And wonder why they can't reach some websites)
- calgoo 11y ago
  Yup happened to one company i worked for. We moved from a couple of public blocks to the DoD 11.* range internally. Then one day we could not access some Oracle hosted services as they where using the range.
memracom 11y ago
Some people are encoding IP addresses inside smartcards and similar electronic devices. There are all sorts of schemes out there such as devices that user their hardcoded IP address to send packets and network gateways use routing rules to decide whether to forward or drop the traffic. Fact is that if you want a GLOBALLY UNIQUE IP address, then IPv6 is the ONLY way to get one. It has been over 20 years since IPv4 addresses ceased to be globally unique.
- simoncion 11y ago
  > Fact is that if you want a GLOBALLY UNIQUE IP address, then IPv6 is the ONLY way to get one. Pardon? Just as any yahoo can choose to manually assign the IPv4 address assigned to my border router to a machine on his internal network, he can choose to do the same thing with its IPv6 address. My border router has a globally unique IPv4 address and a globally unique IPv6 address, inasmuch as any IP address in globally-routable space can be globally unique.

by ck2 11y ago

ju-st 11y ago

The problem with this is that you will get X million "new" IP addresses. But in Y years you will have the same problems as we have now again, because the X million IPs are again consumed. So it is much better to focus on the implementation of IPv6. The E block is a lost cause: http://packetlife.net/blog/2010/oct/14/ipv4-exhaustion-what-about-class-e-addresses/ http://packetlife.net/blog/2010/oct/14/ipv4-exhaustion-what-...

dragonwriter 11y ago
> But in Y years you will have the same problems as we have now again, Note that Y in this case is significantly less than 1.

mrbill 11y ago

I was a sysadmin for a division of Halliburton for over a decade (until this past January) and word came down the pipe that they were going to retire/give-back 134.132.x (owned by Landmark Graphics subsidiary) and work on moving off 10.x in the next few years. Keep in mind that a lot of these allocations were made in the 80s and 90s when nobody worried about running out of IPv4 addresses; in addition I saw what we paid to ARIN every year just to "have" 10.x and it was an insane amount (I remember it being more than my yearly salary).

swinglock 11y ago
You paid for using 10.0.0.0/8? Am I reading this correctly?
- tedunangst 11y ago
  Possibly meant 11/8 which has been abused as an extension of 10/8.
  - mrbill 11y ago
    Typo; I meant 34.0.0.0/8.
- freehunter 11y ago
  Probably just a placeholder number used by someone who didn't think about what 10.x actually is.
- mrbill 11y ago
  Typo! 34.0.0.0/8. Sorry.
mrbill 11y ago
Typo; they have 34.0.0.0/8 and were discussing moving to 10.x internally last I remember.

linkregister 11y ago

To be fair, US DoD was the first organization to use TCP/IP. Perhaps these 210 million addresses are a legacy of ARPAnet. I agree that they should probably be returned to IANA.

semi-extrinsic 11y ago

A lot of this is down to history. Way back when lots of these blocks were allocated, not only was IPV4 exhaustion a non-issue, but allocations were either in /16 or /8. So if 65 000 adresses (a /16) was too few, the next step up was 16 million.

astrodust 11y ago
There was a time when simply having a .net domain, which was free to register, entitled you to a free Class B /16 allocation. If you were a company with any degree of credibility, it wasn't too hard to petition for a Class A allocation, /8. Apple and MIT managed. Then CIDR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing) came along and we had more than three sizes to offer, which really eased up on the crazy allocations. All those /8 allocations created chaos in the routing tables. Now they're usually sub-allocations from larger blocks which makes the routing tables much more orderly. Anything in the 192.x.x.x range was once called "the swamp" since it was full of so many routes.

msbarnett 11y ago

> What the frack does Halliburton need with 16 million IP addresses? Who cares? If they gave them back to IANA tomorrow, IANA would be out again in 2 weeks, at the rate of demand they were seeing the last time they had any blocks to assign. It would probably last even less time, now. Do the class A allocations suck in retrospect? Sure. Is it worth flushing time, effort, and money on trying to recover them? Hell no. Whatever amount of money it would cost Haliburton to restructure all of their internal networks and rewrite their applications to compactify their IPv4 usage would be far more efficiently spent if they simply used it to upgrade their infrastructure to IPv6. Putting any money into IPv4 is just throwing good money after bad at this point.

astrodust 11y ago
Keep in mind when IPv4 was introduced the number of computers on the internet could be measured in the hundreds. I really hope people don't shit on the original engineers. A 32-bit address space probably seemed stupidly, uselessly huge at that point in time.
- msbarnett 11y ago
  I don't think anybody's out to shit on the original engineers. That the decisions they made at the time made sense doesn't make them any less regrettable in retrospect. Either way, it's a pointless argument anyways. There is no point to fixing those allocations because if you could snap your fingers and efficiently allocate IPv4 address today, we'd still be out and still have to switch to IPv6.
  - bsder 11y ago
    > That the decisions they made at the time made sense doesn't make them any less regrettable in retrospect. They really couldn't have made any better decision at the time--TCP/IP dates to 1974! Bits were expensive back then. Backbone links were 56K. The Intel 1103 1K DRAM was the biggest selling semiconductor in 1972 and had just replaced core memory. The fact that they even allocated 32 bits (the wastrels!) was amazingly forward thinking.

detaro 11y ago

Funnily enough, people have used DoD space internally, since large parts of it never where publicly announced. Until DoD gave some of it back... (granted, the people pulling such stunts probably still run it internally. And wonder why they can't reach some websites)

calgoo 11y ago
Yup happened to one company i worked for. We moved from a couple of public blocks to the DoD 11.* range internally. Then one day we could not access some Oracle hosted services as they where using the range.

memracom 11y ago

Some people are encoding IP addresses inside smartcards and similar electronic devices. There are all sorts of schemes out there such as devices that user their hardcoded IP address to send packets and network gateways use routing rules to decide whether to forward or drop the traffic. Fact is that if you want a GLOBALLY UNIQUE IP address, then IPv6 is the ONLY way to get one. It has been over 20 years since IPv4 addresses ceased to be globally unique.

simoncion 11y ago
> Fact is that if you want a GLOBALLY UNIQUE IP address, then IPv6 is the ONLY way to get one. Pardon? Just as any yahoo can choose to manually assign the IPv4 address assigned to my border router to a machine on his internal network, he can choose to do the same thing with its IPv6 address. My border router has a globally unique IPv4 address and a globally unique IPv6 address, inasmuch as any IP address in globally-routable space can be globally unique.