5 ms·

> 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

> 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.
    - msbarnett 11y ago
      > They really couldn't have made any better decision at the time Is there some confusion about what the phrase "in retrospect" means? Time is linear and we gain perspective as we move forward in it. Often times good, smart seeming decisions, or even the only possible decision that was possible at a given point, become regrettable when we view them with the added perspective of seeing how things ultimately played out. This isn't a condemnation of anyone; it's a simple, obvious observation: knowing what we know now, some of the decisions we made then have had unfortunate, regrettable consequences, however necessary they were are the time. C'est la vie.
      - logn 11y ago
        I think the point is that even with the ability to see the future, they would have still made the same choice, given technical limitations of the time. So there's nothing to regret and a retrospective view adds nothing.
        msbarnett 11y ago
        > I think the point is that even with the ability to see the future, they would have still made the same choice, given technical limitations of the time. So there's nothing to regret I disagree. We can regret the way something worked out even if we had no other choice to make. That's a pretty normal human thing to do. But we could also regret that, eg) the technical limitations didn't drive them to choose an even smaller address space, one that would have lasted just long enough to get us to a point where we could move to maybe a 2^64 space in the 90s, instead of a space just big enough to become incredible hard to move out of, but not big enough that half the world isn't now living behind carrier grade NAT.
      - scrollaway 11y ago
        What the parent is saying is that had they implemented a scheme like IPv6 at the time, it would have been problematic for hardware reasons, so it wouldn't have made sense. He's right. IPv6 is old now. It dates back from 1998. Engineers understood two decades ago that ipv4 would run out and it finally made sense to create something better.
  - jwatte 11y ago
    No we would not. IPv4 with NAT can scale for a very, very long time. If we had been politically bold 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, we'd not have a problem for a long time to come. Instead, the cost of replacing software and devices for IPv6 is staggering and will depress other investment. And IPv6 doesn't even solve any other, modern networking proverbs any better than v4.
    - msbarnett 11y ago
      > IPv4 with NAT can scale for a very, very long time. Sure it can. Just ask everyone in India and China sitting behind three levels of Carrier-Grade NAT how great that experience is. And hey, working out a rotational schedule as to who gets to have the XBox Live ports to themselves on what night of the month is a great way to meet your neighbours.
- athenot 11y ago
  And at that time, it was really hard to foresee how cheap and ubiquitous computers would be. Computers were still multi-user shared resources. A "personal computer" was still a dream.

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.
  - msbarnett 11y ago
    > They really couldn't have made any better decision at the time Is there some confusion about what the phrase "in retrospect" means? Time is linear and we gain perspective as we move forward in it. Often times good, smart seeming decisions, or even the only possible decision that was possible at a given point, become regrettable when we view them with the added perspective of seeing how things ultimately played out. This isn't a condemnation of anyone; it's a simple, obvious observation: knowing what we know now, some of the decisions we made then have had unfortunate, regrettable consequences, however necessary they were are the time. C'est la vie.
    - logn 11y ago
      I think the point is that even with the ability to see the future, they would have still made the same choice, given technical limitations of the time. So there's nothing to regret and a retrospective view adds nothing.
      - msbarnett 11y ago
        > I think the point is that even with the ability to see the future, they would have still made the same choice, given technical limitations of the time. So there's nothing to regret I disagree. We can regret the way something worked out even if we had no other choice to make. That's a pretty normal human thing to do. But we could also regret that, eg) the technical limitations didn't drive them to choose an even smaller address space, one that would have lasted just long enough to get us to a point where we could move to maybe a 2^64 space in the 90s, instead of a space just big enough to become incredible hard to move out of, but not big enough that half the world isn't now living behind carrier grade NAT.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      What the parent is saying is that had they implemented a scheme like IPv6 at the time, it would have been problematic for hardware reasons, so it wouldn't have made sense. He's right. IPv6 is old now. It dates back from 1998. Engineers understood two decades ago that ipv4 would run out and it finally made sense to create something better.
- jwatte 11y ago
  No we would not. IPv4 with NAT can scale for a very, very long time. If we had been politically bold 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, we'd not have a problem for a long time to come. Instead, the cost of replacing software and devices for IPv6 is staggering and will depress other investment. And IPv6 doesn't even solve any other, modern networking proverbs any better than v4.
  - msbarnett 11y ago
    > IPv4 with NAT can scale for a very, very long time. Sure it can. Just ask everyone in India and China sitting behind three levels of Carrier-Grade NAT how great that experience is. And hey, working out a rotational schedule as to who gets to have the XBox Live ports to themselves on what night of the month is a great way to meet your neighbours.
athenot 11y ago
And at that time, it was really hard to foresee how cheap and ubiquitous computers would be. Computers were still multi-user shared resources. A "personal computer" was still a dream.