5 ms·

A market is an excellent way to manage scarcity. However, ipv6 is preferable to well managed scarcity because it effectively eliminates the scarcity. Addresses

by dmm 16y ago

A market is an excellent way to manage scarcity. However, ipv6 is preferable to well managed scarcity because it effectively eliminates the scarcity. Addresses under ipv6 are practically unlimited. A typical ipv6 allocation for an end user is a /48. This allocation consists of 65,536 subnets, each of which has 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 individual addresses. This is just for the end user! Your grandma's cellphone will have 18,446,744,073,709,551,616*65,536 address available to it. No one will ever have to worry about running out again. The market is a great way to allocate wheat, but imagine if we could make a machine that generated unlimited wheat. Why not use it? Look at the population of Asia and look at the current ip allocations for that region. It's insanely small! Think about the next 30 years. All of those people are going to want internet access. Demand for ips is only going to grow and the difficulty associated with any sort of fundamental change is only going to grow. IPv6 isn't perfect but it's needed and needed soon.

tptacek 16y ago
So, I agree with you about all of this, but it's simply orthogonal to the discussion. We are not charting a course in a vacuum, based on pure competing principles. People have been arguing for the urgency of migrating to IPv6 for over a decade now. Not in the abstract. A decade ago was 2000, and in 2000, people were also seriously concerned about IP address depletion, and certain that we needed to imminently migrate to IPv6. So the first thing you want to address in this argument is whether or not the Internet --- or, more precisely, the value propositions and service model of the current Internet --- is going to collapse if we don't migrate. And, no, it turns out, it's not going to collapse. It will surely be more expensive for a Fortune 100 company to hold on to a vanity /8, but most of us aren't going to notice any change in a market-driven allocation world. To me, it follows from this that if we're going to have a usable IPv4 Internet for the foreseeable future, we have a choice: * We can pursue IPv6 with all vigor and alacrity, forklifting out every piece of software that treats an IPv4 address as a number instead of an opaque bundle of an arbitrary number of bits, or * We can reconsider whether a constituency in a persistent entry in the global BGP4 routing table is what it means to be a "first class citizen" of the Internet, and instead build a new city on top of the ruins of the old one, relegating IPv4 addresses (over time) to the same trash heap as MAC addresses. This isn't a pie-in-the-sky idea; CDNs and cloud providers are an immediate half-step in that direction, and overlay networks are a reasonable architectural goal for the next 5 years. In our overlay future, we get more than just expandable addressing; we get multicast service models (which IPv6 isn't going to provide), we get true multihoming (which IPv6 isn't going to provide), we get first-class peer-to-peer routing (which IPv6 isn't going to provide), and we get ISP portability without any intervention or agreement by a nationwide telco or MSP.
jodrellblank 16y ago
Your grandma's cellphone will have 18,446,744,073,709,551,61665,536 address available to it.* Good to know they're not being wastefully allocated this time around. "Man said, "Carefully husbanded, as directed by the Cosmic AC, the IPv6 addresses that are even yet left in all the Universe will last for billions of years." "But even so," said Man, "eventually it will all come to an end. However it may be husbanded, however stretched out, IP addresses once allocated are gone and cannot be restored. Entropy must increase to the maximum." Man said, "Can wasteful IP allocation not be reversed? Let us ask the Cosmic AC.
- joshhart 16y ago
  Not so sure about that. Think about how much energy would be necessary to operate that many devices: http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/128_bit_storage_are_you http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/128_bit_storage_are_you
  - jodrellblank 16y ago
    I wasn't suggesting they would be used, I was suggesting they would be wasted. Unless you want to run your new company as a process on my grandma's cellphone, that she can have more IP addresses on it than I can make a witty comparatory analogy about, is merely stupid and wasteful allocation. The IPv6 address space may be so big we could never use it all, it's not so big we could never wastefully allocate it all.
- dmm 16y ago
  You're not understanding the scales involved. You're complaining that the smallest package of salt at the store is a .5 kilo when all you need is a dash. That's crazy. There are oceans full of salt. Humanity will never want for salt.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    Hate to break the analogy, but, actually: not true. There's a simple numeric scaling bottleneck with IPv6 already: routing table size. There will, for the foreseeable future, be scarcity in portable routable addresses.

by dmm 16y ago

tptacek 16y ago

So, I agree with you about all of this, but it's simply orthogonal to the discussion. We are not charting a course in a vacuum, based on pure competing principles. People have been arguing for the urgency of migrating to IPv6 for over a decade now. Not in the abstract. A decade ago was 2000, and in 2000, people were also seriously concerned about IP address depletion, and certain that we needed to imminently migrate to IPv6. So the first thing you want to address in this argument is whether or not the Internet --- or, more precisely, the value propositions and service model of the current Internet --- is going to collapse if we don't migrate. And, no, it turns out, it's not going to collapse. It will surely be more expensive for a Fortune 100 company to hold on to a vanity /8, but most of us aren't going to notice any change in a market-driven allocation world. To me, it follows from this that if we're going to have a usable IPv4 Internet for the foreseeable future, we have a choice: * We can pursue IPv6 with all vigor and alacrity, forklifting out every piece of software that treats an IPv4 address as a number instead of an opaque bundle of an arbitrary number of bits, or * We can reconsider whether a constituency in a persistent entry in the global BGP4 routing table is what it means to be a "first class citizen" of the Internet, and instead build a new city on top of the ruins of the old one, relegating IPv4 addresses (over time) to the same trash heap as MAC addresses. This isn't a pie-in-the-sky idea; CDNs and cloud providers are an immediate half-step in that direction, and overlay networks are a reasonable architectural goal for the next 5 years. In our overlay future, we get more than just expandable addressing; we get multicast service models (which IPv6 isn't going to provide), we get true multihoming (which IPv6 isn't going to provide), we get first-class peer-to-peer routing (which IPv6 isn't going to provide), and we get ISP portability without any intervention or agreement by a nationwide telco or MSP.

jodrellblank 16y ago

Your grandma's cellphone will have 18,446,744,073,709,551,61665,536 address available to it.* Good to know they're not being wastefully allocated this time around. "Man said, "Carefully husbanded, as directed by the Cosmic AC, the IPv6 addresses that are even yet left in all the Universe will last for billions of years." "But even so," said Man, "eventually it will all come to an end. However it may be husbanded, however stretched out, IP addresses once allocated are gone and cannot be restored. Entropy must increase to the maximum." Man said, "Can wasteful IP allocation not be reversed? Let us ask the Cosmic AC.

joshhart 16y ago
Not so sure about that. Think about how much energy would be necessary to operate that many devices: http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/128_bit_storage_are_you http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/128_bit_storage_are_you
- jodrellblank 16y ago
  I wasn't suggesting they would be used, I was suggesting they would be wasted. Unless you want to run your new company as a process on my grandma's cellphone, that she can have more IP addresses on it than I can make a witty comparatory analogy about, is merely stupid and wasteful allocation. The IPv6 address space may be so big we could never use it all, it's not so big we could never wastefully allocate it all.
dmm 16y ago
You're not understanding the scales involved. You're complaining that the smallest package of salt at the store is a .5 kilo when all you need is a dash. That's crazy. There are oceans full of salt. Humanity will never want for salt.
- tptacek 16y ago
  Hate to break the analogy, but, actually: not true. There's a simple numeric scaling bottleneck with IPv6 already: routing table size. There will, for the foreseeable future, be scarcity in portable routable addresses.