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IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011
- wccrawford 16y agoI don't think my router even supports IPv6. This is going to be -such- a fun transition. I really thought people would get serious about it 2 years ago.
- zandorg 16y agoIt would be fixed with firmware updates in an ideal world.
- jsz0 16y agoDevices that don't support IPv6, or don't have IPv6 enabled, will just share an IPV4 address in a NAT pool at the ISP level. It's not pretty but it works.
- tptacek 16y agoThat still means that everything anyone wants to get to needs to be dual-stacked for the forseeable future.
- TheCondor 16y agoSort of. There are some very real limitations what what how much you can NAT too. Never mind what happens when various services break due to double NATing and the various port filtering, think VOIP and the like. Probably not terribly difficult for a few P2P programs to DoS your ISP wide NAT as well.
- wmf 16y agohttp://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-ipv6-cpe-router-07 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-ipv6-cpe-router-... Once this is published as an RFC we can all start asking the vendors to support it.
- tptacek 16y agoMost of your software doesn't support IPv6, which I think is a bigger problem. Most everything that works with sockets assumes that a network address fits in a machine int type; IPv6 addresses aren't even scalar.
- tomjen3 16y agoYou computer have SSID registers, which are 128 bytes. So it still fits.
- tptacek 16y agoThis is the moral equivalent of saying your computer has bignum libraries, so it still fits. Of course it does, if you use a bignum library.
- jfr 16y agoYou mentioned twice that IPv6 addresses aren't scalar in this discussion. Why? Are you talking about the scope identifier or the flow label? The scope identifier is not used by the Network Layer, it is used to disambiguate between addresses in different Data Link Layer outputs by the operating system, but plays no role in routing after the packet leaves the network card. There is no field for it in the IPv6 packet. The flow label is part of the IPv6 packet, but it is used for routing and quality of service, it is not used for addressing. So, the IPv6 address is actually just a 128-bit scalar integer, that goes from 0 to 340282366920938463463374607431768211455, with different sub-ranges designated to different purposes.
- tptacek 16y agoIn very few languages people use today is there a 128 bit scalar integer type. You're right to point out that I'm being imprecise with my terms, but I think now you get what I'm saying.
- rbanffy 16y agoWill it be auctioned on eBay?
- DeusExMachina 16y agoEvery host on an IP network, from servers to personal computers to networked printers, is assigned an IP address, a unique identifying number that is used to communicate with other hosts on the same network, or globally. This is misleading: computers (and especially printers) attached to a local network do not deplete public IP addresses, even if the network is connected to the global internet. Should not the TC crowd be a little more computer savvy than this?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- randomtask 16y ago> This is misleading: computers (and especially printers) attached to a local network do not deplete public IP addresses A device connected to a LAN in someone's house will often just have a private IP and go through a NAT for its internet access. However many big organisations will have been allocated a large address space at some point, often the size of a Class B. Their machines internally will often use a global IP address. The printers I use at university have their own public IPs. I'm guessing that's not unusual.
- DeusExMachina 16y agoGood point. I thought that there is not much use for a public IP for a printer, but I did not think about big address allocations. But is there any convenience in this? Can't they just switch a private LAN infrastructure connected through NAT?
- jedbrown 16y agoPrinting from off-site is easier with a public IP, I don't know how often that is necessary.
- randomtask 16y agoThis would be better done with a VPN than simply allowing external access to your printers.
- kilian 16y agoHaven't we been told that IPv4 will run out "next year" for the past couple of years? I mean, yeah, it's a legitimate concern and all, but if you keep crying wolf...
- jsz0 16y agoIt was a best estimate at the time. Reclaiming unused/wasted IPv4 space has helped some but routers have probably had a bigger impact. 5 years ago most ISPs were working under the assumption that the average customer was going to need (at least) 2 IPv4 addresses. My guess is the economic meltdown probably slowed down the growth of the Internet worldwide as well. I haven't seen any firm numbers to back that up it though.
- mhansen 16y agoNo - the estimates I've seen have always been 'the space will run out in a few years'.
- mike-cardwell 16y agohttp://ipv6.he.net/statistics/ http://ipv6.he.net/statistics/ Check the "v4 Exhaustion" widget on the right. It currently reckons there are 228 days left. I wrote an article about it on the 28th of May this year, and on that date, the widget calculated there were 427 days left.
- nanijoe 16y agoThere are a lot of addresses that should be 'reclaimed' . These days, most enterprises really only need a few public addresses, and many of them are 'sitting on' large chunks of addresses they acquired in the 90s.
- mgkimsal 16y agoWhile I agree, reclaiming them would only delay the inevitable by a few months or a couple years, perhaps.
- demallien 16y agoIt would be a better use of everybody's energy to actually get to work on the IPv6 transition, rather than trying to squeeze another couple of years out of IPv4. I think it should be pretty much obvious to everyone by now that until we actually hit the wall of IPv4, no one is going to get serious about the transition. NAT is not a great solution - it's a hack, and as anybody that has had to set up a server behind a NAT knows, it can be a real pain.
- tptacek 16y agoI'll wager that most residential Internet users are NAT'd, as are most corporate Internet users. The Internet works better today than it did back in 1996, when virtually nobody was NAT'd (back then, the big imposition was dynamic addresses instead of static).
- dasil003 16y agoNAT'd by their own router you mean? Because that seems like a world of difference from ISP-level NAT which I can imagine breaking a lot of shit.
- tptacek 16y agoWhen people argue that IPv6 is necessary because NAT is a terrible hack that breaks applications, they are talking about the concept of NAT, the thing that makes it hard to pass a callback address in protocols they design and that requires their routers to peek into their FTP traffic. I'm sure ISP NAT is at some level worse than home NAT, but the point is, we can scale our IPv4 address space if companies stop, for instance, spending /19's to give every one of their desktops a routable IP address (which are then firewalled off the Internet anyways). We'll simply have to accept some form of self-managed NAT to do that. I'm fine with that. We're freighting IP with too much responsibility and it's holding us back. We'd have multicast in several different service models by now if people would just stop trying to get Cisco IOS routers to do it for us.
- iwr 16y agoI wonder if it wouldn't just be cheaper to design NAT-friendly apps. By the looks of it, the transition would last a decade and there would still be large legacy infrastructure in place after that. So why not learn to love NAT and ipv4?
- mpk 16y agoBecause then we're still loving NAT and IPv4 in 2050.
- clistctrl 16y agoI can't wait for the last IPv4 address to be handed out. There is going to be so much opportunity for profit here.
- jrockway 16y agoI already got 2^33 entire IPv4 spaces for free. I only need about 3 addresses and I have 36893488147419103232 of them. Not sure how you're going to monetize that ;)
- jrockway 16y agoI'm already on IPv6. Find yourself an old 486 in the trash somewhere, get an OpenBSD install CD, and you can be too.
- RodgerTheGreat 16y agoI know this is going to sound silly, but it runs through my mind every time there's an IPv4/IPv6 discussion: Consider a pair of random IPs in standard written form: v4: 209.85.225.147 v6: 2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e8 From a purely aesthetic standpoint, IPv6 addresses look nasty. They vary in length, they're hard to remember, they're a little bit harder to parse and print than v4s. Much like an email address, an IPv4 address is iconic (to the right people) and immediately recognizable, whereas it would be easy to confuse a v6 for a MAC address. Is it at all possible that this is hampering adoption of IPv6?
- tptacek 16y agoIt is, but not in the way you think. IPv4 addresses are also cognitively nasty (try to remember two of them, walk to the other end of your building, and recite them from memory). People don't often use them directly. The problem is that IPv4 addresses happen to fit in machine registers, and so virtually all of the world's networking software has been written to assume that they are just a gossamer-thin semantic layer on top of a scalar integer. IPv6 addresses emphatically do not work as scalar integers. It's not just that this means you can't do math on an IPv6 address (though without a bignum library you can't). It's also the case that, as far as a lot of C programmers are concerned, you can't even directly assign them; they're "memcpy big". When Daniel J. Bernstein talks about the "IPv6 mess", this is one of the things he's talking about; it's not just that the whole world needs to be renumbered (note: hasn't ever been done before), but also that all our software needs to be upgraded.
- contextfree 16y agoDo you think it would have been better if they'd gone to a 64-bit format instead of 128-bit?
- tptacek 16y agoI think 32 bits are fine, because I think IP addresses should be to 2020 what ethernet addresses were to 1994. We shouldn't forklift out IPv4; we should build a new city on the ruins. More direct answer: yeah, I think 64 bits is a more reasonable addressing size, particularly if you accept the notion of second-class entities (that is to say, that the 15th heat sensor inside your toaster just might be OK with an RFC19180 private /8 address relayed through the toaster master control system's publicly routable address).
- js2 16y agoMost recent previous discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1742305 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1742305
- buro9 16y agoCan I buy cheap IPv6 SSL certificates yet?
- mateu 16y agoI just keep thinking about some of the "greybeards" as @tptacek said. The US Dept of Defense owns TEN class A blocks. HP owns two class A blocks, due to acquiring DEC (indirectly) Do they need that much space? I doubt it. Getting them to give back some space is not a long-term solution, but it would give this a little more time