8 ms·

I have been hearing this end-of-the-IPv4 world chatter for 10+ years now. While I understand it is a real problem, I wonder if we’ll still be talking about it

by ulkesh 7y ago

I have been hearing this end-of-the-IPv4 world chatter for 10+ years now. While I understand it is a real problem, I wonder if we’ll still be talking about it in the present tense 10 years from now.

fortran77 7y ago
It's like "peak oil." They keep saying we'll run out, but if we keep drilling or fracking, we keep finding more.
- kstrauser 7y ago
  That's a great analogy. Like peak oil, we've passed the point of exhausting the cheap, plentiful reserves. Now we're scrounging for harder-to-get, scarcer deposits which means that the prices of both will go up, inevitably. No, we're not out of oil or IPv4 addresses. It's just getting a lot harder to come by either one, and the writing's on the wall that the invisible hand is able to slap us silly if we don't seriously start migrating to the replacements ASAP.
- p1mrx 7y ago
  IPv4 addresses are more like land than oil. We're never going to find any more, but they aren't consumed, and existing ones can be traded. IPv6 lets us build in the sky, where space is no longer a constraint.
  - mysterydip 7y ago
    There are no more, but there are a lot wasted. In the early days when it was assumed everything would be publicly accessible, large organizations were given class A's or more.
    - p1mrx 7y ago
      There's a lot of wasted land too (e.g. single-story buildings in the Bay Area.) In any case, many of those "wasted" /8s have been resold for $100M+ in the last decade. Grep this page for "formerly" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
    - Dagger2 7y ago
      Not as much as you think. There are only about 20 /8s owned by companies (and those companies are using those /8s for their networks!). Before IANA runout in 2011 we were going through one /8 every month; given that demand has only gone up since then, 20 /8s would be, what, a 12 month supply or so? v4 is just too small, and no amount of pushing allocations around is going to change that.
      - nucleardog 7y ago
        While the addresses are largely in use (though I'd wager ham radio operators aren't using much of 44/8), are they really necessary? Does the UK Ministry of Defense actually have 16 million devices that need publicly routable addresses? Or could they be doing what almost everyone else is doing and using a handful of publicly routable addresses and private IP ranges behind them?
        Dagger2 7y ago
        No, of course they're not necessary. They could turn off all their computers and then they wouldn't need any address space at all. But there are benefits to having networked computers, and there are benefits to doing that networking correctly and not paying the costs of NAT and overlapped address space. It would take them years to renumber off of their /8, at great cost and with the result of an increased ongoing operational cost, and for what benefit? That /8 would last the public internet for less than a month. It's not like the people who are yet to deploy v6 are suffering a lack of time, so buying them an extra month which they would then squander isn't going to be very helpful.
    - rednixion 7y ago
      Classless networking used to not exist and a lot of universities being early adopters and some companies ended up with with class B's at least. Anyone in the US(who isn't one of the said universities) likely already had the address range taken back due to noteworthy underutilization though. We lost two class C's a few years ago due to this reason but it was hard to complain about since we weren't really using them.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    I'm patiently waiting for the day where someone tries to block usage of IPv4 addresses to increase the value of their own, much in the same way is done with actual land today.
rolltiide 7y ago
One company is running out of addresses this time
- zenexer 7y ago
  It's not just a "company". Someone has to decide who's in charge of which IP addresses. IANA is the overarching authority; they then delegates large swaths of IP addresses to regional organizations. RIPE is in charge of Europe. It would be more accurate to say one continent has run out of IPv4 addresses, but even that isn't entirely accurate. As IPv4 addresses have become scarcer and scarcer, it's become common for companies to obtain IP addresses from registries other than the one that handles their region. In other words: RIPE is in charge of assigning IP addresses. They're running out of IPv4 addresses to assign to other organizations. That's different from a single company running out of IPv4 addresses, which just means they need to buy more addresses (or find an alternative solution).
- rsynnott 7y ago
  One _continent_. (Or 1.5, really; RIPE also handles a decent chunk of Asia).
zenexer 7y ago
The internet can continue operating and growing without IPv6; it just won't be pretty. More and more endpoints will have to share a single IPv4 address; that's possible, but it can cause a variety of problems. I'm not really qualified to assess their severity on such large scales, but similar scenarios are known for being problematic at small scales. It might seem like it makes more sense to switch to IPv6 than to deal with the issues of IPv4, but the entities that have to deal with problems that result from IPv4 depletion usually aren't the same entities impeding the adoption of IPv6.
- ATsch 7y ago
  Two big reasons that Microsoft says have caused them to start pushing v6 adoption internally from around 2017 are: a) struggling to implement proper IP based access control with their available address space. b) as everyone uses the same 16 or so bits of Private IPv4 space, every acquisition likely causes new IPv4 address space collisions which must be worked around.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    > b) as everyone uses the same 16 or so bits of Private IPv4 space, every acquisition likely causes new IPv4 address space collisions which must be worked around. I mostly agree, but this overstates thing some. 10/8 offers 24 bits, 192.168 offers 16 bits, and 172.16-172.31 offers 20 bits. The latter are particularly frequently unused; if you pick one of 172.20-172.28 to cram into you have a high chance of not crashing into someone else when you integrate networks. Particularly if you use the upper half of the resultant class b. Of course RFC 4193 for IPv6 is very nice; pick your own random 40 bit prefix, and get to run 65536 subnets of arbitrary size. You need to integrate ~2^20-- a million-- networks before you have a 50% chance of having encountered a collision.
    - ATsch 7y ago
      > 172.16-172.31 are particularly frequently unused haha, I wish. We decided to use them two decades ago exactly because we thought they were less frequently used, but then a decade later docker comes along and uses exactly that as a default NAT subnet. So we get multiple tickets about that a week.
michaelsbradley 7y ago
I distinctly remembering hearing about it in the late 1990s during my university years (chatter among the computer lab staff). It’s amazing how long it’s dragged on.

by ulkesh 7y ago

fortran77 7y ago

It's like "peak oil." They keep saying we'll run out, but if we keep drilling or fracking, we keep finding more.

kstrauser 7y ago
That's a great analogy. Like peak oil, we've passed the point of exhausting the cheap, plentiful reserves. Now we're scrounging for harder-to-get, scarcer deposits which means that the prices of both will go up, inevitably. No, we're not out of oil or IPv4 addresses. It's just getting a lot harder to come by either one, and the writing's on the wall that the invisible hand is able to slap us silly if we don't seriously start migrating to the replacements ASAP.
p1mrx 7y ago
IPv4 addresses are more like land than oil. We're never going to find any more, but they aren't consumed, and existing ones can be traded. IPv6 lets us build in the sky, where space is no longer a constraint.
- mysterydip 7y ago
  There are no more, but there are a lot wasted. In the early days when it was assumed everything would be publicly accessible, large organizations were given class A's or more.
  - p1mrx 7y ago
    There's a lot of wasted land too (e.g. single-story buildings in the Bay Area.) In any case, many of those "wasted" /8s have been resold for $100M+ in the last decade. Grep this page for "formerly" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
  - Dagger2 7y ago
    Not as much as you think. There are only about 20 /8s owned by companies (and those companies are using those /8s for their networks!). Before IANA runout in 2011 we were going through one /8 every month; given that demand has only gone up since then, 20 /8s would be, what, a 12 month supply or so? v4 is just too small, and no amount of pushing allocations around is going to change that.
    - nucleardog 7y ago
      While the addresses are largely in use (though I'd wager ham radio operators aren't using much of 44/8), are they really necessary? Does the UK Ministry of Defense actually have 16 million devices that need publicly routable addresses? Or could they be doing what almost everyone else is doing and using a handful of publicly routable addresses and private IP ranges behind them?
      - Dagger2 7y ago
        No, of course they're not necessary. They could turn off all their computers and then they wouldn't need any address space at all. But there are benefits to having networked computers, and there are benefits to doing that networking correctly and not paying the costs of NAT and overlapped address space. It would take them years to renumber off of their /8, at great cost and with the result of an increased ongoing operational cost, and for what benefit? That /8 would last the public internet for less than a month. It's not like the people who are yet to deploy v6 are suffering a lack of time, so buying them an extra month which they would then squander isn't going to be very helpful.
  - rednixion 7y ago
    Classless networking used to not exist and a lot of universities being early adopters and some companies ended up with with class B's at least. Anyone in the US(who isn't one of the said universities) likely already had the address range taken back due to noteworthy underutilization though. We lost two class C's a few years ago due to this reason but it was hard to complain about since we weren't really using them.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  I'm patiently waiting for the day where someone tries to block usage of IPv4 addresses to increase the value of their own, much in the same way is done with actual land today.

rolltiide 7y ago

One company is running out of addresses this time

zenexer 7y ago
It's not just a "company". Someone has to decide who's in charge of which IP addresses. IANA is the overarching authority; they then delegates large swaths of IP addresses to regional organizations. RIPE is in charge of Europe. It would be more accurate to say one continent has run out of IPv4 addresses, but even that isn't entirely accurate. As IPv4 addresses have become scarcer and scarcer, it's become common for companies to obtain IP addresses from registries other than the one that handles their region. In other words: RIPE is in charge of assigning IP addresses. They're running out of IPv4 addresses to assign to other organizations. That's different from a single company running out of IPv4 addresses, which just means they need to buy more addresses (or find an alternative solution).
rsynnott 7y ago
One _continent_. (Or 1.5, really; RIPE also handles a decent chunk of Asia).

zenexer 7y ago

The internet can continue operating and growing without IPv6; it just won't be pretty. More and more endpoints will have to share a single IPv4 address; that's possible, but it can cause a variety of problems. I'm not really qualified to assess their severity on such large scales, but similar scenarios are known for being problematic at small scales. It might seem like it makes more sense to switch to IPv6 than to deal with the issues of IPv4, but the entities that have to deal with problems that result from IPv4 depletion usually aren't the same entities impeding the adoption of IPv6.

ATsch 7y ago
Two big reasons that Microsoft says have caused them to start pushing v6 adoption internally from around 2017 are: a) struggling to implement proper IP based access control with their available address space. b) as everyone uses the same 16 or so bits of Private IPv4 space, every acquisition likely causes new IPv4 address space collisions which must be worked around.
- mlyle 7y ago
  > b) as everyone uses the same 16 or so bits of Private IPv4 space, every acquisition likely causes new IPv4 address space collisions which must be worked around. I mostly agree, but this overstates thing some. 10/8 offers 24 bits, 192.168 offers 16 bits, and 172.16-172.31 offers 20 bits. The latter are particularly frequently unused; if you pick one of 172.20-172.28 to cram into you have a high chance of not crashing into someone else when you integrate networks. Particularly if you use the upper half of the resultant class b. Of course RFC 4193 for IPv6 is very nice; pick your own random 40 bit prefix, and get to run 65536 subnets of arbitrary size. You need to integrate ~2^20-- a million-- networks before you have a 50% chance of having encountered a collision.
  - ATsch 7y ago
    > 172.16-172.31 are particularly frequently unused haha, I wish. We decided to use them two decades ago exactly because we thought they were less frequently used, but then a decade later docker comes along and uses exactly that as a default NAT subnet. So we get multiple tickets about that a week.

michaelsbradley 7y ago

I distinctly remembering hearing about it in the late 1990s during my university years (chatter among the computer lab staff). It’s amazing how long it’s dragged on.