5 ms·

!! I had no idea ip addresses were allocated in this way. Living in american tech is apparently way more luxurious than anything I ever could have imagined

• HideousKojima 6y ago
  You'd think the Vatican would have a bustling tech industry with all those IPv4 addresses
  • Aperocky 6y ago
    17K isn't a whole lot when you have to assign one to the pope and every single cardinal (jk)
    • labster 6y ago
      It’s not just a problem of cardinal numbers; with all the accredited priests the church has you have to consider ordain-al numbers too.
• DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  The more optimistic of us really did think we'd all be using IPv6 by 2006.
  • SilverRed 6y ago
    The funny thing is Telegram just ran in to the issue where the 32bit user id column was about to overflow but overnight it went from 32bit to 64bit. No decades of waiting and hacks. Just goes to show how hard it is to make any kind of change without a central authority.
    • munk-a 6y ago
      That is a very, very different situation - it's highly likely that the values from that column are generally being read out into numeric-ish typed variables that default to using 64 bits of storage anyways. Additionally, they can actually see and potentially review all of the code using that value and adjust it as necessary. The central authority doesn't hurt but this is really an apples to elephants comparison.
    • astrea 6y ago
      One is global infrastructure with billions of users to appease making a potentially breaking change that the end user directly sees. The other is an app used by a order of magnitude less users simply changing int to int64 in their code and rolling over some databases.
    • topranks 6y ago
      Yeah. It’d never be as easy to convert a decentralised system like the internet to a new protocol. That said, simply increasing the IP address field size in the header would have been a lot simpler and been easy to upgrade. A big part of the IPv6 story is how they made so many changes there is a relatively steep learning curve to adopt. And NAT etc gave us another way not to.
  • arpa 6y ago
    And if ipv6 weren't balls to the wall insane with the only goal of being as different as possible from v4, we would have. But we have what we have.
    • Dagger2 6y ago
      It's actually very similar to v4, just with more bits. It has an identical network model to v4: routing and address assignment work the same way. It works over the same L2 links as v4, and L4 protocols like TCP and UDP all work the same. DNS is the same. The socket API is the same. Link-local addresses exist in v4 too, and v4 even had router advertisements already before v6 was even out. If they intended v6 to be as different as possible to v4, they wouldn't have designed it to work mostly like v4 with bigger addresses. They could've given it variable length addresses, or a locator/identifier split, or any number of other useful features that would've made it different to v4... but they didn't.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • shaicoleman 6y ago
      "The world in which IPv6 was a good design" (long read) dives into why it was designed that way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14986324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14986324
      • arpa 6y ago
        Thanks!
    • arpa 6y ago
      Hm. Perhaps better put it this way: if the adoption would be as simple as changing 4bytes to 6, we would be using it for 20 years already.
• tialaramex 6y ago
  In the modern era, your LIRs request address blocks from the RIR and your RIR requests them from IANA. The LIRs are local to you, ISPs, data centre companies, outfits like that, and they might be for-profit companies, government agencies, anything. The RIR is for your entire region (so in your case ARIN is for roughly North America, which means the US, Canada, Mexico, a bunch of small places in the Atlantic or Carribean) and in most cases these are some sort of non-profit where all the LIRs for the region pay a membership fee and agree its policies in their mutual interest. For IPv4 IANA eventually exhausted its supply of address blocks in 2011, when APNIC requested two more. That triggered their planned final distribution of one block to each of the five RIRs. So, this chart is a distortion in the sense that nobody said "OK, Timor-Leste gets 4096 addresses" in some smoke filled room - at some point an LIR in Timor-Leste asked for a /20 maybe they're an ISP there or something, they got that from APNIC (the RIR for Asia Pacific) and APNIC in turn got their addresses from IANA as I explained above. Each RIR gets to decide its own policies, most of them have a policy which says if you require IPv4 addresses today (a) you may just not get any, because they are exhausted and (b) if you can get addresses you might have to pay somebody else to release them and meet some qualifications to get those now-free addresses (but you can cut a deal so you're not paying for addresses somebody else ends up getting). They also tend to have a policy which demands you take IPv6 addresses, just to underscore that your correct way forward is not to hope that mathematicians discover more integers that were down the back of the sofa, but to just use IPv6 which has enough addresses for everybody. IPv6 addresses are distributed exactly the same way, except they are of course very far from being exhausted because there are so many more of them and we've understood the "shape" of networks better this time.