9 ms·

250M-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released

61 points by fariszr 3y ago

gavinhoward 3y ago
If they are, I kinda hope that I could get my hands on one. Or a few.
sgjohnson 3y ago
It’s not going to happen. Plenty of routers and other equipment are hardcoded to not route to those addresses. Any time spent rectifying this is time wasted on just adopting IPv6. Ping 240.whatever.whatever.whatever from Windows. You just can’t. General failure. And Windows is not the exception here. They can lobby all they want, all the effort is going to be in vain. Imagine having to debug a problem where your services are sitting on 240.0.0.0/4, but some customers have routers that just drop the packets to that destination. It’d be a nightmare and “get better networking gear” might not even be a solution, because their ISPs routers could also be doing that. This proposal is provably worse than just adopting IPv6, because when IPv6 works, it just works. This? This would fragment the IPv4 internet with undefined behaviour. If they really want more v4 space, they should advocate for yoinking the v4 space that e.g. the DoD, Daimler, Ford or Apple doesn’t use. And they have a lot of v4 space. But that’s also not going to happen, and one of the reasons why not would be similar. A lot of people are actually squatting on DoD space in their internal networks if they run out of 10/8.
- dheera 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - growse 3y ago
    > Make them all inter-compatible and backward-compatible by modifying the packet structure to accept a variable length address. "Simply draw the rest of the Owl".
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    Like clockwork this comment shows up...
    - Macha 3y ago
      Often it's even the same users, as if all the reasons it wouldn't work were't explained to them the last times they reflexively suggested it at the mention of IPv6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39100317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39100317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36996003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36996003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047061 ...
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Can you explain exactly how a IPv4 host would send packet to 1.2.4.5.6. What fields inside a fixed IP packet it would set to achieve such?
  - mike256 3y ago
    And a real IPv6 (128 bit) address would look like 164.32.74.105.164.32.74.105.164.32.74.105.164.32.74.105
  - JackSlateur 3y ago
    By that logic, ipv6 would be 1.2.3.4.1.2.3.4.1.2.3.4.1.2.3.4 Easy to remember, indeed
    - Macha 3y ago
      Address with patterns are indeed easy to remember, see how easy 1:2:3:4:: is to remember. So all we have to do is allocate everyone an artisanally crafted address with easy to remember patterns /s
      - exe34 3y ago
        Have you heard of domain names? They can be very memorable!
      - dheera 3y ago
        - 8.8.8.8 is IPv4 google DNS - What is IPv6 google DNS? Hell if I can remember it. 2001:4680:something? Guess which one is going into the DNS config of a new machine that I have to bring up and am forced to deliver results on short notice.
        growse 3y ago
        It's Google's prefix (`2001:4860:4860`) with `8888` and `8844` on the end. If you can't remember that, the problem's not the protocol.
        JackSlateur 3y ago
        And why on earth would you remember 8.8.8.8 in the first place ? For almost all the thing, I use DNS For DNS resolvers, I use root servers Never shall I use 8.8.8.8 : why would I ..
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - p1mrx 3y ago
    You post a strawman IPv6 address to HN every month or so. Why not take a minute to learn what a real address looks like? For example, 2eff:ff:a0ee::/54 is a prefix and 2eff:ff:a0ee::dead:beef is an address within that prefix. It is invalid for "::" to appear more than once, as that would be ambiguous.
    - dheera 3y ago
      Because nobody has fixed the bad UX yet, I'm still on IPv4, and like 5 million other people, have no incentive to move to IPv6 until the consortium of PMs of IPv6 do some user research (e.g. read HN) and work together to make the UX better or invent a better successor that people actually want to use. They're all wondering why IPv6 adoption is so slow, I'm telling them right here plain and simple.
      - p1mrx 3y ago
        You're trying to close the door after the horse has left the barn and started a worldwide colony of horsepeople. IPv6 isn't perfect, but it's not really practical to change the fundamentals of a 25 year old protocol.
- kees99 3y ago
  > problem where your services are sitting on 240.0.0.0/4, but some customers have routers that just drop the packets to that destination. On the other hand, as an ISP, you can pull some of those addresses for your CGNAT's external address pool. Your customers' gear will never see those. Server side will, though. But then, troubleshooting cloud/server front-end to reliably let those through sounds like a more doable chore?
  - tjoff 3y ago
    You can still connect to other non-nated individuals that might not expect that.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > On the other hand, as an ISP, you can pull some of those addresses for your CGNAT's external address pool. You're right but ugh, CGNAT. We just had fiber deployed here (yay!) and then I got assigned an ISP that has me behind CGNAT. The list of things that can make icky Spectrum better than fiber (for me) is super short, but CGNAT in the 1 or 2 spot.
    - p1mrx 3y ago
      CGNAT will become common for residential IPv4, because math. It's more reasonable to expect ISPs to provide native IPv6 alongside CGNAT, than avoid CGNAT entirely.
      - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
        > It's more reasonable to expect ISPs to provide native IPv6 alongside CGNAT, than avoid CGNAT entirely. You'd think so but of our fiber ISPs, 0 of 8 support IPv6 or have plans to do so - inc the NATty ones.
        p1mrx 3y ago
        Well, expectations do not always match reality. I suggest that you complain about their lack of IPv6, and encourage other customers to do the same.
- kees99 3y ago
  ...and about that part: > advocate for yoinking the v4 space that e.g. the DoD, Daimler, Ford or Apple doesn’t use Isn't it a travesty that owning a sizeable chunk of limited-supply IP addresses doesn't cost much, but exact same number of (nearly-)unlimited-supply domains does cost dearly per-domain to own? We don't hear horror stories how somebody is hoarding 16 millions .com domains, right? Too expensive to do so.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    We do. With gTLDs they can hoard all the domains under there... And price them how they like. Then again, we can generate nearly infinite amount of gTLDs so it is not too big deal.
  - dtaht 3y ago
    I am bugged that the BEAD programs do not seem to grok that we are indeed out of IPv4 space, and that the federal government is sitting on 10? 11 idle /8s.
- yardstick 3y ago
  All OpenWRT based routers have supported it for a very long time now. Also note the proposal is for 240/4 to be added to the RFC1918 list, not to be globally routable. I’ve been using 240/4 successfully in internal networks for over a decade now. The only devices I’ve had problems with are Windows. So for a quick win, Windows just needs to drop special checks they do for 240/4. I recall the 240/4 idea being floated at least 5-10 years ago. If Windows was changed to allow it at that point, today hardly anyone would be complaining that Ciscos or Junipers or other core routers don’t support it. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
  - RockRobotRock 3y ago
    Why do we need more RFC1918 addresses? What's wrong with 10.0.0.0/8?
    - stuff4ben 3y ago
      Some larger companies need it. I say if their equipment supports it and it's currently unused globally, then let it work internally.
      - RockRobotRock 3y ago
        Fair enough.
    - christopherh1 3y ago
      This proposal is not regarding repurposing 240/4 as RFC1918 space. It is regarding reclassifying it as Unicast space. I would recommend reading the article.
      - RockRobotRock 3y ago
        My bad. I was replying to the parent comment but you're right that I should have read the article.
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
- bigfatfrock 3y ago
  And here I was excited, me, as a common person, could possibly buy a block of ipv4. Dream crusher.
  - dtaht 3y ago
    I wish I had enough clout - as jon postel did - to merely declare I was the authority on 255/8 and was selling /24s at an auction price to anyone that was willing to route it. I´d use the money to support open source, and to help fund the rest of the ipv6 transition. And buy myself a nice sailboat to sail around in whilst I de-bufferbloated the rest of the networks of the world.
- dtaht 3y ago
  240/4 for windows is a patch tuesday away.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mellamoyo 3y ago
This again? Just use v6, it’s not that hard.
- diggan 3y ago
  Judging by the amount of infrastructure that doesn't yet support IPv6 (even parts of AWS), it seems to be harder than "easy" at least.
- Night_Thastus 3y ago
  From a consumer standpoint, I wish it was. I cannot tell you how many devices or software have had a notice of "just disable IPV6, that will fix X" and it's worked perfectly. If V6 was working everywhere and it was a simple toggle I'd say sure. But it's not.
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
    > I cannot tell you how many devices or software have had a notice of "just disable IPV6, that will fix X" and it's worked perfectly. I’ve heard this advice dozens of times, but it hasn’t worked once, to the point where I firmly believe that everyone giving out such advice either completely doesn’t care or know anything about networking, or, is suffering from some sort of a mental difficulty.
    - SlightlyLeftPad 3y ago
      Eh, I disagree. There are ton of crappy consumer grade devices that claim to support IPv6 but there are obscure implementation issues and these same devices offer zero visibility into what the cause might be. Sure, a packet sniffer might explain some of it but the remedy may require adjustment to the device which abstracts all the IP config away. The situation sucks all around.
      - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
        > Eh, I disagree. There are ton of crappy consumer grade devices I support all kinds of devices and turning off IPv6 was sometimes a thing I did. No so much now. Maybe once in the last 5 years.
thelastgallon 3y ago
Nice, they will be released, so the blocks can be bought by AWS, etc extractring rents for a long time ... Why don't we switch to ipv6.
- sgjohnson 3y ago
  They won’t be released, because releasing them would literally wreak havoc on the IPv4 internet. Releasing them could be the best thing for IPv6 to ever happen.
- speedgoose 3y ago
  > Why don't we switch to ipv6. Because the IPv4 NAT technology exists.
- hatch_q 3y ago
  Because of IoT - devices are inherently insecure and they are currently obscured by NAT. Imagine if billions of printers, weather stations, baby monitors, toothbrushes and thermostats suddenly obtain publicly routeable address...
  - autoexecbat 3y ago
    Consumer routers typically have a firewall. Additionally all those IoT devices are able to obtain these publicly routable ipv6 addresses already in millions of homes, its just the numbers are lower
  - bauruine 3y ago
    The main issue is that you can port scan all those IPv4 addresses in minutes. It's impossible for v6 so the issue, even without a firewall, isn't a big issue. I know you can do address harvesting like it was done with pool.ntp.org by shodan but if you don't use any public services your IoT devices are basically protected by the 128bit address space. So you need a address harvesting possibility, and people are watching for this as seen in the shodan case, and an exploitable issue at the same time. Not impossible and you should use a firewall but orders of magnitude less scary than a public routable IPv4 address.
  - 3y ago
xist 3y ago
I remember the days when theregister could be considered good newsource. Did the author need to crank out an "article" before the weekend? This has been talked about for decades. It's not going to happen. The entire range is unusable at the networking core level, even if you magically had an OS that accepted it. You can't tweak IPv4 any more. Accept the fact that while IPv6 may seem scary to some, it's the way we _must_ move. Networking is not scary, learn it.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > Accept the fact that while IPv6 may seem scary to some, it's the way we _must_ move. IPv6 availability is far from universal. I have 8 fiber ISPs to choose from. Zero of them offer IPv6.
  - topranks 3y ago
    The point is it’s not terribly difficult for them to offer it if they chose. That said I don’t feel there is any meaningful technical barrier to using 240/4.
    - hyc_symas 3y ago
      It took many years before mobile carriers in the US supported IPv6. I don't think any carriers here in Ireland do. My gigabit fiber provider only supports IPv4. Granted, they're just a VNO, using PPPoE on top of Eircom's network. Eir supports IPv6 if you subscribe to them directly, but their customer service is nonexistent and you'll be waiting over a year just for them to hook you up. For now I stay with the VNO because they have excellent customer service, except for not having an answer for me every time I ask them when they'll support v6.
ProllyInfamous 3y ago
I attended a university which DHCP'd unique, public-facing IPs to every device on the network. Although this requires tens-of-thousands of unique global IPs, the university only utilizes a small percentage of their allocated IP range. Having worked in the IT dept during school, I know it would have been a nightmare to attempt merging ours with another IP-range. Back in 2006 I gave a presentation on IPv4 end-of-life, when it was then predicted IPv6 would be entirely necessary by 2020 (i.e. that IPv4 would die out by then). This explainer/demo, almost two decades ago, got me a job offer... and yet two decades later I still don't use IPv6, myself!
- spiffytech 3y ago
  My university did this and it was great for me as a student. I bought an old workstation from surplus and put it on my dorm room desk as a server. I got to play around a lot with of tech stuff that would have otherwise been out of reach because $5 VPS didn't really exist yet.
  - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    >old workstation from surplus and put it on my dorm room desk as a server. Our dorm did this, with competitions to see "who could upload the most torrent traffic" [i2hub fiber between universities was just becoming popular]. Eventually the MAC address would be blacklisted, and all you'd need to do is replace the NIC and you'd immediately be "back in business." >I got to play around a lot with of tech stuff that would have otherwise been out of reach Memories, and it goes by so quickly (my ranting is from two decades ago). Then life gets serious =P
    - hyc_symas 3y ago
      Replacing the NIC sounds expensive, on a college student budget. You could've just reprogrammed the MAC EEPROM, no?
dtaht 3y ago
Some answers from my perspective: 240/4 is already useful in sdns, vpns, and networks like AWS as a hop along the way. Merely moving it on the IETF/IANA ledger from reserved to unicast would recognize reality since 2008. It is hilarious how hard that has been. Universal connectivity need not be a goal - can you imagine a portion of the internet completely immune from 30+ years of windows borne worms and viruses? :) 240/4 support in modern windows is a patch tuesday away which I would hope happen after it is moved from one side of the ledger to the other, officially. It (and 0/8) saves nanoseconds. In doing these patches we noticed that NO IoT OS actually did the 240/4 or 0/8 check, and in deleting the checks for it in Linux, etc, 5 and 16 years ago, the internet did not melt down. I see a lot of resentment from the router community that bemoans the extra work it will take to block these addresses, when if they don´t bother, nothing will change. Deleting code and acls for it, will actually speed things up. The flack I took for the 0/8 patches from thousands of people and the 3 weeks it took to patch that out of everything were outweighed in terms of saving nanoseconds on every packet the first weekend that kernel deployed. 5+ years ago in the case of 0/8. Enforcing a stupid policy for decades for no reason seems silly. 0/8 should have been reclaimed in 1986. As for what doesn´t work, who cares? Enough networks do already to make the 240/4 space usable. However AWS and google and perhaps others squatting on it!? and turning it into RFC1918 space, was certainly not my intent - I had thought that these addresses should be added to the global internet, for all mankind. Jon Postel would be spinning in his grave if he saw this abuse of this space. I had delusions of setting up 255/8 (the most junky space available, much like 2.4ghz was for wifi) as a test, as a place to innovate, as a place to perhaps perfect udp-lite natting, and other protocols, within the open source community. Lastly, everybody misses the most important draft of all, finally retiring the .0 broadcast idea (with no users since 1986) which will free up oodles of real world IPv4 address space. Most of that work is already done, it would take very little to finish it. Why is it so hard to get people to pay attention to that? https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-address-05.html https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-... IPv6 also has a stupid idea about the zeroth address, only implemented in a few places that needs to be depreciated, which would shrink a lot of routing tables.
- topranks 3y ago
  A reasonable approach imo would be to let the RIRs assign it, but only to networks that can demonstrate they are running v6. As regards to the zeroth address on multipoint L2 networks would it really help that much? I’m not sure many people are really gonna see massive improvement squeezing one more host onto subnets. Maybe at the smaller end of things, /30, /29, /28 etc. Orgs are finding they can stretch v4 quite a lot, with load-balancers, proxies, NATs etc. The bigger headache in my experience is acquiring enough routable ranges to assign 1 for each site. A couple of extra hosts at each seems less critical.
teddyh 3y ago
Technically, they could¹ be released – but it wouldn’t help! Even a /4 is a drop in the bucket the way allocations were accelerating up until the addresses ran out. They’d quickly run out again, and we’d be back to where we started. Except now with additional problems for everybody unable to use the new addresses. If you have to exchange old equipment anyway, it’s better to use the new equipment to simply switch to IPv6. 1. With horrible consequences, admittedly.

61 points by fariszr 3y ago

If they are, I kinda hope that I could get my hands on one. Or a few.

It’s not going to happen. Plenty of routers and other equipment are hardcoded to not route to those addresses. Any time spent rectifying this is time wasted on just adopting IPv6. Ping 240.whatever.whatever.whatever from Windows. You just can’t. General failure. And Windows is not the exception here. They can lobby all they want, all the effort is going to be in vain. Imagine having to debug a problem where your services are sitting on 240.0.0.0/4, but some customers have routers that just drop the packets to that destination. It’d be a nightmare and “get better networking gear” might not even be a solution, because their ISPs routers could also be doing that. This proposal is provably worse than just adopting IPv6, because when IPv6 works, it just works. This? This would fragment the IPv4 internet with undefined behaviour. If they really want more v4 space, they should advocate for yoinking the v4 space that e.g. the DoD, Daimler, Ford or Apple doesn’t use. And they have a lot of v4 space. But that’s also not going to happen, and one of the reasons why not would be similar. A lot of people are actually squatting on DoD space in their internal networks if they run out of 10/8.

dheera 3y ago
[flagged]
- growse 3y ago
  > Make them all inter-compatible and backward-compatible by modifying the packet structure to accept a variable length address. "Simply draw the rest of the Owl".
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  Like clockwork this comment shows up...
  - Macha 3y ago
    Often it's even the same users, as if all the reasons it wouldn't work were't explained to them the last times they reflexively suggested it at the mention of IPv6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39100317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39100317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36996003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36996003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047061 ...
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Can you explain exactly how a IPv4 host would send packet to 1.2.4.5.6. What fields inside a fixed IP packet it would set to achieve such?
- mike256 3y ago
  And a real IPv6 (128 bit) address would look like 164.32.74.105.164.32.74.105.164.32.74.105.164.32.74.105
- JackSlateur 3y ago
  By that logic, ipv6 would be 1.2.3.4.1.2.3.4.1.2.3.4.1.2.3.4 Easy to remember, indeed
  - Macha 3y ago
    Address with patterns are indeed easy to remember, see how easy 1:2:3:4:: is to remember. So all we have to do is allocate everyone an artisanally crafted address with easy to remember patterns /s
    - exe34 3y ago
      Have you heard of domain names? They can be very memorable!
    - dheera 3y ago
      - 8.8.8.8 is IPv4 google DNS - What is IPv6 google DNS? Hell if I can remember it. 2001:4680:something? Guess which one is going into the DNS config of a new machine that I have to bring up and am forced to deliver results on short notice.
      - growse 3y ago
        It's Google's prefix (`2001:4860:4860`) with `8888` and `8844` on the end. If you can't remember that, the problem's not the protocol.
      - JackSlateur 3y ago
        And why on earth would you remember 8.8.8.8 in the first place ? For almost all the thing, I use DNS For DNS resolvers, I use root servers Never shall I use 8.8.8.8 : why would I ..
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- p1mrx 3y ago
  You post a strawman IPv6 address to HN every month or so. Why not take a minute to learn what a real address looks like? For example, 2eff:ff:a0ee::/54 is a prefix and 2eff:ff:a0ee::dead:beef is an address within that prefix. It is invalid for "::" to appear more than once, as that would be ambiguous.
  - dheera 3y ago
    Because nobody has fixed the bad UX yet, I'm still on IPv4, and like 5 million other people, have no incentive to move to IPv6 until the consortium of PMs of IPv6 do some user research (e.g. read HN) and work together to make the UX better or invent a better successor that people actually want to use. They're all wondering why IPv6 adoption is so slow, I'm telling them right here plain and simple.
    - p1mrx 3y ago
      You're trying to close the door after the horse has left the barn and started a worldwide colony of horsepeople. IPv6 isn't perfect, but it's not really practical to change the fundamentals of a 25 year old protocol.
kees99 3y ago
> problem where your services are sitting on 240.0.0.0/4, but some customers have routers that just drop the packets to that destination. On the other hand, as an ISP, you can pull some of those addresses for your CGNAT's external address pool. Your customers' gear will never see those. Server side will, though. But then, troubleshooting cloud/server front-end to reliably let those through sounds like a more doable chore?
- tjoff 3y ago
  You can still connect to other non-nated individuals that might not expect that.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > On the other hand, as an ISP, you can pull some of those addresses for your CGNAT's external address pool. You're right but ugh, CGNAT. We just had fiber deployed here (yay!) and then I got assigned an ISP that has me behind CGNAT. The list of things that can make icky Spectrum better than fiber (for me) is super short, but CGNAT in the 1 or 2 spot.
  - p1mrx 3y ago
    CGNAT will become common for residential IPv4, because math. It's more reasonable to expect ISPs to provide native IPv6 alongside CGNAT, than avoid CGNAT entirely.
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      > It's more reasonable to expect ISPs to provide native IPv6 alongside CGNAT, than avoid CGNAT entirely. You'd think so but of our fiber ISPs, 0 of 8 support IPv6 or have plans to do so - inc the NATty ones.
      - p1mrx 3y ago
        Well, expectations do not always match reality. I suggest that you complain about their lack of IPv6, and encourage other customers to do the same.
kees99 3y ago
...and about that part: > advocate for yoinking the v4 space that e.g. the DoD, Daimler, Ford or Apple doesn’t use Isn't it a travesty that owning a sizeable chunk of limited-supply IP addresses doesn't cost much, but exact same number of (nearly-)unlimited-supply domains does cost dearly per-domain to own? We don't hear horror stories how somebody is hoarding 16 millions .com domains, right? Too expensive to do so.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  We do. With gTLDs they can hoard all the domains under there... And price them how they like. Then again, we can generate nearly infinite amount of gTLDs so it is not too big deal.
- dtaht 3y ago
  I am bugged that the BEAD programs do not seem to grok that we are indeed out of IPv4 space, and that the federal government is sitting on 10? 11 idle /8s.
yardstick 3y ago
All OpenWRT based routers have supported it for a very long time now. Also note the proposal is for 240/4 to be added to the RFC1918 list, not to be globally routable. I’ve been using 240/4 successfully in internal networks for over a decade now. The only devices I’ve had problems with are Windows. So for a quick win, Windows just needs to drop special checks they do for 240/4. I recall the 240/4 idea being floated at least 5-10 years ago. If Windows was changed to allow it at that point, today hardly anyone would be complaining that Ciscos or Junipers or other core routers don’t support it. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
- RockRobotRock 3y ago
  Why do we need more RFC1918 addresses? What's wrong with 10.0.0.0/8?
  - stuff4ben 3y ago
    Some larger companies need it. I say if their equipment supports it and it's currently unused globally, then let it work internally.
    - RockRobotRock 3y ago
      Fair enough.
  - christopherh1 3y ago
    This proposal is not regarding repurposing 240/4 as RFC1918 space. It is regarding reclassifying it as Unicast space. I would recommend reading the article.
    - RockRobotRock 3y ago
      My bad. I was replying to the parent comment but you're right that I should have read the article.
- sgjohnson 3y ago
bigfatfrock 3y ago
And here I was excited, me, as a common person, could possibly buy a block of ipv4. Dream crusher.
- dtaht 3y ago
  I wish I had enough clout - as jon postel did - to merely declare I was the authority on 255/8 and was selling /24s at an auction price to anyone that was willing to route it. I´d use the money to support open source, and to help fund the rest of the ipv6 transition. And buy myself a nice sailboat to sail around in whilst I de-bufferbloated the rest of the networks of the world.
dtaht 3y ago
240/4 for windows is a patch tuesday away.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

mellamoyo 3y ago

This again? Just use v6, it’s not that hard.

diggan 3y ago
Judging by the amount of infrastructure that doesn't yet support IPv6 (even parts of AWS), it seems to be harder than "easy" at least.
Night_Thastus 3y ago
From a consumer standpoint, I wish it was. I cannot tell you how many devices or software have had a notice of "just disable IPV6, that will fix X" and it's worked perfectly. If V6 was working everywhere and it was a simple toggle I'd say sure. But it's not.
- sgjohnson 3y ago
  > I cannot tell you how many devices or software have had a notice of "just disable IPV6, that will fix X" and it's worked perfectly. I’ve heard this advice dozens of times, but it hasn’t worked once, to the point where I firmly believe that everyone giving out such advice either completely doesn’t care or know anything about networking, or, is suffering from some sort of a mental difficulty.
  - SlightlyLeftPad 3y ago
    Eh, I disagree. There are ton of crappy consumer grade devices that claim to support IPv6 but there are obscure implementation issues and these same devices offer zero visibility into what the cause might be. Sure, a packet sniffer might explain some of it but the remedy may require adjustment to the device which abstracts all the IP config away. The situation sucks all around.
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      > Eh, I disagree. There are ton of crappy consumer grade devices I support all kinds of devices and turning off IPv6 was sometimes a thing I did. No so much now. Maybe once in the last 5 years.

thelastgallon 3y ago

Nice, they will be released, so the blocks can be bought by AWS, etc extractring rents for a long time ... Why don't we switch to ipv6.

sgjohnson 3y ago
They won’t be released, because releasing them would literally wreak havoc on the IPv4 internet. Releasing them could be the best thing for IPv6 to ever happen.
speedgoose 3y ago
> Why don't we switch to ipv6. Because the IPv4 NAT technology exists.
hatch_q 3y ago
Because of IoT - devices are inherently insecure and they are currently obscured by NAT. Imagine if billions of printers, weather stations, baby monitors, toothbrushes and thermostats suddenly obtain publicly routeable address...
- autoexecbat 3y ago
  Consumer routers typically have a firewall. Additionally all those IoT devices are able to obtain these publicly routable ipv6 addresses already in millions of homes, its just the numbers are lower
- bauruine 3y ago
  The main issue is that you can port scan all those IPv4 addresses in minutes. It's impossible for v6 so the issue, even without a firewall, isn't a big issue. I know you can do address harvesting like it was done with pool.ntp.org by shodan but if you don't use any public services your IoT devices are basically protected by the 128bit address space. So you need a address harvesting possibility, and people are watching for this as seen in the shodan case, and an exploitable issue at the same time. Not impossible and you should use a firewall but orders of magnitude less scary than a public routable IPv4 address.
- 3y ago

xist 3y ago

I remember the days when theregister could be considered good newsource. Did the author need to crank out an "article" before the weekend? This has been talked about for decades. It's not going to happen. The entire range is unusable at the networking core level, even if you magically had an OS that accepted it. You can't tweak IPv4 any more. Accept the fact that while IPv6 may seem scary to some, it's the way we _must_ move. Networking is not scary, learn it.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> Accept the fact that while IPv6 may seem scary to some, it's the way we _must_ move. IPv6 availability is far from universal. I have 8 fiber ISPs to choose from. Zero of them offer IPv6.
- topranks 3y ago
  The point is it’s not terribly difficult for them to offer it if they chose. That said I don’t feel there is any meaningful technical barrier to using 240/4.
  - hyc_symas 3y ago
    It took many years before mobile carriers in the US supported IPv6. I don't think any carriers here in Ireland do. My gigabit fiber provider only supports IPv4. Granted, they're just a VNO, using PPPoE on top of Eircom's network. Eir supports IPv6 if you subscribe to them directly, but their customer service is nonexistent and you'll be waiting over a year just for them to hook you up. For now I stay with the VNO because they have excellent customer service, except for not having an answer for me every time I ask them when they'll support v6.

ProllyInfamous 3y ago

I attended a university which DHCP'd unique, public-facing IPs to every device on the network. Although this requires tens-of-thousands of unique global IPs, the university only utilizes a small percentage of their allocated IP range. Having worked in the IT dept during school, I know it would have been a nightmare to attempt merging ours with another IP-range. Back in 2006 I gave a presentation on IPv4 end-of-life, when it was then predicted IPv6 would be entirely necessary by 2020 (i.e. that IPv4 would die out by then). This explainer/demo, almost two decades ago, got me a job offer... and yet two decades later I still don't use IPv6, myself!

spiffytech 3y ago
My university did this and it was great for me as a student. I bought an old workstation from surplus and put it on my dorm room desk as a server. I got to play around a lot with of tech stuff that would have otherwise been out of reach because $5 VPS didn't really exist yet.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  >old workstation from surplus and put it on my dorm room desk as a server. Our dorm did this, with competitions to see "who could upload the most torrent traffic" [i2hub fiber between universities was just becoming popular]. Eventually the MAC address would be blacklisted, and all you'd need to do is replace the NIC and you'd immediately be "back in business." >I got to play around a lot with of tech stuff that would have otherwise been out of reach Memories, and it goes by so quickly (my ranting is from two decades ago). Then life gets serious =P
  - hyc_symas 3y ago
    Replacing the NIC sounds expensive, on a college student budget. You could've just reprogrammed the MAC EEPROM, no?

dtaht 3y ago

Some answers from my perspective: 240/4 is already useful in sdns, vpns, and networks like AWS as a hop along the way. Merely moving it on the IETF/IANA ledger from reserved to unicast would recognize reality since 2008. It is hilarious how hard that has been. Universal connectivity need not be a goal - can you imagine a portion of the internet completely immune from 30+ years of windows borne worms and viruses? :) 240/4 support in modern windows is a patch tuesday away which I would hope happen after it is moved from one side of the ledger to the other, officially. It (and 0/8) saves nanoseconds. In doing these patches we noticed that NO IoT OS actually did the 240/4 or 0/8 check, and in deleting the checks for it in Linux, etc, 5 and 16 years ago, the internet did not melt down. I see a lot of resentment from the router community that bemoans the extra work it will take to block these addresses, when if they don´t bother, nothing will change. Deleting code and acls for it, will actually speed things up. The flack I took for the 0/8 patches from thousands of people and the 3 weeks it took to patch that out of everything were outweighed in terms of saving nanoseconds on every packet the first weekend that kernel deployed. 5+ years ago in the case of 0/8. Enforcing a stupid policy for decades for no reason seems silly. 0/8 should have been reclaimed in 1986. As for what doesn´t work, who cares? Enough networks do already to make the 240/4 space usable. However AWS and google and perhaps others squatting on it!? and turning it into RFC1918 space, was certainly not my intent - I had thought that these addresses should be added to the global internet, for all mankind. Jon Postel would be spinning in his grave if he saw this abuse of this space. I had delusions of setting up 255/8 (the most junky space available, much like 2.4ghz was for wifi) as a test, as a place to innovate, as a place to perhaps perfect udp-lite natting, and other protocols, within the open source community. Lastly, everybody misses the most important draft of all, finally retiring the .0 broadcast idea (with no users since 1986) which will free up oodles of real world IPv4 address space. Most of that work is already done, it would take very little to finish it. Why is it so hard to get people to pay attention to that? https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-address-05.html https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-... IPv6 also has a stupid idea about the zeroth address, only implemented in a few places that needs to be depreciated, which would shrink a lot of routing tables.

topranks 3y ago
A reasonable approach imo would be to let the RIRs assign it, but only to networks that can demonstrate they are running v6. As regards to the zeroth address on multipoint L2 networks would it really help that much? I’m not sure many people are really gonna see massive improvement squeezing one more host onto subnets. Maybe at the smaller end of things, /30, /29, /28 etc. Orgs are finding they can stretch v4 quite a lot, with load-balancers, proxies, NATs etc. The bigger headache in my experience is acquiring enough routable ranges to assign 1 for each site. A couple of extra hosts at each seems less critical.

teddyh 3y ago

Technically, they could¹ be released – but it wouldn’t help! Even a /4 is a drop in the bucket the way allocations were accelerating up until the addresses ran out. They’d quickly run out again, and we’d be back to where we started. Except now with additional problems for everybody unable to use the new addresses. If you have to exchange old equipment anyway, it’s better to use the new equipment to simply switch to IPv6. 1. With horrible consequences, admittedly.