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Just because we make hundreds of billions of numbers available tomorrow Actually its more like 4 billion billion billion billion IPs. There are plenty of logi

by trezor 18y ago

Just because we make hundreds of billions of numbers available tomorrow Actually its more like 4 billion billion billion billion IPs. There are plenty of logistical problems (RIB size, portability) besides the artificial "scarcity" of IP addresses that retard universal fixed addressing. This is indeed true. If you want a small RIB size you need hierarchial address assignment. If you want portability, you need to break hierarchial address assignment. That being said, if portability becomes a limited issue, routing doesn't have to be much worse than it is today, where it is pretty much random. What fraction of "creativity" on the Internet depends on end-station addressing? Today I can put up a server on any DSL, have a public IP (and DynDNS if it's dynamic) and I can serve up new stuff to the entire internet without having to pay for hosting. Granted, that is not a business-class solution by any means, but anyone can do it. If you all of a sudden have to use commercial hosting to put something online, you are 100% at their mercy. What they offer, how they offer it, it will have to work on their server-setup unless you are willing to pay premium for a VPS etc etc. You want to develop some new kind of project/service which doesn't run over HTTP or on Apache? It sure must be encouraging to know that 99% of the internet wont be able to run or host your stuff since you are at the hosting provider's mercy and they have no plans deploying untested software. If addressing is hurting creativity, it's because you're being creative at the wrong layer of the stack. I'll assume this comment means you misunderstood what I was thinking about.

tptacek 18y ago
It's 4 zillion IP addresses just like 64 bit address space is 17 billion gigabytes --- meaning, not any time soon. Let's stipulate that we can both do math, OK? Again, the rest of your argument is hand-wavy. Virtual servers cost dollars a month. Virtually everybody uses them. What's the application I've heard of that, it turns out, is served off someone's DSL? You're saying, the best argument you've got for IPv6 is that it means I might be able to start something Posterous out of my home DSL instead of off Slicehost? Here's a news flash: you can't do that today; your DSL ToS forbids it. Maybe fix that problem before demanding that all the world's socket code get ported to a new address format.
- dandelany 18y ago
  I use EC2, and I'm 'renting' an elastic IP (v4) address from them for 1 cent an hour while it's not in use. I'm using the EC2 instance as a modified proxy server for a startup I'm working on, and obviously, I have to secure it. To do so, in Apache, I set my Allow rule to allow my home IP address for testing, which I can pay Comcast to keep static for me, and the IP address of the server I host the rest of my site on, which grabs content off of the EC2 server to display. This is easy today, but I worry it will be more difficult if IPv6 migration doesn't happen and there is a shortage of cheap IPv4 addresses. End-user addressing provides immense value to web developers, because it makes it easy to connect computers with global addresses. I understand that NAT can take care of many of the architecture problems, but its still useful, as a developer, to avoid the headache of worrying about the way packets are being routed and just use a single number to represent a single computer/iphone/laser-nose-hair-trimmer connected to the Internet. It's a layer of abstraction that, unless I'm understanding incorrectly, NAT makes more difficult. Am I wrong?

by trezor 18y ago

tptacek 18y ago

It's 4 zillion IP addresses just like 64 bit address space is 17 billion gigabytes --- meaning, not any time soon. Let's stipulate that we can both do math, OK? Again, the rest of your argument is hand-wavy. Virtual servers cost dollars a month. Virtually everybody uses them. What's the application I've heard of that, it turns out, is served off someone's DSL? You're saying, the best argument you've got for IPv6 is that it means I might be able to start something Posterous out of my home DSL instead of off Slicehost? Here's a news flash: you can't do that today; your DSL ToS forbids it. Maybe fix that problem before demanding that all the world's socket code get ported to a new address format.

dandelany 18y ago
I use EC2, and I'm 'renting' an elastic IP (v4) address from them for 1 cent an hour while it's not in use. I'm using the EC2 instance as a modified proxy server for a startup I'm working on, and obviously, I have to secure it. To do so, in Apache, I set my Allow rule to allow my home IP address for testing, which I can pay Comcast to keep static for me, and the IP address of the server I host the rest of my site on, which grabs content off of the EC2 server to display. This is easy today, but I worry it will be more difficult if IPv6 migration doesn't happen and there is a shortage of cheap IPv4 addresses. End-user addressing provides immense value to web developers, because it makes it easy to connect computers with global addresses. I understand that NAT can take care of many of the architecture problems, but its still useful, as a developer, to avoid the headache of worrying about the way packets are being routed and just use a single number to represent a single computer/iphone/laser-nose-hair-trimmer connected to the Internet. It's a layer of abstraction that, unless I'm understanding incorrectly, NAT makes more difficult. Am I wrong?