9 ms·

10 yesterday

70 points by Amfy 12y ago

throwaway2048 12y ago
Seems a little absurd that one company just got 1/4th of all remaining ARIN ipv4 adresses when there is such an insane crunch looming, no matter how big and important they are.
- nemasu 12y ago
  I can't wait till subnets are a thing of the past with ipv6.
  - pjd7 12y ago
    Most people at this stage are probably happy to push along ipv6 more so.
  - ams6110 12y ago
    Don't hold your breath. I think ipv4 will be around for a long time. With NAT, there's really no shortage of numbers for many sites.
    - dvdkhlng 12y ago
      Haha, I'm laughing at that statement. You do realize that NATs merely extend the address space by mapping connections to computers with non-public IPs onto a uniquely identifiable port number? So depending on the average number of concurrent connections operated per peer, NATs won't be able to extend the IP4 address space by more than, say 12 bits. See also here: http://serverfault.com/questions/502305/linux-networking-port-exhaustion http://serverfault.com/questions/502305/linux-networking-por...
      - abcd_f 12y ago
        Hahas are on you. NAT does tuple mapping - src/dst addr/port and protocol. That is - two TCP mappings can use the same local external port even if they go to the same remote address, for as long as they connect to a different remote port.
        dvdkhlng 12y ago
        Shortly after submitting my reply I had a similar thought but after some googling I cannot find any source that this kind of "port sharing" NAT is actually used. Looking at RFC 3022 "Traditional IP Network Address Translator" it looks like usually unique port numbers are allocated per connection. Maybe there are protocol subtitles or security implications that keep implementors from going with "port sharing" NAT? My argument still stands in case all peers behind a common NAT router try to access the same IPv4 server (which may just happen with centralized services like youtube/facebook/google). It also stands in case UDP based services are used (stuff depending on a Cone NAT and using STUN like VoIP or online gaming).
        lsc 12y ago
        This is true, but consider that while there are 16 bits of ports on both source and destination, in reality, nearly all traffic flows to a very short list of ports. Most connections, and connections are what matters here, not total traffic, are going to have a port 80 or 443 on one side of the connection or the other. So while I think 12 bits is too low, in practical use, you aren't getting the 32 bits you think you are getting. Considering source port restrictions, I think saying single-level nat extends IPv4 with another 16 bits is not too far off. Of course, that is still a lot of IPs. Of course, nat has a bunch of other pain in the ass problems, especially in that if I want to be able to track abuse, I've got to log every new connection (flow, whatever) that you make. When I get a complaint, I've got to match that up to my logs, which can be goddamn difficult if the complainer's clock isn't just right. With static IPs it's way easier to track abuse, and I don't have to actively log what you are doing, just who has what IP when, and because IPs stick around a lot longer than connections, I'm way less vulnerable to clock drift.
  - roeme 12y ago
    You should know that subnets are not a past with IPv6. Unless you meant to say "I can't wait to have one big net for all of my $CORP". Even then, I wouldn't rule out partitioning your big net - there is enough stupid software and OSes around which happily blabber (ie. broadcast) to the attached subnet. Becomes quite a nuisance when you've got hundreds of Nodes.
- Amfy 12y ago
  Exactly! They should not hand out anything bigger than a /16 or so. It's really unfair for the others.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Arnt 12y ago
  That's just an effect of how the roadmap works. The registries defined about number of points at which the allocation rules became/become stricter. They could have defined more points, ie. smaller and more frequent rule changes, but what would the benefit be, really? Btw, your math is off. ⅕, not ¼.
aidenn0 12y ago
Still no ipv6 address from my ISP at home :(
- darklajid 12y ago
  Better than the abomination called Dual Stack Lite imo (which is what I got).
  - zokier 12y ago
    Whats wrong with DS-Lite?
    - skrause 12y ago
      Carrier-grade NAT.
      - zokier 12y ago
        In case you haven't noticed, we are running out of IPv4 addresses. CGNAT for v4 is inevitable one way or another. That is why we have IPv6. At least with DS-lite there is only one layer of NAT, compared to full dual-stack which usually implies two layers of NAT (CPE and CG). But all that shouldn't matter that much when you have nice unobstructed end-to-end connectivity with IPv6.
    - darklajid 12y ago
      Lots of issues with (arguably broken) sites, that don't like it when your ipv4 address changes A broken cable modem for month (mandatory, btw) that went into a freeze whenever the ipv6 prefix was renewed (not even changed, necessarily): Every 2-3 days the box locked up. While I appreciate the 'No addresses left' argument, I was 'upgraded' to this crap. Before that I had a (dynamic) ipv4. My cable provider sits on ipv4 addresses and won't jump from providing cable in Germany into the huge Indian/Chinese market and run out of addresses. Why do we allocate huge networks (was it a /10 recently?) to Akamai if we're scarce? No way to access my home machines anymore. Dyndns is dead. I could implement that for ipv6 and that would be even better in theory, alas .. most people/networks/mobile carriers are on ipv4. So my AAAA is utterly useless, even if I keep it up to date. In the end I'm a fan of ipv6. I ran ipv6 tunnels in the past, native ipv6 is cool. Somewhat. CGNAT is bullshit for the reasons above and more and forcing it down to your customers is a tough sell (-> The ISP loses goodwill here). For new or exploding markets? Probably no other way. Here it's just useless. Dual Stack is fine, DS Lite causes trouble again and again in my setup here. And there's never an excuse for a known issue that requires your customers to unplug the cable modem you provided, because .. well .. it's not quite ipv6 ready yet. [1] 1: That was an issue for month, was solved around end of February. Support hotline knew about it, device manufacturer knew about it, official workaround see above.
zaroth 12y ago
I remember reading about full IPv4-space scans showing some fairly massive blocks that were allocated but unused. As I recall it was well over 10% of the overall space that could theoretically be reclaimed and redistributed with a hand-wave. Anything that gets IPv6 adoption to mainstream is a Good Thing, but more likely we'll just start seeing the $1/mo/IP become $2/mo/IP, and upward... The squeeze will just continue as people make more money off of it, and we'll still need IPv4 addresses for compatibility with people running Windows XP in 2020.
- yuhong 12y ago
  I think XP has partial IPv6 support, though not installed by default.
  - zaroth 12y ago
    You're right, the "Windows XP User on IPv4" is just an allegory of the critical mass of users that will keep us from dropping our IPv4 addresses many years into the future. Put another way, what is the incremental value to provide access to your service to those IPv4 only users/devices? Whatever that value is, in theory you would be willing to pay a portion of that for access to IPv4 address space. Luckily supply is not really constrained, so much as it is controlled. You can always get more IPs if you need them, but the cost associated I think will continue to increase... until enough people not only just support IPv6, but actually abandon their IPv4 addresses. When the only devices that your software or service is designed to run on all support IPv6, then there's "no point" in having an IPv4 address. You almost have to get to the point where IPv4 is "not worth the trouble". And we are very, very far from that point I think. More to the point, more people are likely to think that it's IPv6 that is not worth the trouble.
    - stock_toaster 12y ago
      Look at the other side of the coin though. If you have a service that only talks ipv6, you will be insulated from all the unsupported, unpatched, and trojan/virus laden XP machines for years to come!
    - 12y ago
spullara 12y ago
Maybe they should have come up with a version of IPv6 that didn't basically require both to exist forever.
- Arnt 12y ago
  All the proposed variants required that. Some hid the requirement a little better than others. Some proposals were superset-like, so v4 and v6 addresses could ping each other. But not all v6 addresses. As soon as the v4 space was used up, those variants had to allocate v6 addresses that could not ping v4 addresses, so you got a sneaking incompatibility. Worse: you'd never know for sure whether there were any v4-only hosts left on the network. Clean break or sneaking, what's your preference?
  - spullara 12y ago
    Clean break with the new protocol NATing the old protocol. IPv4 addresses not behind the NAT are not accessible on the new internet. Exploit the asymmetry inherit in services vs clients.
martinflack 12y ago
I work for Akamai and it's worth noting that we also do a ton of work around IPv6: http://www.akamai.com/ipv6 http://www.akamai.com/ipv6
- alexgartrell 12y ago
  Why did you guys need a /10?
  - muppetman 12y ago
    I'd love to know the justification for this too. SSL hosts is the only thing I can think of.
    - zurn 12y ago
      Would be a shame since SNI appeared in browsers ~2007. IE 6 is hardly worth wasting the Internet's last IPv4 space on.
      - vidarh 12y ago
        It's needed for Windows XP users regardless of IE version. Whether you care about Windows XP users or not is another question..
        toomuchtodo 12y ago
        Are we terribly concerned about supporting a 13 year old OS that is EOL'd by its manufacturer?
      - SomeoneWeird 12y ago
        Except... WinXP does not support SNI, so even the latest browsers on XP still fail
        icebraining 12y ago
ay 12y ago
I am curious if this news affects how many HN readers which are involved into the product development are developing their products / websites with IPv6 support ? If maybe this helps folks managing news.ycombinator.com to click the button and dualstack their site ? (Being behind CloudFlare, it is really just a click away, I am told).
- bananas 12y ago
  We've been IPv6 entirely for about 3 years internally. Externally our peering is shit and they don't do IPv6 competently at all. We run Windows and Linux machines. My ISP (Andrews and Arnold) in the UK give us IPv6.
  - nextw33k 12y ago
    Could you expand on the peering problems? I was thinking of switching to either A&A or fido.net this summer as they are the only ISPs in the UK that offer reasonable priced IPv6 broadband.
    - bananas 12y ago
      It's our DC not broadband connection. We have several peers in the DC but not all are IPv6 and the level of competence is "variable". We had some techs not able to understand IPv6 even from a basic level and one peer screw up our routing. A&A rock - no complaints at all.
davidw 12y ago
This seems to be a problem that markets will solve pretty well: as the resource gets scarcer, the price will go up, meaning people will have an incentive to use it more efficiently (selling unused address space), and/or look for alternatives (IPv6).
- bashtoni 12y ago
  Not really; there's a mismatch between the people who incur the cost of getting IP address space, the content providers, and the people who would incur the biggest costs switching to IPv6, the connectivity providers.
  - davidw 12y ago
    Markets are usually not perfect, but tend to work decently even under imperfect conditions. Edit: it's kind of mind boggling that people on a site about startups are so anti-market. Lord knows they don't solve all the world's problems, and all of us can think of examples where they don't work, but they generally work pretty well, and I don't see evidence that this is not the case here.
- lsc 12y ago
  The major cost of IPs is routing table bloat. Every time I announce a new block, every router on the internet (that carries a full table) needs more (very expensive) memory. The size of the routing table has been growing faster than the cost of fast router memory has been falling for some time now. I mean, if you are only pushing a gigabit of traffic (and /maybe/ 10 gigabits, especially if the packets are large.) it's not that big of a deal; you can use dram and CPUs with large caches, and it's fast enough. But if you own a real pipe and have to push 40 gigs, or really, even 10gigs of small packets, my pair of vyatta routers on Xeons just isn't going to cut the mustard. It's kind of a 'tragedy of the commons' because when I buy IPs, that money goes to ARIN (or to the previous owner of those IPs) - none of that money goes to all the router owners who have to pay for more fast router memory - even though I'm costing those people money. The problem with runout intersects with this. If I need, say, 4000 IPs, I can get one /20, and occupy only one routing slot, or I can get 16 /24s and occupy 16 routing slots. From my point of view, from the point of view of the person who owns the IPs, there really isn't much difference between one /20 and 16 /24s. But the rest of the internet has to pay 16x as much if I get 16 /24s.
dcc1 12y ago
A lot of websites could use ipv6 to connect to a proxy/security provider such as cloudflare which would output the site to ipv4/ipv6 end users with all the other bells and whistles that cloudflare offers. The end user then doesnt even know or care that the website he/she is using is ipv6 btw does cloudflare support ipv6 only domains?
- baudehlo 12y ago
  There's still some issues with HTTPS which need further roll-out to completely solve this problem (i.e. not everywhere supports SNI yet), but yes, for a lot of web sites this would work perfectly fine, and indeed is how many PaaS providers work.
exabrial 12y ago
Ipv6 is still a terrible solution for so many reasons. Running out of addresses wasn't and and still actually isn't a problem, so stop pretending like it is. IETF should have taken a pave-the-cowpaths approach and cleaned up ipv4, not created a huge incompatible ipv6 mess.
- aidenn0 12y ago
  ipv6 is a terrible solution for many reasons, but running out of addresses is a problem, and the best solution available right now is ipv6
  - exabrial 12y ago
    sadly... you might be right. I wish there was a collaboration group to fix ipv4 incrementally
tszming 12y ago
If the certificate authorities can reduce the price of a SAN cert (multi-domains on a single IP, not to be confused with SNI), I guess a vast number of IPv4 can be saved, e.g. we host quite a number of client sites and we need IPv4 for each site just for SSL.

70 points by Amfy 12y ago

throwaway2048 12y ago

Seems a little absurd that one company just got 1/4th of all remaining ARIN ipv4 adresses when there is such an insane crunch looming, no matter how big and important they are.

nemasu 12y ago
I can't wait till subnets are a thing of the past with ipv6.
- pjd7 12y ago
  Most people at this stage are probably happy to push along ipv6 more so.
- ams6110 12y ago
  Don't hold your breath. I think ipv4 will be around for a long time. With NAT, there's really no shortage of numbers for many sites.
  - dvdkhlng 12y ago
    Haha, I'm laughing at that statement. You do realize that NATs merely extend the address space by mapping connections to computers with non-public IPs onto a uniquely identifiable port number? So depending on the average number of concurrent connections operated per peer, NATs won't be able to extend the IP4 address space by more than, say 12 bits. See also here: http://serverfault.com/questions/502305/linux-networking-port-exhaustion http://serverfault.com/questions/502305/linux-networking-por...
    - abcd_f 12y ago
      Hahas are on you. NAT does tuple mapping - src/dst addr/port and protocol. That is - two TCP mappings can use the same local external port even if they go to the same remote address, for as long as they connect to a different remote port.
      - dvdkhlng 12y ago
        Shortly after submitting my reply I had a similar thought but after some googling I cannot find any source that this kind of "port sharing" NAT is actually used. Looking at RFC 3022 "Traditional IP Network Address Translator" it looks like usually unique port numbers are allocated per connection. Maybe there are protocol subtitles or security implications that keep implementors from going with "port sharing" NAT? My argument still stands in case all peers behind a common NAT router try to access the same IPv4 server (which may just happen with centralized services like youtube/facebook/google). It also stands in case UDP based services are used (stuff depending on a Cone NAT and using STUN like VoIP or online gaming).
      - lsc 12y ago
        This is true, but consider that while there are 16 bits of ports on both source and destination, in reality, nearly all traffic flows to a very short list of ports. Most connections, and connections are what matters here, not total traffic, are going to have a port 80 or 443 on one side of the connection or the other. So while I think 12 bits is too low, in practical use, you aren't getting the 32 bits you think you are getting. Considering source port restrictions, I think saying single-level nat extends IPv4 with another 16 bits is not too far off. Of course, that is still a lot of IPs. Of course, nat has a bunch of other pain in the ass problems, especially in that if I want to be able to track abuse, I've got to log every new connection (flow, whatever) that you make. When I get a complaint, I've got to match that up to my logs, which can be goddamn difficult if the complainer's clock isn't just right. With static IPs it's way easier to track abuse, and I don't have to actively log what you are doing, just who has what IP when, and because IPs stick around a lot longer than connections, I'm way less vulnerable to clock drift.
- roeme 12y ago
  You should know that subnets are not a past with IPv6. Unless you meant to say "I can't wait to have one big net for all of my $CORP". Even then, I wouldn't rule out partitioning your big net - there is enough stupid software and OSes around which happily blabber (ie. broadcast) to the attached subnet. Becomes quite a nuisance when you've got hundreds of Nodes.
Amfy 12y ago
Exactly! They should not hand out anything bigger than a /16 or so. It's really unfair for the others.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Arnt 12y ago
That's just an effect of how the roadmap works. The registries defined about number of points at which the allocation rules became/become stricter. They could have defined more points, ie. smaller and more frequent rule changes, but what would the benefit be, really? Btw, your math is off. ⅕, not ¼.

aidenn0 12y ago

Still no ipv6 address from my ISP at home :(

darklajid 12y ago
Better than the abomination called Dual Stack Lite imo (which is what I got).
- zokier 12y ago
  Whats wrong with DS-Lite?
  - skrause 12y ago
    Carrier-grade NAT.
    - zokier 12y ago
      In case you haven't noticed, we are running out of IPv4 addresses. CGNAT for v4 is inevitable one way or another. That is why we have IPv6. At least with DS-lite there is only one layer of NAT, compared to full dual-stack which usually implies two layers of NAT (CPE and CG). But all that shouldn't matter that much when you have nice unobstructed end-to-end connectivity with IPv6.
  - darklajid 12y ago
    Lots of issues with (arguably broken) sites, that don't like it when your ipv4 address changes A broken cable modem for month (mandatory, btw) that went into a freeze whenever the ipv6 prefix was renewed (not even changed, necessarily): Every 2-3 days the box locked up. While I appreciate the 'No addresses left' argument, I was 'upgraded' to this crap. Before that I had a (dynamic) ipv4. My cable provider sits on ipv4 addresses and won't jump from providing cable in Germany into the huge Indian/Chinese market and run out of addresses. Why do we allocate huge networks (was it a /10 recently?) to Akamai if we're scarce? No way to access my home machines anymore. Dyndns is dead. I could implement that for ipv6 and that would be even better in theory, alas .. most people/networks/mobile carriers are on ipv4. So my AAAA is utterly useless, even if I keep it up to date. In the end I'm a fan of ipv6. I ran ipv6 tunnels in the past, native ipv6 is cool. Somewhat. CGNAT is bullshit for the reasons above and more and forcing it down to your customers is a tough sell (-> The ISP loses goodwill here). For new or exploding markets? Probably no other way. Here it's just useless. Dual Stack is fine, DS Lite causes trouble again and again in my setup here. And there's never an excuse for a known issue that requires your customers to unplug the cable modem you provided, because .. well .. it's not quite ipv6 ready yet. [1] 1: That was an issue for month, was solved around end of February. Support hotline knew about it, device manufacturer knew about it, official workaround see above.

zaroth 12y ago

I remember reading about full IPv4-space scans showing some fairly massive blocks that were allocated but unused. As I recall it was well over 10% of the overall space that could theoretically be reclaimed and redistributed with a hand-wave. Anything that gets IPv6 adoption to mainstream is a Good Thing, but more likely we'll just start seeing the $1/mo/IP become $2/mo/IP, and upward... The squeeze will just continue as people make more money off of it, and we'll still need IPv4 addresses for compatibility with people running Windows XP in 2020.

yuhong 12y ago
I think XP has partial IPv6 support, though not installed by default.
- zaroth 12y ago
  You're right, the "Windows XP User on IPv4" is just an allegory of the critical mass of users that will keep us from dropping our IPv4 addresses many years into the future. Put another way, what is the incremental value to provide access to your service to those IPv4 only users/devices? Whatever that value is, in theory you would be willing to pay a portion of that for access to IPv4 address space. Luckily supply is not really constrained, so much as it is controlled. You can always get more IPs if you need them, but the cost associated I think will continue to increase... until enough people not only just support IPv6, but actually abandon their IPv4 addresses. When the only devices that your software or service is designed to run on all support IPv6, then there's "no point" in having an IPv4 address. You almost have to get to the point where IPv4 is "not worth the trouble". And we are very, very far from that point I think. More to the point, more people are likely to think that it's IPv6 that is not worth the trouble.
  - stock_toaster 12y ago
    Look at the other side of the coin though. If you have a service that only talks ipv6, you will be insulated from all the unsupported, unpatched, and trojan/virus laden XP machines for years to come!
  - 12y ago

spullara 12y ago

Maybe they should have come up with a version of IPv6 that didn't basically require both to exist forever.

Arnt 12y ago
All the proposed variants required that. Some hid the requirement a little better than others. Some proposals were superset-like, so v4 and v6 addresses could ping each other. But not all v6 addresses. As soon as the v4 space was used up, those variants had to allocate v6 addresses that could not ping v4 addresses, so you got a sneaking incompatibility. Worse: you'd never know for sure whether there were any v4-only hosts left on the network. Clean break or sneaking, what's your preference?
- spullara 12y ago
  Clean break with the new protocol NATing the old protocol. IPv4 addresses not behind the NAT are not accessible on the new internet. Exploit the asymmetry inherit in services vs clients.

martinflack 12y ago

I work for Akamai and it's worth noting that we also do a ton of work around IPv6: http://www.akamai.com/ipv6 http://www.akamai.com/ipv6

alexgartrell 12y ago
Why did you guys need a /10?
- muppetman 12y ago
  I'd love to know the justification for this too. SSL hosts is the only thing I can think of.
  - zurn 12y ago
    Would be a shame since SNI appeared in browsers ~2007. IE 6 is hardly worth wasting the Internet's last IPv4 space on.
    - vidarh 12y ago
      It's needed for Windows XP users regardless of IE version. Whether you care about Windows XP users or not is another question..
      - toomuchtodo 12y ago
        Are we terribly concerned about supporting a 13 year old OS that is EOL'd by its manufacturer?
    - SomeoneWeird 12y ago
      Except... WinXP does not support SNI, so even the latest browsers on XP still fail
      - icebraining 12y ago

ay 12y ago

I am curious if this news affects how many HN readers which are involved into the product development are developing their products / websites with IPv6 support ? If maybe this helps folks managing news.ycombinator.com to click the button and dualstack their site ? (Being behind CloudFlare, it is really just a click away, I am told).

bananas 12y ago
We've been IPv6 entirely for about 3 years internally. Externally our peering is shit and they don't do IPv6 competently at all. We run Windows and Linux machines. My ISP (Andrews and Arnold) in the UK give us IPv6.
- nextw33k 12y ago
  Could you expand on the peering problems? I was thinking of switching to either A&A or fido.net this summer as they are the only ISPs in the UK that offer reasonable priced IPv6 broadband.
  - bananas 12y ago
    It's our DC not broadband connection. We have several peers in the DC but not all are IPv6 and the level of competence is "variable". We had some techs not able to understand IPv6 even from a basic level and one peer screw up our routing. A&A rock - no complaints at all.

davidw 12y ago

This seems to be a problem that markets will solve pretty well: as the resource gets scarcer, the price will go up, meaning people will have an incentive to use it more efficiently (selling unused address space), and/or look for alternatives (IPv6).

bashtoni 12y ago
Not really; there's a mismatch between the people who incur the cost of getting IP address space, the content providers, and the people who would incur the biggest costs switching to IPv6, the connectivity providers.
- davidw 12y ago
  Markets are usually not perfect, but tend to work decently even under imperfect conditions. Edit: it's kind of mind boggling that people on a site about startups are so anti-market. Lord knows they don't solve all the world's problems, and all of us can think of examples where they don't work, but they generally work pretty well, and I don't see evidence that this is not the case here.
lsc 12y ago
The major cost of IPs is routing table bloat. Every time I announce a new block, every router on the internet (that carries a full table) needs more (very expensive) memory. The size of the routing table has been growing faster than the cost of fast router memory has been falling for some time now. I mean, if you are only pushing a gigabit of traffic (and /maybe/ 10 gigabits, especially if the packets are large.) it's not that big of a deal; you can use dram and CPUs with large caches, and it's fast enough. But if you own a real pipe and have to push 40 gigs, or really, even 10gigs of small packets, my pair of vyatta routers on Xeons just isn't going to cut the mustard. It's kind of a 'tragedy of the commons' because when I buy IPs, that money goes to ARIN (or to the previous owner of those IPs) - none of that money goes to all the router owners who have to pay for more fast router memory - even though I'm costing those people money. The problem with runout intersects with this. If I need, say, 4000 IPs, I can get one /20, and occupy only one routing slot, or I can get 16 /24s and occupy 16 routing slots. From my point of view, from the point of view of the person who owns the IPs, there really isn't much difference between one /20 and 16 /24s. But the rest of the internet has to pay 16x as much if I get 16 /24s.

dcc1 12y ago

A lot of websites could use ipv6 to connect to a proxy/security provider such as cloudflare which would output the site to ipv4/ipv6 end users with all the other bells and whistles that cloudflare offers. The end user then doesnt even know or care that the website he/she is using is ipv6 btw does cloudflare support ipv6 only domains?

baudehlo 12y ago
There's still some issues with HTTPS which need further roll-out to completely solve this problem (i.e. not everywhere supports SNI yet), but yes, for a lot of web sites this would work perfectly fine, and indeed is how many PaaS providers work.

exabrial 12y ago

Ipv6 is still a terrible solution for so many reasons. Running out of addresses wasn't and and still actually isn't a problem, so stop pretending like it is. IETF should have taken a pave-the-cowpaths approach and cleaned up ipv4, not created a huge incompatible ipv6 mess.

aidenn0 12y ago
ipv6 is a terrible solution for many reasons, but running out of addresses is a problem, and the best solution available right now is ipv6
- exabrial 12y ago
  sadly... you might be right. I wish there was a collaboration group to fix ipv4 incrementally

tszming 12y ago

If the certificate authorities can reduce the price of a SAN cert (multi-domains on a single IP, not to be confused with SNI), I guess a vast number of IPv4 can be saved, e.g. we host quite a number of client sites and we need IPv4 for each site just for SSL.