6 ms·

IPv4 Depletion

53 points by paralelogram 11y ago

na85 11y ago
They really just need to set a date and say "okay guys, on 1 March 2017 we're all just going to drop IPv4 entirely, you have until then to get ready" Yes, there will be casualties.
- oasisbob 11y ago
  Who is 'they' ?
  - nacs 11y ago
    The organization from the linked site -- ARIN -- American Registry for Internet Numbers.
    - teraflop 11y ago
      ARIN has no control over what protocols people use on their networks. They're only responsible for the allocation of new publicly-routable IP address ranges for North American customers. They've been quite clear and vocal about the fact that they're rapidly running out of addresses and will soon be unable to fulfill requests. There was no urgency when ARIN received its last global /8 allocations four years ago, and there doesn't seem to be any urgency now that we're seemingly weeks away from entirely running out. I don't know what it will take to make people pull their heads out of the sand.
- nothrabannosir 11y ago
  ... and then "we" say "No." "They" lose credibility and political weight. Next time a decision has to be made, "others" will try to seize power, pointing at this event to show the threat to backwards compatibility that they present. Politics are everywhere. Don't underestimate the energy necessary to shift the direction of an oil tanker.
- tedunangst 11y ago
  They should start by deciding when we're really out of IPv4. We exhausted IPv4 in 2011. And 2012. And 2013. And 2014. Every time somebody says "but this time we're really serious."
  - ay 11y ago
    There are multiple RIRs who exhausted in various times. RIPE already ran on the "1024 addresses for every new member and that's it" soft-landing policy for the past couple of years. But ARIN does not have a nice policy like RIPE does, so it will be a bit more entertaining this time.
    - tedunangst 11y ago
      None of which makes me care. From the beginning, the relevant question has been, when will I be unable to get an IP? And every time the answer is "real soon now". Yet the price of an extra IP on linode (for one example) has not budged from $1/month. You'll understand if this doesn't inspire much concern. For the record, I make the same complaint every time. Always the same response. "Those were warning signs, but now the end is nigh!"
      - profmonocle 11y ago
        > From the beginning, the relevant question has been, when will I be unable to get an IP? And every time the answer is "real soon now". It's going to be a long time before you can't get an IPv4 address at all. But what is going to happen over time is the cost of an IPv4 address is going to go up, since demand will increase, but supply won't.
      - zaroth 11y ago
        When you think of the size of the IPv4 space, you realize that $1/mo for an IP is by far the most profitable add-on they sell. 4.3 billion IPs x $12 per year = $51 billion. If the average cost to actually hold an IPv4 address was even $0.10/month, we would not be talking about IPv4 exhaustion. My point is, as long as you're willing to spend $12/year just for the IP address, there will be a long line of people happy to sell one to you. But $1 per month for a routable address is at least two orders of magnitude more expensive than network architects are aiming for.
- sixdimensional 11y ago
  Actually, you may be right, in a way. I've seen some government organizations pull a trick to motivate change - they schedule a change for a certain date... a "hard stop" and everyone has to switch. From the outside this looks like insanity, boiling the ocean... panic!! The trick comes in, they never had any intention for the change to be complete by that date, just to motivate people with the threat of impending required change. Many will scramble or work hard to meet that deadline, but there are always those who are left behind. Then, to make it work, nearly before the deadline, the deadline is extended for special cases by a reasonable, margin to allow those that don't convert to catch up. In any case, the goal is to give the illusion that there is a make it or break it deadline for real, and then address the consequences as they come up after the deadline.
qnaal 11y ago
HP doesn't need both those Class A blocks
- jsmthrowaway 11y ago
  Say everyone who doesn't "need" a LEGACY /8, by your estimation, gives them back. Then what do we do when those are gone? Seriously, should we be bolting aftermarket mods on our Datsun to get it another fifty miles or should we just buy a new bus already and get it overwith? Yeah, not everyone fits in the new bus, and that's the problem, but we've been in this dire boat for a long time. I've seen firsthand how Apple uses 17/8. Asking Apple to renumber that is completely futile. You might as well deploy IPv7, for as much effort it will take. Better to just advance the state of the art instead of squeezing another few days out of IPv4.
  - virtuallynathan 11y ago
    Apple is starting to use those for "real" purposes now with their CDN, iMessages, iCloud, etc...
    - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
      Apple has used them for "real" purposes since the dawn of the very first Internet services offered by the company. It's not recent.
- wmf 11y ago
  Fortunately there is a market where they can sell the parts they don't need. It could make for a nice quarterly bump if they ever do it.
bluedevil2k 11y ago
There's a secondary market that is surprisingly lacking in interest. I have a site that brokers large blocks of IPv4 to interested parties, and the most interest I've seen is for a /21. We have a /8 and can not come anywhere close to drumming up interest for it. http://ipv4hub.com http://ipv4hub.com
- kjs3 11y ago
  Interesting idea, but my unsubstantiated feeling is that there's probably a solid market for sub-class C to maybe /23 or /22, a small but well funded market for blocks bigger than /12 or so, and very, very little in the middle. That is, there's a lot of business use cases where owning a modest sized, routeable network is a potential win (e.g. site redundancy via BGP), a couple of business plans where having a very large numbers of addresses is important (e.g. you're a Something-aaS company, or an ISP/hosting play), but what's the business that needs just 64k addresses? Yes, I know they're out there (I've worked with many), but in my experience many of those are either a) really, really inefficient with their address space or b) are tacking on whatever space they can scrounge because they started out with a too-small allocation. YMMV.
- betaby 11y ago
  In fact IPv4 transfers are very common in RIPE servin region, there is official pace https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-transfers-and-mergers/ipv4-transfers/table-of-transfers https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-transfers-... So companies are buying IPv4 space
- porjo 11y ago
  There is a lot of FUD surrounding this market. Apparently Iran has been buying blocks of IPv4 from Romania, only to discover that the Romanians were continuing to advertise those same blocks after the sale!! See https://youtu.be/Jn5ztZSigHA https://youtu.be/Jn5ztZSigHA
  - MertsA 11y ago
    That's pretty egregious, why the heck did the romanian upstream peers not just drop them after they started obviously highjacking the /23? I mean you have something that is obviously not just some misconfiguration, if you know that one of your peers is intentionally hijacking some prefix why would you be complacent in being a part of their fraud?
FrankenPC 11y ago
What happens to the private sector end nodes? Do routers perform NAT from IPV4 to IPV6?
- turnip1979 11y ago
  No .. You'd think this was worked out before ipv6 was finalized. Nat64 and other related tech is a mess.
  - koffiezet 11y ago
    > NAT and other related tech is a mess. FTFY
- betaby 11y ago
  There are many ways to do so, like dual stack of real IPv6 + RCF6598 for IPv4 - used by many ISPs in Europe where IPv4 space shortage is a real problem.
- porjo 11y ago
  They continue doing IPv4. Anyone they want to reach needs to be reachable on IPv4 - at least via an IPv4 gateway/proxy
Animats 11y ago
Mobile should have been IPv6 from the beginning. In China, it mostly is. If we could get all the handsets on IPv6, that would free up much address space. T-Mobile has been pushing IPv6, but they had problems with Skype and WhatsApp, which apparently don't talk IPv6 properly.
- betaby 11y ago
  Interesting, especially in the light of google reported ~2 percent IPv6 penetration in China. My personal experience in managing somewhat popular sites (dual stack) in line with Google reported numbers. https://www.google.ca/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.ca/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-c...
  - porjo 11y ago
    AFAIK Google web-based services aren't that popular in China, so IPv6 metrics there are kinda irrelevant.
    - betaby 11y ago
      Randomly distributed sampling should give the same percentage.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
- virtuallynathan 11y ago
  Verizon Wireless and T-Mo have very large amounts of IPv6 deployed. They use 464XLAT, and anything with hard-coded IPv4 literals (bad practice) works kinda poorly.
- ay 11y ago
  I tested Skype back in January on IPv6only+NAT64, worked for me. Anyway given this: http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2015/06/apple-will-require-ipv6-support-for-all-ios-9-apps/ http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2015/06/apple-..., the days of "Apps not working with IPv6" are counted.
shmerl 11y ago
IPv6 adoption is surprisingly slow. Shouldn't it happen faster?
- stephengillie 11y ago
  A lot of SMB and even large-ish companies are in total denial mode, still. Most use IPv4 exclusively for all network connectivity. Some places disable IPv6 across the board, in other places it remains enabled by default but ignored.
  - contingencies 11y ago
    Some devices won't work, people need retraining, security with less tested stacks is a concern, addresses are harder to remember. It's a nontrivial change to push on to an established network, with a horizon for payoffs beyond the standard political term.
- porjo 11y ago
  A recent presentation [1] at RIPE conference highlighted that only 6 of the top 30 carriers in the world (based on customer value) are doing anything visible with IPv6. I suspect the rest have some IPv6 strategy cooking on the back burner, but are in no hurry to deploy until their hand is forced. [1] https://youtu.be/hrEh40_H4r4?t=730 https://youtu.be/hrEh40_H4r4?t=730
- api 11y ago
  Few of the big cloud providers -- EC2, Azure, etc. -- support IPv6. That's the big bottleneck. Fundamentally I think IPv6 itself is fine, but the transition was utterly botched. They should have unshelved 240.0.0.0/4 and mapped IPv6 onto it, allowing IPv4 applications to access select "early adopter" regions of IPv6. That would have been a start.
  - betaby 11y ago
    IPv4 to IPv6 mapping exists for a long time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4
nodesocket 11y ago
Is ipv4 depletion an issue for the big cloud providers (Amazon , Google, DigitalOcean, Rackspace)? How many ips do they have left?
- raidan 11y ago
  It has been an issue for some in the past[1]. [1] http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/06/ipv4-exhaustion-gets-real-microsoft-runs-out-of-u-s-addresses-for-azure-cloud-time-to-move-to-ipv6/ http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/06/ipv4-e...
- betaby 11y ago
  They keep buying space. Microsoft for example http://www.networkworld.com/article/2228854/microsoft-subnet/microsoft-pays-nortel--7-5-million-for-ipv4-addresses.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2228854/microsoft-subnet...
- ay 11y ago
  The most widely known is Azure, when they had to shuffle addresses around: http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/06/ipv4-exhaustion-gets-real-microsoft-runs-out-of-u-s-addresses-for-azure-cloud-time-to-move-to-ipv6/ http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/06/ipv4-e... Google already started charging a nominal fee for idle IPv4 addresses: https://cloud.google.com/sql/ https://cloud.google.com/sql/, search for "Idle IPv4 address"
- jsmthrowaway 11y ago
  Amazon landed the largest address transfer that I'm aware of to date (a /10) when du Pont chopped up 52/8. Reddit mentioned it, but I didn't see news on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/2tc4ss/looks_like_amazon_just_got_42_million_ips_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/2tc4ss/looks_li...
sliken 11y ago
Seems like IoT would have much more to offer with IPv6. Currently you buy a "internet enabled" schlage deadbolt for your front door and it connects to cloud to enable remote lock/unlock. If you could count on a visible IP address products/services could skip such things. Again it's a chicken and egg problem, nobody does anything cool assuming IPv6 because few have it. Few have it, because you can't do anything cool with it.
- steckerbrett 11y ago
  World accessible devices is a pretty scary concept. If you have your garage door controlled by an ESP8266 it would take a single host to denial of service attack it, maybe even just one server to denial of service attack every garage door in the united states.
  - koffiezet 11y ago
    It's not because it's public addressable that it would be public accessible.
mmaunder 11y ago
I feel lucky to have our little /27 colo block. We added IPv6 support to our firewall product earlier this year and it was a big deal - lots of schema and code changes to deal with 128 bit wide addresses and address math. I'd encourage any devs working on new products to bake it in from v1 if you can.
- gonzo 11y ago
  We put IPv6 in pfSense years ago. Definitely worth all the work.

53 points by paralelogram 11y ago

na85 11y ago

They really just need to set a date and say "okay guys, on 1 March 2017 we're all just going to drop IPv4 entirely, you have until then to get ready" Yes, there will be casualties.

oasisbob 11y ago
Who is 'they' ?
- nacs 11y ago
  The organization from the linked site -- ARIN -- American Registry for Internet Numbers.
  - teraflop 11y ago
    ARIN has no control over what protocols people use on their networks. They're only responsible for the allocation of new publicly-routable IP address ranges for North American customers. They've been quite clear and vocal about the fact that they're rapidly running out of addresses and will soon be unable to fulfill requests. There was no urgency when ARIN received its last global /8 allocations four years ago, and there doesn't seem to be any urgency now that we're seemingly weeks away from entirely running out. I don't know what it will take to make people pull their heads out of the sand.
nothrabannosir 11y ago
... and then "we" say "No." "They" lose credibility and political weight. Next time a decision has to be made, "others" will try to seize power, pointing at this event to show the threat to backwards compatibility that they present. Politics are everywhere. Don't underestimate the energy necessary to shift the direction of an oil tanker.
tedunangst 11y ago
They should start by deciding when we're really out of IPv4. We exhausted IPv4 in 2011. And 2012. And 2013. And 2014. Every time somebody says "but this time we're really serious."
- ay 11y ago
  There are multiple RIRs who exhausted in various times. RIPE already ran on the "1024 addresses for every new member and that's it" soft-landing policy for the past couple of years. But ARIN does not have a nice policy like RIPE does, so it will be a bit more entertaining this time.
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    None of which makes me care. From the beginning, the relevant question has been, when will I be unable to get an IP? And every time the answer is "real soon now". Yet the price of an extra IP on linode (for one example) has not budged from $1/month. You'll understand if this doesn't inspire much concern. For the record, I make the same complaint every time. Always the same response. "Those were warning signs, but now the end is nigh!"
    - profmonocle 11y ago
      > From the beginning, the relevant question has been, when will I be unable to get an IP? And every time the answer is "real soon now". It's going to be a long time before you can't get an IPv4 address at all. But what is going to happen over time is the cost of an IPv4 address is going to go up, since demand will increase, but supply won't.
    - zaroth 11y ago
      When you think of the size of the IPv4 space, you realize that $1/mo for an IP is by far the most profitable add-on they sell. 4.3 billion IPs x $12 per year = $51 billion. If the average cost to actually hold an IPv4 address was even $0.10/month, we would not be talking about IPv4 exhaustion. My point is, as long as you're willing to spend $12/year just for the IP address, there will be a long line of people happy to sell one to you. But $1 per month for a routable address is at least two orders of magnitude more expensive than network architects are aiming for.
sixdimensional 11y ago
Actually, you may be right, in a way. I've seen some government organizations pull a trick to motivate change - they schedule a change for a certain date... a "hard stop" and everyone has to switch. From the outside this looks like insanity, boiling the ocean... panic!! The trick comes in, they never had any intention for the change to be complete by that date, just to motivate people with the threat of impending required change. Many will scramble or work hard to meet that deadline, but there are always those who are left behind. Then, to make it work, nearly before the deadline, the deadline is extended for special cases by a reasonable, margin to allow those that don't convert to catch up. In any case, the goal is to give the illusion that there is a make it or break it deadline for real, and then address the consequences as they come up after the deadline.

qnaal 11y ago

HP doesn't need both those Class A blocks

jsmthrowaway 11y ago
Say everyone who doesn't "need" a LEGACY /8, by your estimation, gives them back. Then what do we do when those are gone? Seriously, should we be bolting aftermarket mods on our Datsun to get it another fifty miles or should we just buy a new bus already and get it overwith? Yeah, not everyone fits in the new bus, and that's the problem, but we've been in this dire boat for a long time. I've seen firsthand how Apple uses 17/8. Asking Apple to renumber that is completely futile. You might as well deploy IPv7, for as much effort it will take. Better to just advance the state of the art instead of squeezing another few days out of IPv4.
- virtuallynathan 11y ago
  Apple is starting to use those for "real" purposes now with their CDN, iMessages, iCloud, etc...
  - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
    Apple has used them for "real" purposes since the dawn of the very first Internet services offered by the company. It's not recent.
wmf 11y ago
Fortunately there is a market where they can sell the parts they don't need. It could make for a nice quarterly bump if they ever do it.

bluedevil2k 11y ago

There's a secondary market that is surprisingly lacking in interest. I have a site that brokers large blocks of IPv4 to interested parties, and the most interest I've seen is for a /21. We have a /8 and can not come anywhere close to drumming up interest for it. http://ipv4hub.com http://ipv4hub.com

kjs3 11y ago
Interesting idea, but my unsubstantiated feeling is that there's probably a solid market for sub-class C to maybe /23 or /22, a small but well funded market for blocks bigger than /12 or so, and very, very little in the middle. That is, there's a lot of business use cases where owning a modest sized, routeable network is a potential win (e.g. site redundancy via BGP), a couple of business plans where having a very large numbers of addresses is important (e.g. you're a Something-aaS company, or an ISP/hosting play), but what's the business that needs just 64k addresses? Yes, I know they're out there (I've worked with many), but in my experience many of those are either a) really, really inefficient with their address space or b) are tacking on whatever space they can scrounge because they started out with a too-small allocation. YMMV.
betaby 11y ago
In fact IPv4 transfers are very common in RIPE servin region, there is official pace https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-transfers-and-mergers/ipv4-transfers/table-of-transfers https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-transfers-... So companies are buying IPv4 space
porjo 11y ago
There is a lot of FUD surrounding this market. Apparently Iran has been buying blocks of IPv4 from Romania, only to discover that the Romanians were continuing to advertise those same blocks after the sale!! See https://youtu.be/Jn5ztZSigHA https://youtu.be/Jn5ztZSigHA
- MertsA 11y ago
  That's pretty egregious, why the heck did the romanian upstream peers not just drop them after they started obviously highjacking the /23? I mean you have something that is obviously not just some misconfiguration, if you know that one of your peers is intentionally hijacking some prefix why would you be complacent in being a part of their fraud?

FrankenPC 11y ago

What happens to the private sector end nodes? Do routers perform NAT from IPV4 to IPV6?

turnip1979 11y ago
No .. You'd think this was worked out before ipv6 was finalized. Nat64 and other related tech is a mess.
- koffiezet 11y ago
  > NAT and other related tech is a mess. FTFY
betaby 11y ago
There are many ways to do so, like dual stack of real IPv6 + RCF6598 for IPv4 - used by many ISPs in Europe where IPv4 space shortage is a real problem.
porjo 11y ago
They continue doing IPv4. Anyone they want to reach needs to be reachable on IPv4 - at least via an IPv4 gateway/proxy

Animats 11y ago

Mobile should have been IPv6 from the beginning. In China, it mostly is. If we could get all the handsets on IPv6, that would free up much address space. T-Mobile has been pushing IPv6, but they had problems with Skype and WhatsApp, which apparently don't talk IPv6 properly.

betaby 11y ago
Interesting, especially in the light of google reported ~2 percent IPv6 penetration in China. My personal experience in managing somewhat popular sites (dual stack) in line with Google reported numbers. https://www.google.ca/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.ca/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-c...
- porjo 11y ago
  AFAIK Google web-based services aren't that popular in China, so IPv6 metrics there are kinda irrelevant.
  - betaby 11y ago
    Randomly distributed sampling should give the same percentage.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
virtuallynathan 11y ago
Verizon Wireless and T-Mo have very large amounts of IPv6 deployed. They use 464XLAT, and anything with hard-coded IPv4 literals (bad practice) works kinda poorly.
ay 11y ago
I tested Skype back in January on IPv6only+NAT64, worked for me. Anyway given this: http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2015/06/apple-will-require-ipv6-support-for-all-ios-9-apps/ http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2015/06/apple-..., the days of "Apps not working with IPv6" are counted.

shmerl 11y ago

IPv6 adoption is surprisingly slow. Shouldn't it happen faster?

stephengillie 11y ago
A lot of SMB and even large-ish companies are in total denial mode, still. Most use IPv4 exclusively for all network connectivity. Some places disable IPv6 across the board, in other places it remains enabled by default but ignored.
- contingencies 11y ago
  Some devices won't work, people need retraining, security with less tested stacks is a concern, addresses are harder to remember. It's a nontrivial change to push on to an established network, with a horizon for payoffs beyond the standard political term.
porjo 11y ago
A recent presentation [1] at RIPE conference highlighted that only 6 of the top 30 carriers in the world (based on customer value) are doing anything visible with IPv6. I suspect the rest have some IPv6 strategy cooking on the back burner, but are in no hurry to deploy until their hand is forced. [1] https://youtu.be/hrEh40_H4r4?t=730 https://youtu.be/hrEh40_H4r4?t=730
api 11y ago
Few of the big cloud providers -- EC2, Azure, etc. -- support IPv6. That's the big bottleneck. Fundamentally I think IPv6 itself is fine, but the transition was utterly botched. They should have unshelved 240.0.0.0/4 and mapped IPv6 onto it, allowing IPv4 applications to access select "early adopter" regions of IPv6. That would have been a start.
- betaby 11y ago
  IPv4 to IPv6 mapping exists for a long time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4

nodesocket 11y ago

Is ipv4 depletion an issue for the big cloud providers (Amazon , Google, DigitalOcean, Rackspace)? How many ips do they have left?

raidan 11y ago
It has been an issue for some in the past[1]. [1] http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/06/ipv4-exhaustion-gets-real-microsoft-runs-out-of-u-s-addresses-for-azure-cloud-time-to-move-to-ipv6/ http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/06/ipv4-e...
betaby 11y ago
They keep buying space. Microsoft for example http://www.networkworld.com/article/2228854/microsoft-subnet/microsoft-pays-nortel--7-5-million-for-ipv4-addresses.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2228854/microsoft-subnet...
ay 11y ago
The most widely known is Azure, when they had to shuffle addresses around: http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/06/ipv4-exhaustion-gets-real-microsoft-runs-out-of-u-s-addresses-for-azure-cloud-time-to-move-to-ipv6/ http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/06/ipv4-e... Google already started charging a nominal fee for idle IPv4 addresses: https://cloud.google.com/sql/ https://cloud.google.com/sql/, search for "Idle IPv4 address"
jsmthrowaway 11y ago
Amazon landed the largest address transfer that I'm aware of to date (a /10) when du Pont chopped up 52/8. Reddit mentioned it, but I didn't see news on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/2tc4ss/looks_like_amazon_just_got_42_million_ips_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/2tc4ss/looks_li...

sliken 11y ago

Seems like IoT would have much more to offer with IPv6. Currently you buy a "internet enabled" schlage deadbolt for your front door and it connects to cloud to enable remote lock/unlock. If you could count on a visible IP address products/services could skip such things. Again it's a chicken and egg problem, nobody does anything cool assuming IPv6 because few have it. Few have it, because you can't do anything cool with it.

steckerbrett 11y ago
World accessible devices is a pretty scary concept. If you have your garage door controlled by an ESP8266 it would take a single host to denial of service attack it, maybe even just one server to denial of service attack every garage door in the united states.
- koffiezet 11y ago
  It's not because it's public addressable that it would be public accessible.

mmaunder 11y ago

I feel lucky to have our little /27 colo block. We added IPv6 support to our firewall product earlier this year and it was a big deal - lots of schema and code changes to deal with 128 bit wide addresses and address math. I'd encourage any devs working on new products to bake it in from v1 if you can.

gonzo 11y ago
We put IPv6 in pfSense years ago. Definitely worth all the work.