7 ms·
IPv6 Exhaustion Counter
- gweinberg 11y agoThe best ones are gone already though.
- AndrewGaspar 11y agoDoes this take into account that we're creating devices that connect to the Internet at an increasing rate? :)
- irl_zebra 11y agoI was also wondering this. For example, they were talking about the debunked idea of solar panel roadways. If something like that took off in the future, literally every panel would require its own ipv6 address. Perhaps we can at least make it until solar systems no longer exist.
- agwa 11y ago> For example, they were talking about the debunked idea of solar panel roadways. If something like that took off in the future, literally every panel would require its own ipv6 address. Hardly a problem. According to [1], there is 64,285,009 km of roadway in the world. So every meter of road in the world could be addressed with merely a 36 bit integer: 64285009*1000 = 64,285,009,000 < 2^36 = 68,719,476,736 Remember that with every additional bit, the address space doubles. Exponential growth is insane. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_network_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_netw...
- nickodell 11y agoWhy do they need an Internet connection at all? Even if they do need to be connected to the Internet, why can't they connect through NAT?
- hackmiester 11y agoNAT is a hack that was created due to a lack of addresses.
- j_jochem 11y agoBecause NAT is a hack to cope with IPv4 address space exhaustion. The main benefit of using IPv6 is that it allows you to get rid of NAT.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- noselasd 11y agoWhich would be fine. Even if you covered the entire earth with 1 square millimeter solar panels, you could give each of them about 66 quadrilion IPv6 addresses.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
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- saltedshiv 11y agohttps://samsclass.info/ipv6/exhaustion-calc.htm https://samsclass.info/ipv6/exhaustion-calc.htm
- jbverschoor 11y agoAnd the huge blocks which are assigned without any good reason?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- lucisferre 11y agoRelevant https://xkcd.com/865/ https://xkcd.com/865/
- ck2 11y agoThis is lovely for end users but for server admin, how do you firewall countries for IPv6 without memory exhaustion?
- paralelogram 11y agohttps://www.arin.net/policy/archive/ipv6_policy.html#34 https://www.arin.net/policy/archive/ipv6_policy.html#34
- api 11y agoYou don't. You fix security more fundamentally instead of doing ham-fisted things like that. IPv6 is going to require that we stop using IP-based hacks as a substitute for actual authentication and robust protocols.
- bluecmd 11y agoYou.. don't track connections? Because why would you?
- marcosdumay 11y agoWhat? Differently from IPv4, IPv6 addresses are strictly hierarchical. You block areas by blocking their root network. Now, why do you need to firewall entire countries again? Are you working at the Great Firewall of China or some similar project?
- worklogin 11y agoHow about working for a company with sensitive defense or financial information, for which access from China/Russia/Ukraine is completely unnecessary? GeoIP blocking is not one's only defense, of course, but it's one of many tools to keep the low-to-mid level groups at bay.
- mhurron 11y agoMy firewall blocks China, a lot of the former Soviet countries and a few others to block spam and other traffic hitting my home network because I have no legitimate reason to be communicating with them. But yes, this type of blocking with IPv6 should be eaiser.
- api 11y agoHmm... still could be a problem: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
- ChuckMcM 11y agoReminding us once again why 64 bit addresses would have been just fine.
- api 11y agoLarge address spaces give you more than just more addresses. There's room in IPv6 addresses to put meaningful information such as cryptographically significant identifiers. It also allows for stateless auto-configuration with ridiculously small chances of collision. There are issues and missed opportunities in IPv6 but that isn't one of them.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoI understand the argument, I just fundamentally disagree with all this "... There's room in IPv6 addresses to put meaningful information ..." part. I've never been a fan of the "IP address as the way we get the OSI object identifier concept foisted on to the TCP/IP crowd." :-)
- JoshTriplett 11y agoIt would certainly be interesting to build a system in which every address is a public key, and implies control of the corresponding private key.
- colin_mccabe 11y agoOne man's "meaningful information" is another mans "privacy leak." If I visit foobar.com and they can find out from my ipv6 address what make and model of motherboard I am running, is that really a good thing? There is a reason why MAC addresses were not included in ipv4. The ipv6 designers seem to have hated the idea of network address translation (NAT). But a lot of people have come to depend on it for security. For example, with ipv4 my wireless router only exposes one IP address to the world, no matter how many devices are behind it. But with ipv6 in its default mode, all the devices are exposed. So if I visit evildude.com on my laptop, they will know my ipv6 address. This will then map back directly to the device (no NAT), and they can port scan me and try to do bad things to any ports I have open. You can fix this with firewalls or just with NAT, but you lose a lot of the supposed benefits of ipv6 by doing so. I think there's a strong argument to be made that point-to-point communication is more useful for evil than for good. Most of the time when you're doing something legitimate you don't mind going through a gateway. For example, I don't need to talk to my bank's backend servers directly... I can just use their public IP address and let their load-balancer send me to some open server. But if I'm a hacker, maybe I want to target something deep inside the internal network, and ipv6 makes that easier.
- msvan 11y agoWhat about the 10^40 years between IPv6 exhaustion and proton decay? No one plans for the future these days.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- personjerry 11y agoLet's start working on IPv8.
- BorisMelnik 11y agoyou might not be far off. I imagine there will be an ipv8 not because of address allocation but protocol standardization changes. Just a guess.
- ossreality 11y agowat
- mdergosits 11y agoNotes from when we get close to exhaustion of IPv9: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1606 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1606
- colinbartlett 11y ago> 1 April 1994
- nisa 11y agoSo why don't I get at least an /48 if I rent a server online? Hetzner gives you a /64 and a lot of providers only provide something like /80 or /112. Having a /48 oder /44 would make deploying IPv6 VPNs a breeze because of ULA and prefix translation. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6296 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6296 Where is the problem?
- devicenull 11y agoRouter hardware cannot keep up with any real number of IPv6 addresses. You'll quickly overflow router tables if you try to use even a tiny fraction of that /48 at once. For example, Cisco Nexus 9000 can deal with 30k IPv6 neighbors. Once you cross that, things start blowing up. This isn't really a limit for the backbone routers, because they're all dealing with routes, not individual IPs (they know that 2001:DB8::/32 goes to peer A, which only consumes one routing table entry). It's only a provide when you get to the network edge.
- tw04 11y agoAnd thus SDN was born.
- nisa 11y ago> ...when you get to the network edge. I'm not a networking guy. Where is the difference? One table entry for the /48 should be enough? Where is the difference to a /64 that still allows enough IP addresses to blow something up? I can't image that a lot of people map their ULA network 1:1 to a /48 or is this the reason? As far as I undetstand it it shouldn't matter because the prefix translation is happening on the server itself on not on the router. So a single router should suffice? Wasn't at least the IPv6 header explicitly designed to be more router friendly?
- devicenull 11y agoAt the edge, the last router before your server has to have a mapping that a single particular IPv6 address maps to a specific MAC address. You can't really condense this down to a single entry, because any given switchport might have multiple MAC addresses active (think of the case where you have a dumb switch attached to your router, and 20 servers attached to that dumb switch. You're looking at 20 different mac addresses, so no way to condense that down to a few entries). Even a /64 is more then enough to blow up a router at this point. The /48 just makes it a lot more likely that that will happen. The simplest solution here is to route the entire /48 at a specific IPv6 address. This brings you back down to a couple table entries, but requires that your customer configure things properly.
- vanzard 11y agoThis counter is completely inaccurate. I used to work for a company that was doing email marketing (I quit because I disagreed with their practices). My employer was buying about one /48 per week. What does this mean? We alone exhausted 2^80 ip addresses per week, or 2e18 addresses per second (that's 2 quintillion!). So this counter showing 2 addresses exhausted per second is wrong by an order of 1 quintillion. In fact, with the proper paperwork you can still relatively easily buy an entire /40 or maybe even /32. With these practices, IPv6 WILL run out of addresses within the next 100 years. Well, to be pedantic, it will run out of allocatable subnets, but the vast majority of their addresses will remain unused.
- gruez 11y ago>My employer was buying about one /48 per week Why?
- extesy 11y agoMy guess is that their subnets would be periodically marked as spammers in various black lists, so they would need new subnets to continue "email marketing".
- tw04 11y agoBecause "email marketing" means "spammers". They were buying new blocks of IP addresses to try to evade blacklists. They are the scum of the internet, dumping their pollution far and wide because nobody is stopping them. *to be clear, not all email marketers are spammers. But you can be damn sure anyone buying that many IP blocks is. There's literally no legitimate reason for them to need that many IP addresses.
- sbov 11y ago1/week seems like a lot. At the same time, where I work, at least with ipv4, we like to segment product by ip block. This way if one gets a bad reputation it can't adversely affect the others. This hasn't been an issue in practice, but its just an extra layer of protection we like to have. I'm not sure if there's the same concern with ipv6 or not.
- 11y ago
- Wonderdonkey 11y agoSmall point of grammar: AD goes in front of the date. IPv6 will be exhausted in AD 5,395,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, not 5,395,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 AD. Explanation: AD stands for anno Domini, "in the year of our Lord...." You would say "in the year of our Lord 2015," not "2015 in the year of our Lord." BC and CE go after the date.
- vacri 11y agoThis sounds like a convention that is begging to be broken. No-one speaks Latin anymore, so let's start now :)
- Apocryphon 11y agoAll of this discussion of the accuracy of the counter also overlooks the cosmology- Sol is projected to expand into a red giant, which while it will certainly destroy the Earth, will not actually explode. Our sun isn't heavy enough to go supernova.
- tux 11y agoIs there something like this for IPv4 ?
- itslennysfault 11y agohttp://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/ http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/
- tommorris 11y agoI first heard about IPv6 on the front of a British computing magazine in 1997. For an industry that is supposed to be so cutting edge and innovative and disruptive (urgh), we sure have been slow as shit in transitioning to IPv6.
- nextw33k 11y agoSky are certainly looking at a roll out: http://www.ipv6.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/SKY-IPv6-Technology-Update-IPv6Councilc1.pdf http://www.ipv6.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/SKY-IPv6-T... BT are apparently going the opposite direction (and looking to create a lot of hurt) with CG-NAT: http://www.alphr.com/news/broadband/381646/customers-fume-as-bt-introduces-ip-sharing http://www.alphr.com/news/broadband/381646/customers-fume-as...
- simoncion 11y agoComcast turned IPv6 (through DHCPv6-PD) on by default on for all of their residential customers a little while ago, have had it on-by-default in many cities for quite some time, and have had it opt-in for even longer. Additionally, their core infrastructure has been IPv6 only for a very long time.