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IPv4 Address Use In 2008
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Jan 02, 2009 11:04 PM
from the act-now-while-supplies-last dept.
from the act-now-while-supplies-last dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The world used 197 million new IPv4 addresses in 2008, leaving 926 million addresses still available. The US remains the biggest user of new addresses, but China is catching up quickly. Quoting Ars Technica: 'A possible explanation could be that the big player(s) in some countries are executing a "run on the bank" and trying to get IPv4 addresses while the getting is good, while those in other countries are working on more NAT (Network Address Translation) and other address conservation techniques in anticipation of the depletion of the IPv4 address reserves a few years from now. In both cases, adding some IPv6 to the mix would be helpful. Even though last year the number of IPv6 addresses given out increased by almost a factor eight over 2007, the total amount of IPv6 address space in use is just 0.027 percent.'"
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Submission: IPv4 address use in 2008 by Anonymous Coward
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ipv6 increases by a factor of almost 8. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
great, so now we're at 8 IPv6 sites, all of which are tunnel brokers!
Which, ironically, doesn't work well with NAT. That'll play out nicely when we're out of IPv4 addresses.
How many here think ISPs will try to use NAT to get around IPv4 exhaustion, effectively killing the very brokers we're trying to use as a means to avoid the very same problem?
Re: (Score:2)
When the crunch comes, any ISP that isn't batshit insane will be deploying native IPv6 alongside their NAT.
Re:ipv6 increases by a factor of almost 8. (Score:5, Insightful)
What ISP isn't batshit insane in the US?
Parent
0.027% (Score:5, Funny)
the total amount of IPv6 address space in use is just 0.027 percent
So how many is that, in quadrillions?
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I thought they were only handing out live IPv6 addresses that were compatible with IPv4? That is 0:0:0:0:0:0:127.0.0.1 or ::127.0.0.1.
Re:0.027% (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
wow, finally!
In other news .027% of slashdotters can understand what they read.
Re:0.027% (Score:5, Informative)
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In general, the first half (64 bits) of the address identifies a subnet, and the last half is a host ID.
A typical end-user should get an allocation between a /48 and a /64. ISPs are typically given allocations in blocks of /32.
0.027% of the space is somewhere around a million /32's.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Artificially Increase Demand (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If I was an IPV6-hater, I couldn't come up with a better put-down of IPV6... that it's so pitiful that the only way to get quick adoption is to artificially kill the competition. Sounds like a Microsoft tactic.
I'm neutral on IPV6; when it becomes necessary, I'll switch. I'm running linux, which is ready for IPV6. We will exhaust IPV4 adress space in a few years, unless ISPs go NWN (Nuts With NAT). Reclaiming /8's from the likes of GE and Compaq (Compaq has 2 /8's; 16 million addresses) may buy another c
Re:Artificially Increase Demand (Score:5, Interesting)
Because let's be truthful: IPv6 isn't going to be widely adopted in 5 years unless something changes (and it's best for everyone if that "something" isn't a complete lack of IP Addresses)
It's already enabled by default in Linux distributions and Windows Vista and Server 2008. The major backbones should be able to handle it. Many businesses use proxy and other gateway servers for intranet-to-internet access, so if a company is not ready to migrate the intranet to IPv6 right away they can just put it on their proxy, gateway and public servers.
I'm not saying it will happen, but I don't think the obstacles are technical at this point. I think what needs to change is to put all the porn on IPv6-only servers. Or YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, etc.. Okay not literally, but either the customers or the service needs to be accessible by IPv6 only before it make sense for everyone to make the effort. I'm guessing it will be forced when governments or militaries have large masses of users on IPv6 and the IPv6-IPv4 gateways start getting overloaded.
Parent
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Why are they still available? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's to prevent someone from buying them all and charging more later?
An open market for IPv4 addresses would solve the 'depletion' problem by encouraging the most wasteful users to sell their addresses.
Re:Why are they still available? (Score:5, Informative)
What's to prevent someone from buying them all and charging more later?
You can only get addresses if you can demonstrate a legitimate use for them. To get millions of addresses, you'd have to show that you have millions of devices that need them. Also, technically you can't resell addresses.
Parent
Re:Why are they still available? (Score:4, Informative)
Not just technically. It would be a huge, huge routing problem to do so and the regional registrars would step in to get back the IPs, since they are delegated and not bought or sold.
Parent
tunnelbroker.net (Score:5, Informative)
Get your IPv6 addresses here: Tunnelbroker.net [tunnelbroker.net]
They've got a ton of presences all over the place, so latency is not too bad. It's really nice to be able to SSH directly to your boxes behind your router. Every address you get contains the square of the IPv4 address space for your own use.
Then bug your ISP to give you native connectivity.
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I don't know about you, but even if the whole internet switches to IPv6, I'm still keeping my NAT firewall.
I'm keeping my firewall too. Who's crazy enough to drop it just because IPv6 is around?
My computers have no business being poked from the internet.
Then don't let them be poked, and find a better argument for having good connectivity.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
AFAIK, DOCSIS 2.0 modems won't do native IPv6. That takes DOCSIS 3.0, one of the new features of which is native IPv6 capabilities. Until your market deploys DOCSIS 3.0, then (and Comcast does seem to be a bit ahead there, at least in its two high-speed markets), hassling the cableco isn't going to do you much good.
Unfortunately DOCSIS 3 has been vaporware for ~2 years now. There's certified equipment now, but from what I read, most of it's going to Asia. It's quite difficult to find DOCSIS 3.0 modems
Can someone calculate that for me? (Score:5, Informative)
What is .027% of 2**128
Here's a neat (and understandable) place to find out just how stupid it is to say that "only X%" if IPv6 is assigned: http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_IPv6AddressSizeandAddressSpace-2.htm [tcpipguide.com]
IPv6 is HUGE. I didn't even understand how huge until I found out I can get an address for every friggin cell in my body.
Weeeee!
Re:Can someone calculate that for me? (Score:5, Insightful)
The space may be astronomical, but astronomical amounts of space are wasted in order to simplify routing and such.
For all practical purposes, I would estimate that IPv6 is about 64k times larger than IPv4.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I think you're a bit off by a few orders of magnitude.
Did you read the post? Large bits of IPv6 are deliberately wasted in order to simplify routing. Thus, while there may be many more leaves, the branching structure is only 64k larger, to his estimate.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I can get an address for every friggin cell in my body.
Finally missing piece of the puzzle. When IPv6 was first planned it suppose to give enough addresses for every cell phone, but apparently due to miscommunication, they made it large enough to give address to every cell.
Why did they do it this way? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand why they made IPv6 the way they did.
Sure, the size of the new address space is absolutely staggering, but this was done at the expense of making them impossible for a person to remember. Right now, I can go to some internet cafe and ssh into my home network because I can remember the IP.
Were I using an IPv6 address, I would have to pay for DNS service just so I could log into my own network remotely, or keep a scrap of paper and laboriously type it out.
Why not extend IPv4 by adding more bits to the representation of each octet? For example, instead of using 8 bits, use x bits where x is specified at the beginning of the address. For example, you can use x=10 and create an address up to 1024.1024.1024.1024.
This still allows people to remember them easily, as there is no difference between remembering, say, 189 and 857 from a human brain perspective. It's three digits in each case. And, you can go as high as you need to. You can never deplete it, as you can just keep using more bits to represent the address when necessary, and all of the applications supporting such a protocol would be able to support that natively.
Best of all, assume x=8 unless explicitly specified, and voila -- perfect backwards compatibility with the existing IPv4 protocol. You no longer need to have separate treatment of IPv4 and next-gen address spaces, because IPv4 will be a subset of the expanded space.
Why the current mess of horrible alphanumeric sequences? Why didn't they make it easy on our eyes and do it like this?
Re:Why did they do it this way? (Score:5, Informative)
There are several free DNS services, such as dyndns and no-ip, which work just fine for such uses.
Parent
Re:Why did they do it this way? (Score:4, Informative)
Or you put your IPv6 address in ~/.ssh/config
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
2001:db8:a5b2::1
Where the last part is statically assigned by you. The addresses aren't really that messy unless you're using relying on autoconfiguration for the last 64 bits.
Re:Why did they do it this way? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not extend IPv4 by adding more bits to the representation of each octet? For example, instead of using 8 bits, use x bits where x is specified at the beginning of the address. For example, you can use x=10 and create an address up to 1024.1024.1024.1024.
You misunderstand the meaning of the octet, which is little more than a way to make a large number more understandable. If you take 255*255*255*255 you end up with the largest number that can be stored in a 32 bit integer. And it's this integer that is actually your "ip address". It's just rendered in octet format because 63.95.215.231 is much more readable than some huge integer like 2393201938.
But when you are talking about very, very, very, very large numbers, such as 2^128, even breaking up the numbers into "bite sized chunks" falls apart. Even when you use alphanumeric values, it still is hard to remember.
So DNS is your friend. It works well, fast, and reliably.
Parent
Re:Why did they do it this way? (Score:5, Interesting)
They made it that way because it's similar in structure to IPv4 and made it long not to make 2^128 addressable devices but to make (theoretically up to) 2^64 collision domains with the possibility for 2^63 globally Unique IDentifiers and 2^63 non-globally-unique ID's. But a lot of people are going to ignore the global ID part and use (network)::1, (network)::2, etc. or have fun with hex letters with (network)::dead:beef and such. (Luckily--actually by design--these simplified IPv6 addresses will usually happen to be be in the non-globally-unique range.)
They intend to waste a lost of potential addresses to make routing tables simpler. Ideally the IPv6 network map will be a hierarchical structure of networks.
If you don't have DNS handy there are a growing number of peer-to-peer name resolution protocols that I expect will become more popular with IPv6 addressing.
So the answer is that the "horrible alphanumeric sequences" are designed to make easy-on-core-routers hierarchical routing feasible while squaring the theoretical maximum number of addressable hosts. And they really expect people to use managed or peer name resolution, anyway.
Parent
Re:Why did they do it this way? (Score:5, Informative)
> Why not extend IPv4 by adding more bits to the representation of each octet?
*ANY* physical change to IPV4 breaks IPV4, as far as today's applications, operating systems, and internet routers are concerned. Repeat... *ANY* physical change to IPV4 breaks everything that relies on IPV4.
> Why not extend IPv4 by adding more bits to the representation of each octet?
> For example, instead of using 8 bits, use x bits where x is specified at the
> beginning of the address. For example, you can use x=10 and create an address
> up to 1024.1024.1024.1024.
Because internet traffic would be painfully slow, that's why. Current routers (the hardware that the internet runs on, not the toy between your modem and your computers) are hard-coded in ROM/firmware to handle 32-bit addresses. They can handle 128 bits in software, but it's a lot slower. Think hardware acceleration versus software acceleration for video cards. New routers can be had which do 128 bits in hardware. Your suggestion breaks down because...
a) the router would have to figure out dynamically how many bits constitutes a data packet.
b) once it figures that out, it has to route it. Because there are endless possibilities, it has to be done in software, again slowing it down.
> Best of all, assume x=8 unless explicitly specified, and voila -- perfect
> backwards compatibility with the existing IPv4 protocol.
Wring, wrang, wrung... wrong, wrong, wrong. At the hardware level, TCP/IP is a series of 8-bit bytes. Ain't gonna change without throwing out almost every computer currently in existence. That would make the switch from IPV4 to IPV6 look trivial.
Just in case you modify your proposal to say X=N bytes instead of X=N bits, there is still a problem. You would need a "flag byte" to signal how many bytes to use. IPV4-compliant software and hardware would choke on the extra bytes in the stream. I repeat what I said at the beginning... *ANY* physical change to IPV4 breaks IPV4. Given that assumption, we may as well start from scratch, and go back to square 1 when designing IPV6.
Parent
Unfair knocking of V6 (Score:5, Informative)
Even though last year the number of IPv6 addresses given out increased by almost a factor eight over 2007, the total amount of IPv6 address space in use is just 0.027 percent.'"
IPv6 addresses are 128 bits instead of v4's 32-bits. I sure HOPE the percentage stays small.
It's a preposterous claim that a whole 0.027 IPv6 addresses are in use. If that many addresses were in use, then that would mean IPv6 is wildly successful
If you just consider the first 48 bits of a V6 address. That's 281474976710656 network addresses.
IF 0.027% of those are in use, then 75,998,243,711 IPv6 networks have been used, which is more networks than IPv4 has ip addresses.
The full 128 bits allows for 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 host addresses.
If 0.027 of those are in use, then that would mean 91876239068653385135111144006577417 IPv6 host addresses are in use.
World's biggest consumers of everything (Score:4, Insightful)
While China and the US consume the world's resources, even the virtual ones the rest of the world is trying to adopt more efficient methods? Same old familiar story.
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While China and the US consume the world's resources, even the virtual ones the rest of the world is trying to adopt more efficient methods?
There are only so many ways to efficiently directly address a few billion devices. As computers become ubiquitous (picture a kid in India with a cell phone), so does the demand for addresses. There's no such thing as "fault" here; everyone wants this.
Someone please answer this? (Score:4, Funny)
Why not just take every existing IPv4 address and make it an alias for the same IPv6 address, but with 5 zeros in front of it? And declare that the owners of those IPv4 addresses now own the corresponding IPv6 addresses?
Re:Someone please answer this? (Score:5, Informative)
Why not just take every existing IPv4 address and make it an alias for the same IPv6 address, but with 5 zeros in front of it? And declare that the owners of those IPv4 addresses now own the corresponding IPv6 addresses?
That's basically what 6to4 tunneling does, except that the ipv4 address defines a /64 subnet. :)
Parent
Re:Someone please answer this? (Score:4, Informative)
Why not just take every existing IPv4 address and make it an alias for the same IPv6 address, but with 5 zeros in front of it? And declare that the owners of those IPv4 addresses now own the corresponding IPv6 addresses?
Because that ignores the biggest feature of IPv6 -- the solution to the routing table size problem. Also, there's no need to do that. ICANN is providing v6 address blocks for free to everyone who has ICANN-assigned v4 addresses, and the IPv4 and v6 infrastructure can easily coexist during a transition, so there's no reason not to use new v6 addresses which are hierarchically-structured for easy routing.
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Re:there's plenty of address space (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:there's plenty of address space (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know which ISP's or upstream providers you are dealing with, but in the last 2 years, every DS1/3 circuit I have ordered required quite a bit of justification for anything more than 5 IPv4 addresses. No, I have not had to pay extra for addresses yet, but I have been told by AT&T and others that /24 blocks are basically impossible to get on anything less than DS3's nowadays.
The last time I did get a /24 or larger block of IPv4 addresses was 3 years ago on a 6mbit bundle of T1's. That was a /23 for a hospital network of 5000+ internal hosts. At last check, we were using about 200 of our allotted 500+ addresses. A bit wasteful.
I remember getting T1's in the mid-to-late 90's, and there were no questions asked- you just got a /24.
Parent
Re:there's plenty of address space (Score:4, Insightful)
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Assumptions are fine (Score:4, Insightful)
You WILL have to make assumptions anyway - after all you aren't going to ask for 2 billion IP addresses for the hospital. Even if someone argues that in the future some applications may require machines to have thousands of IP addresses, but as a designer you are going to say "Even if that's the case, a hospital is unlikely to want that app, or by that time, the hospital and the world would have gone to IPv6".
How good the assumptions are, shows you how good (or lucky
It's perfectly reasonable to assume that most computers in the hospital should never need to have outsiders able to connect directly to them.
This may not be true for universities, but it is likely to be even more true for banks - only a very few ways in and out.
Many universities have an open campus, and outsiders can walk to any building and try to enter them, and the buildings themselves are designed with multiple entry points. Banks in contrast are desigend to have just a few entry points (that's why the crooks often make their own entry points
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Re:there's plenty of address space (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The current situation with most residential ISPs is that each customer gets one public IP. This is typically terminated on a NAT router (either combined with the modem or as a seperate device). In this situation you can port forward because YOU CONTROL THE NAT.
When (not if) IPV4 addresses run out I strongly suspect the first thing the ISPs will do is force residential customers to either pay more or go behind an ISP LEVEL NAT (in some countries afaict they are already doing so). By doing this they will free
Re:No need for IPv6, ever (Score:5, Insightful)
> Because IPv6 was an awful mistake, an abortion created by a project group (IPNG) that had become so politicized that the best people had left.
It has problems, but I can't think of a networking protocol, at any layer, which didn't. The question is not "does it have problems?", but "is it better to switch to IPv6 than to stay with IPv4?". For a lot of us, the answer is "yes".
> So IPv6 perpetuates IPv4's mistakes and adds more of its own. It is costly but doesn't fix anything.
It has the potential to restore the end-to-end principle across most of the internet. (I can't think of anything else I do on my computer where the standards we use have static limits which are so low.)
> The existing v4 space is not well utilized. Blocks can be traded/bought/sold in the interim until something smarter than IPv6 comes along. IPv6 at this point is mainly a hack by equipment vendors to make you buy costly new stuff.
A good solution today is infinitely more valuable than a perfect solution never. Again, simply observing that there are problems with the current administration of IPv4 addresses is not useful. What might be useful would be comparing the relative cost of "fixing administrative problems with IPv4" to "switching to IPv6". In my experience, getting people to upgrade to a newer technology is a lot easier than fixing social issues.
Besides, all of my stuff (at work and at home) already supports IPv6. I don't have to buy anything new. If you invented something better than IPv6 today, wouldn't I have to buy new equipment that supported *that*?
> NAT is harmless to any application that is not broken in the first place. There is never justification for putting an IP address inside the application layer.
Sure, and running without memory protection is harmless to any application that is not broken in the first place. Those of us who have ever done any large-system design in real life have learned the hard way that there are quite a few broken applications in the world.
> Look at HTTP: It uses names, not addresses. In fact, it was a mistake to have applications resolve DNS; that should be a function of TCP/IP itself.
So instead of upgrading IP, you merely want to change how DNS and TCP and all networking applications work? Yeah, good luck with that.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Because IPv6 was an awful mistake, an abortion created by a project group (IPNG) that had become so politicized that the best people had left.
Wow, you have a lot of big words - but you show very little in the way of concrete facts. WHY is it an awful(sic) mistake? Just because you have to remember a few more hex digits? Boo-hoo, the world is a lot larger than just your back yard you know, and those other people also want to get on the internet.
Just screaming that something is bad without explaining why is not really a convincing debating tactic...
The remaining participants were hardly even the B team; they were F Troop. IPv6 was a mashup of two undergrad-level hacks, Steve's IP and Paul's IP, by Steve Deering and Paul Francis.
...and neither are personal attacks on people who aren't even present to defend themselves.
So IPv6 perpetuates IPv4's mistakes and adds more of its own. It is costly but doesn't fix anything.
Which mist
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But the IPv6 overlords in their infinite wisdom have decided that we can't just use a 192.168.0.* equivalent, oh no. All addresses must be publicly routeable.
There is also a private v6 address range - anything in the fc00::/7 range should not be publicly routable so you can use this for totally private machines (not sure why you'd want to, but you might).
So why is there nowhere that will give me, as a private individual, an IPv6 address (officially, I mean - I'm aware of that website that generates an address that should be ok to use)?
Google for a tunnel broker near you. They will give you a /64 (i.e. a subnet of 2^64 addresses). This is not a range that 'should be ok' it is a range that is selected from the range given to that tunnel broker. They will then route all IPv6 traffic for you. Alternatively, you can use 6to4. Every public IPv
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"If IPv6 was something that I had to install only on my router, I would have done it already (or would do when I change my routers software), now, not only do I have to install it on my router, but on all of my devices, for little to no advantage. Yes, all of my PCs would have public IPs, yeas, they would be filtered, so, where is the advantage?"
Every recent OS already has IPv6 installed, so you are complaining about work that you don't need to do. NAT complicates and makes additional work for protocols use