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ARIN Letter Says Two More Years of IPv4
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Apr 30, 2009 04:23 PM
from the no-more-mister-nice-registry dept.
from the no-more-mister-nice-registry dept.
dew4au writes "A reader over at SANS Internet Storm Center pointed out a certified letter his organization received from ARIN. The letter notes that all IPv4 space will be depleted within two years and outlines new requirements for address applications. New submissions will require an attestation of accuracy from an
organizational officer. It also advises organizations to start addressing publicly accessible assets with IPv6. Is ARIN hoping to scare companies into action with the specter of scarce resources? This may be what's needed to spur adoption since there appears to be no business case for IPv6 deployment."
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What about my toaster? (Score:5, Funny)
When IPv6 was announced, one of the benefits was that everything could have its own IP address; even your toaster!
So as for a business case, what about the internet toaster business? If we don't switch to IPv6, what will they do?
Now what am I going to do? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What about my toaster? (Score:5, Funny)
They can receive bailout funds from the stimulus bill under the guise of a "smart power grid" appliance.
You think I'm kidding, don't you?
Parent
A message from our sponsors... (Score:3, Funny)
When IPv6 was announced, one of the benefits was that everything could have its own IP address; even your toaster!
Wait a minute... Is IPv6 just a clever marketing scheme for NetBSD?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What about my toaster? (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming that everyone in the world owns a 1080p monitor, that's about 1x10^16 pixels.
There would be enough IP addresses for each pixel, and still have more than enough IP addresses left to give every man, woman, and child's toaster an IP and also to replace IPv4 in its entirety.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's assuming packed addressing. IPv6 is hierarchical, which means that it's largely sparse addressing, so your theory doesn't hold up. However, since each home network has 48 bits of address space, you still have enough addresses for your monitor - you just won't be able to use the mobility option.
Re:What about my toaster? (Score:5, Informative)
> However, since each home network has 48 bits of address space (snip)
The last time I checked (about 6 weeks ago), ISPs are supposed to assign a 48-bit address to each "customer" (read: site, household, office, etc), who'll have 80 bits, not 48, under his direct control -- from a block whose upper 32 bits are assigned to the ISP by the local coordinator (ARIN, RIPE, etc). In English, here's a theoretical IP address represented by placeholder letters (each letter represents 1 hexadecimal digit = 4 bits):
aaaa:aaaa:bbbb:cccc:dddd:dddd:dddd:dddd
where
aaaa:aaaa is a prefix assigned by ARIN/RIPE/etc to the ISP. For now, most of the addresses we see will have "2001" as the first 4 digits.
bbbb is a 16-bit value, representing 65,536 potential customers. This is the part the ISP gets to assign to customers.
cccc is another 16-bit value. This is the part you, the customer, are officially supposed to be able to use however you please
dddd:dddd:dddd:dddd is a 64-bit value. In theory, this value is supposed to be determined by your ethernet card's MAC address. Originally, it was "mandated". Due to privacy concerns (your ethernet card would be trackable out-of-band wherever in the world you used it from and would have effectively been the "tracking cookie from hell"), it was first softened to allow some randomization, and eventually made a "recommendation". More on this in a moment...
So... what does this mean for you, Joe DslCableModelCustomer? In theory, you will someday be getting a letter from them to the effect of, "Your new IPv6 prefix is 2001:3f87:991d:/48". What does this mean? In the real world, it means you'll plug the shiny new Linksys router you bought circa mid-2012 into it, and configure its address to be 2001:3f87:991d::1 You'll then verify that the rest of your network (192.168.x.x IPv4 addresses and all) is happily doing NAT, and forget about it.
To the rest of the world, your desktop PC (192.168.0.128) will either appear to be 2001:3f87:991d::1 (if the router is acting as an IPv4 proxy), or if you're extra-clever, will transparently be rewritten to something like 2001:3f87:991d:0::192.168.0.101 or 2001:3f87:991d:0::c0a8:0065. Ditto, for the other half-dozen computers and devices in your home that are connected to the internet.
A few weeks later, you get into an IPv6 fetish, and decide to abolish the IPv4 legacy and make everything pure IPv6. At this point, your public IP addresses look even prettier:
your firewall's new IPv6 address is set to 2001:3f87:991d::100
your desktop PC's new IPv6 address is now 2001:3f87:991d::101
your TiVO's new IPv6 address is 2001:3f87:991d::102
and so on.
Put another way, nobody is going to put a gun to your head and force you to use the lower 64-80 bits if you really don't want to. If you're a typical home user who just wants to plug things in and have them work, they'll autoconfig using the munged MAC address and publicly assume some horrific, ugly value its owner will probably never type directly anyway. If you want your network to be handcrafted, with addresses you can remember, you're perfectly free to collapse the 80 bits you control down to as few as 1 bit if that's what makes you happy. Maybe even ZERO bits (I'm not 100% sure whether 2001:3f87:991d:0:0:0:0:0:0 is a legitimate address, or whether the ::0 address still refers to the (sub)net as a whole).
As for privacy, I fully expect that most ISPs will eventually have a semi-anonymizing web proxy available for their customers to use. They'll keep logs for a few days to fight spammers, botnets, and criminals, but keep things sufficiently shuffled around to keep marketers from ever getting TOO comfy and intimate with your IP address. It'll make ISPs happy, because they can make it cache traffic and squeeze more use out of their upstream bandwidth.
Note that the allocation scheme I just mentioned IS radically different from what IETF envisioned circa 2000. Sometime in the past 2 or 3 years, they put down the crack
Parent
Re:What about my toaster? (Score:4, Interesting)
> I thought IPv6 split the network and local address segments right down the middle (i.e. each is 64-bit).
From what I remember, that was more or less the plan circa 2002-2004. The main problem with the original address allocation scheme was that it left big gaps in places that made it nice to route, but a bitch to memorize and rendered the proposed shortcut notation all but useless. Originally, they planned to use the upper 3 bits as a grand macro-level version indicator, then leave the next byte zero for now, then hop and skip over the next few bytes using the lower bit or two of each byte until they got to the "meat" of the address somewhere around bytes 5-8. That would have resulted in lovely addresses like 100:103:401:3f7a:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx which, if you actually used your MAC address to set the lower 48 bits, would have been all but impossible to meaningfully encode with the "::" zero-packing shortcut. At best, you might have ended up with 2 pairs of sequential zero bytes to compress, and had to pick one or the other.
Parent
Re:What about my toaster? (Score:4, Funny)
HDoverIP
Remotely address the individual pixels of a monitor.
Talk about a thin client...
Parent
Nothing gets fixed until it breaks (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing gets fixed until it breaks so fully that people can't ignore it any longer. ARIN should just hand out the last of their IP assignment already and then we can move on with actually deploying IPv6.
Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks (Score:5, Funny)
Just do a HDTV conversion. Give a specific date when IPV4 support will be dropped, then extend the date when the timeout gets close.
Parent
Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks (Score:5, Informative)
There are a number of corporations and organizations that own /8's
Here is a list [iana.org]
Here's a few from the list:
003/8 General Electric Company
004/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc.
008/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc.
012/8 AT&T Bell Laboratories
013/8 Xerox Corporation
015/8 Hewlett-Packard Company
016/8 Digital Equipment Corporation
017/8 Apple Computer Inc.
019/8 Ford Motor Company
034/8 Halliburton Company
Seriously... why does Ford Motor company need a /8?
The US government also owns a whole bunch of /8's
Instead of hogging these, they should just give them up. They don't need all these addresses.
Parent
Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously... why does Ford Motor company need a /8?
They've been keeping it in reserve for a rainy day.
Do you know how much a /8 is worth in today's market? It could pull Ford out of its financial problems!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Nah. Ford already uses most of their /8 in assigning each nut and bolt in each of their cars its own IPv4 address.
Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks (Score:5, Insightful)
And there's absolutely no reason that those devices can't be assigned an address from the 10.x portion of RFC 1918. None at all, except for the magnitude of the problem.
They should have planned for that so, so long ago.
Parent
Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks (Score:4, Informative)
IBM used to use 9.0.0.0/8 address for their internal network. Computers that didn't have access to the internet or anything.
This was back in 1995, so I can't guarantee it is still true, but it is likely.
Parent
Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks (Score:5, Insightful)
Go ahead, yank 'em all back. Worldwide, the five RIRs (AfriNIC, ARIN, APNIC, LACNIC, RIPE) go through 12-14 /8s per year. Don't give yourself a charley-horse patting yourself on the back because you managed to move out the exhaustion date by 8 months.
BTW, the US Government *gave back* several /8s.
IPv4 is terminal. Get over it and get your IPv6 on.
Parent
Re:Nothing gets fixed until it breaks (Score:4, Insightful)
THIS. Mod A/C parent up.
Reclaiming class As only delays things slightly, and doesn't fix the inescapable math.
But it's much easier to bitch and point fingers at evil corporations like Ford, than it is to pick up a damn book and learn how IPv6 works.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
+5 Insightful again?
Can't we just let this die? There are plenty of unused IPv4 addresses, sure. Most are hard to get due to political problems. No company will re-IP all their network just out of goodwill. So what?
The sooner IPv4 addresses end the better. Any quantity that is salvaged is just delaying the inevitable, and hurting IPv6. We could be in a much better infrastructure today if it wasn't for all this whining and "business case"ing.
So what that these companies can make a buck selling the addresses?
It's to try to get some attention (Score:5, Interesting)
I want IPv6 support, but ... (Score:4, Informative)
I want IPv6 support, but there are lots of pieces still not in place. I am actually using Miredo (Teredo implementation) when I am on the move and Sixxs when I am at home. These are more stop-gap solutions and until the necessary entities start allowing to get on board properly.
My parents live in France and they are with Free.fr who offers IPv6 as a standard option. On the other hand I am living in Canada and not one of the service providers offer IPv6 in any shape or form. One questioned about it they blame their up-stream provider. Even if they are ready the only IPv6 ready router for the home is the Apple Airport Extreme, and even then there is a blocker issue for connecting to Sixxs.net (Apple's bug). Linksys, D-Link and Buffalo are still not ready with a public release and you are left trying to see if the version of DD-WRT you need for IPv6 supports your router. Chances are you will be looking at eBay for a router that has enough flash to support it.
Like the Swine Flu outbreak, I get the feeling that few entities are going to be rushing to do any work until there is media frenzied panic.
There is no killer application for IPv6, since its just infrastructure. On the other hand the lack of a NAT can make certain application solutions easier to implement, since you don't need to do any NAT busting or other fancy tricks. Of course since internal addresses are now all routable, you will certainly need to make sure that you have a real firewall on the gateway device.
Once you are on IPv6 you can start playing around with IPv6 torrent and http://ipv6.google.com/ [google.com] , if you are curious.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not true, and you mentioned the killer app in the very next sentence: end-to-end connectivity. Having real, working end-to-end connectivity is a big deal, but most people don't know it because they're accustomed to living on a network where there is no end-to-end connectivity.
So if you want to see more IPv6 deployment, start developing apps on top of Miredo/Teredo that really make use of it. When there's enough encapsulated IPv6 runn
Re:I want IPv6 support, but ... (Score:4, Insightful)
That 6to4 support [wikipedia.org] is bundling IPv6 packets and transmitting them inside an IPv4 packet. So technically, the poster is still using IPv4 with his linksys router.
I think the home router issue is the one that matters. I want IPv6, but simply cannot have it (unless I cough up lots of cash for a serious router). I think the home router manufacturers are missing something here, they just need to say they cannot release firmware updates, and that you need to buy a new router to get IPv6, which is obviously better. They then sell loads more routers.. I don't understand why they don't do this.
Mind you, a firmware update would be better for me :)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
DD-WRT. Of course, this assumes you aren't running one of the crippled Linksys routers that don't have enough memory to support a Linux kernel...
IPv6 is depressing... (Score:4, Insightful)
...because whoever is in charge of it does such a crummy job of explaining what it is and why I should care, and more importantly, why my folks should care.
I got my router set up to use IPv6 (an Apple Time Capsule), and I went searching for some IPv6 love and found practically none. Yes I got to Google, and yes I found a few websites that seemed to do little more than blink(!) "hooray, you are connecting using IPv6! Your address is ..."
IPv6 needs both a killer app (IPv6-only Twitter, anyone?) and some ready-to-explain-why-you-can't-get-to-it documentation that will get the people to *demand* that they have IPv6 addresses.
Until then, it's a 32-bit address space world.
Re:IPv6 is depressing... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have your killer app right here [ipv6experiment.com].
Parent
IPv4 Address Exhaustion Is Always Be 2 Years Away (Score:5, Insightful)
Case [slashdot.org] in point [slashdot.org]. Thought it was supposed to be 2010? Now it's 2011.
IPv4 addresses won't magically be exhausted one night. They'll just start getting more expensive.
Re:IPv4 Address Exhaustion Is Always Be 2 Years Aw (Score:5, Funny)
ARIN really is the most trustworthy source you could have for a claim like that, though. Sure, many have made the claim before, but this is the next best thing to having Jesus, Moses, Mohamed, Buddha, and Thor all sit down with you around a burning bush and explain the importance of implementing IPv6.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If the Pope declares ex cathedra that thou shalt use IPv6, I will convert to Catholicism immediately.
Re:IPv4 Address Exhaustion Is Always Be 2 Years Aw (Score:4, Insightful)
They're already more expensive. The expense increase has been down in the noise for customers - that will no longer be true by the end of the year, and it will hurt by mid 2010.
IPv4 is no longer too cheap to meter. If that's not a business case for IPv6 I don't know what is.
Parent
As I keep pointing out (Score:5, Insightful)
As I keep pointing out on each IPv6 story, there will be little motivation to move to IPv6 until you can hit major sites, like cnn.com and slashdot.org, using nothing but IPv6 packets.
We've made a bit of progress, in that now, if you have IPv6 connectivity to "the Internet", you can in theory do the name resolution entirely by IPv6 packets, now that the root name servers support IPv6.
Note to the "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" crowd: yes, you can form an IPv6 packet with an IPv4 address, but that doesn't mean the target machine will actually be able to understand it - it is still a completely different packet type than an IPv4 packet.
So, does slashdot.org have IPv6 enabled? Does the colo housing slashdot.org's servers route IPv6 packets from the Internet to the slashdot.org servers? Can "the Internet" route IPv6 packets to the colo?
If a tech site like slashdot.org doesn't have the ability to handle IPv6 traffic, then why should I get all hot and bothered about trying to get IPv6? And if I'm not going to demand it, then why should my ISP spend the effort to supply it?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Start making Yahoo.com and Google.com junk with IPv4
so *that's* Microsoft's plan to get some users for their search engine!
Re:As I keep pointing out (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure you could get the tail to shake the dog like that.
Those sites are important because they are easy to use and good at what they do (ok, Google is, anyway).
Users typically follow the path of least resistance. If Microsoft Live Search was the only search engine available to people who had ipv4 and ISPs were still only handing out /32 addresses, guess which search engine those people would use.
Of course, that wouldn't happen, because Google and Yahoo would retain their /32 addresses, because they're businesses designed to get money, not force social or technological change.
Parent
Class A Address Space (Score:3, Interesting)
How about they take back the Class A address space owned by companies who probably aren't even utilizing it. Here's a list of a few companies who have class A licenses and you wonder how much of it they are even using:
General Electric 3.0.0.0 - 3.255.255.255
IBM 9.0.0.0 - 9.255.255.255
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center 13.0.0.0 - 13.255.255.255
Hewlett-Packard 15.0.0.0 - 15.255.255.255
Hewlett-Packard (originally DEC, then Compaq) 16.0.0.0 - 16.255.255.255
Apple Inc. 17.0.0.0 - 17.255.255.255
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 18.0.0.0 - 18.255.255.255
Ford Motor Company 19.0.0.0 - 19.255.255.255
Royal Signals and Radar Establishment 25.0.0.0 - 25.255.255.255
Halliburton Company 34.0.0.0 - 34.255.255.255
Why the hell do some of these companies even need 16+ million addresses? I can't see them utilizing the space available, but maybe someone here can enlighten me on how that is done (aside from trying to justify a public IP address for every workstation).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Can't answer to the others, but IBM uses it's address space for all of it's equipment worldwide (desktops, labs, wireless, etc). All of the equipment is accessible via internal LAN's for each and every building IBM is in (and access can be had via VLAN if approved). The others may have similar needs.
Re:Class A Address Space (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How about they take back the Class A address space owned by companies who probably aren't even utilizing it
Sure you can say "they don't need them", but so what. They've been purchased. You can't just take back their address space.
Actually, the addresses are not "owned" by the companies. They are just allocated. So, theoretically, ARIN could deallocate them. The problem is that people would object and file lawsuits; besides, ARIN has no way to enforce the deallocation of addresses, as ARIN could simply be ignored. If that happened, you now have more than one machine per address, which is bad. Besides, it would only postpone the inevitable, and not by that much.
So, the proposal won't work because it would be a lot of work, be
Set the Way-Back Machine 2 years... (Score:3, Interesting)
...wait, didn't they say the same thing then??!?
How much of ipv4 is dark right now? (Score:4, Insightful)
If we had a measurement that said that only 25% of the entire address space is in use at any one time, then maybe would would rethink our choices.
Why would businesses care? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have 6 IPs just for personal use. Every big networking company that controls some portion of the Internet is set for IPv4 space for a while. There just isn't room for anyone new to enter into the market. This is a huge advantage for those already established companies. I don't think they intentionally planned it this way, but the scarcity of address is a short term advantage for too many businesses for us to simply ignore that and keep pushing IPv6 as if is of some automatic benefit to everyone. Don't get me wrong, I would be thrilled if Comcast and others moved me over to IPv6. Maybe with a massive address space scanning IP blocks for SSH logins and open firewalls would no longer be as a productive use of botnet time.
economics as usual (Score:4, Insightful)
Again, the problem is hoarding of unused IPv4 addresses.
We'd be just fine if it weren't for folks like MIT that have way more IP's than they need.
Of course, when a resource gets tight, the folks who have it become kings. You can bet your behind no company is going to give up it's v4's without a fight.
I'm glad that IPv6 is based upon a stewardship model rather than an ownership model. And also that the v6 guys are leaving 87 percent of the potential v6 namespace unallocated
Re:We need ipv4.5 (Score:5, Insightful)
Fortunately, nobody in their right mind would let Slashdot design a new network protocol.
Parent
Re:We need ipv4.5 (Score:5, Interesting)
Awesome idea. We'll give Google 1/40, The government can 2/40, IBM will get 3/40, etc etc etc
Same problem. The ipv6 is not a "bad" idea, it's just sort of like...imagine in 1950s if the phone company decided "we could go with area codes to subdivide numbers to prevent running out, or we could use letters AND numbers".
Can you imagine the upheaval?
In a lot of ways, that would have been even easier to deal with, because everyone's phone was owned by AT&T. New phones could have been issued without too much problem.
No, imagine it instead in the mid 1980s. Ma Bell doesn't own the phones any more, in fact there are tons of cheap phones available, cell phones are starting to come out, and there are still rotary AND push button phones.
That's more like what the IPv6 switch is like. Do you give the new people 2 numbers, so that grandma can still call them? How long is it before you stop accepting legacy phones that only have 10 dialing options? How the hell do you get DTMF to work with 36 numbers? Do we need area codes? It would be weird without them, but we don't really need them.
The equivalent of these questions are still being asked. Just a couple of months ago, there was a huge to-do about NAT and IPv6. "IPv6 is a world without NAT". The hell it is. My internal routers don't get publicly routable IP addresses, even if I have to NAT back to IPv4.
When the wrinkles get ironed out, we're going to wonder how we ever did without it. During the transition, it's going to be hell for everyone (with the possible exception of the clueless end user, who might have to buy a new router at most).
Parent
Re:We need ipv4.5 (Score:5, Interesting)
Just a couple of months ago, there was a huge to-do about NAT and IPv6. "IPv6 is a world without NAT". The hell it is. My internal routers don't get publicly routable IP addresses, even if I have to NAT back to IPv4.
I agree with the sentiment - however, it's one of policy, not mechanism. NAT is a pretty poor substitute for a router that implements policy (known as a firewall). NAT has literally an all-or-nothing granularity. For instance, I might want to specify that an internal host can enable BitTorrent via UPnP, but under no circumstances can CIFS be allowed through - in either direction. An internal host sending a CIFS solicitation out does not mean a pinhole should be opened and some set of hosts (depending on cone of restriction) free to respond. NAT is just not a practical policy tool. It's an address space recovery tool. Reverse NAT, however, has some redeeming qualities for load balancing and failover - I'm not versed well enough in IPv6 to understand how they'd be implemented without NAT. (Anycast addressing, I suppose.)
But you can implement NAT in IPv6 just as much as in IPv4 if you wish. A router could appear to have a single interface ID and translate to/from that. It's largely unnecessary though since instead of a handful of IPv4 addresses you have an entire 64-bit space to yourself (and maybe even the SLN prefix, not sure about that).
IPv6 really is a major cleanup and simplification from IPv4. I'm slightly disconcerted by the increased dependency on DNS however.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why couldn't we just add another octect.
Because if we're going to completely break networking, we might as well switch to something that fixes a lot of IPv4's problems (such as, say, IPv6).