Millions of Internet Addresses Are Lying Idle 500
An anonymous reader writes "The most comprehensive scan of the entire internet for several decades shows that millions of allocated addresses simply aren't being used. Professor John Heidemann from the University of Southern California (USC) used ICMP and TCP to scan the internet. Even though the last IPv4 addresses will be handed out in a couple of years, his survey reveals that many of the addresses allocated to big companies and institutions are lying idle. Heidemann says: 'People are very concerned that the IPv4 address space is very close to being exhausted. Our data suggests that maybe there are better things we should be doing in managing the IPv4 address space.' So, is it time to reclaim those unused addresses before the IPv6 crunch?"
Leftovers from before NAT? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Credit crunch (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Credit crunch (Score:5, Interesting)
Fallow-Field Legislation (Score:3, Interesting)
In the oil-business (and in many other fixed-resource industries, more then likely) there is a particular kind of legislation that would likely work very well in such a situation. It is known as 'fallow field legislation'.
It works like this:
If a company finds (or buys) rights to an oil field, they are given five years to start producing from it. If they do not, cannot, or are otherwise unwilling after those 5 years, the rights are revoked and the government (or governing body) will find someone who will and can.
Fast forward to IPv4 -- any address that isn't being used (and by used I mean that there is no web presence, to use of e-mail, etc.) after a certain time period (perhaps 1-2 year(s)) then the address is revoked and put back into the public pool.
Obviously, the easiest way to get around this little regulation would be to put up a place holder page, or redirect it to the main site. This would be much trickier. Likewise, it would not stop the name squatters (and increasingly the registrars) from putting up those SPAM pages, but like I said, it would fix the problem of people just sitting on a resource without using it.
My $0.02
Re:screw ipv4 (Score:3, Interesting)
So you've configured all of your network equipment to use IPv6 then.
Tell me: What is your IPv6 address, what's the address of your router/gateway and what's the size of block you are using?
Bankrupt companies (Score:3, Interesting)
What happens to the IP addresses allocated to companies that are now (a) bankrupt, or (b) bought out by larger companies, or (c) allocated to companies now significantly smaller in size? There must be a significant pool of addresses that could be reclaimed there.
e.g. dec.com, compaq.com, sco.com, sgi.com....
Re:screw ipv4 (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody has configured for IPv6 because there's been no forced set date to switch over so everyone is still just using IPv4 which is working just fine.
But when the date comes it'll be a long weekend for a lot of admins, but I'm guessing the switch will happen just fine.
Re:Credit crunch (Score:2, Interesting)
That's a little silly. These allocations were made in the 70s and 80s, before the Internet really existed outside of the US. At the time, the recipients of the addresses were those who were most likely to use them. No hoarding is going on.
Really? There are potential buyers - people who would pay for the IPs. But the owners are not selling - at any price. That is hoarding.
ICMP and TCP? (Score:1, Interesting)
What about firewalls set to drop this traffic from unknown sources instead of rejecting?
Millions more have been hijacked (Score:5, Interesting)
They used ping! (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article:
The USC research group used the most innocuous type of network packet to probe the farthest reaches of the Internet. Known as the Internet Control Message Protocol, or ICMP, this packet is typically used to send error messages between servers and other network hardware.
My home network is in complete stealth mode, and to them that's another "idle IP" address.
I also love how they arrived to their conclusion:
the team probed a million random Internet addresses using both ICMP and TCP, finding a total of 54,297 active hosts ... ...
In total, the researchers estimate that there are 112 million responsive addresses
but the overall conclusion--that the Internet has room to grow--is spot on
How did this ghetto-science experiment end up on Slashdot again?
Re:Give back class As (Score:3, Interesting)
I have 11 Class C's with lots of empty numbers (Score:3, Interesting)
and you can have them when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers. I would never be able to get them today, but way back in the early nineties they just gave them away. I had ten sites and wanted to start a Frame Relay network, so 'they' gave me a Class C for every site and one to knit them together. A couple of my sites had less than a dozen computers. Of course, these days even the copy machines have an IP address, so those sites are up around two dozen or so. One of them is doubling in space, so we'll be up to fifty or so. One of our sites closed, so that freed up an entire Class C, but our largest site is pushing the limits, so we moved the empty Class C to the large site. The numbers are scattered all over the place. .1 is always the router. Of course, the hubs have their own IP address. Public access stations started at .100 to be easily recognizable, but then the staff machines got up to .99 so we had to hop scotch over the public numbers and keep going with .200. The numbers are static because it's easy to track, and when we first started it seemed a reasonable path to take.
Could we do this differently. OF COURSE!! There are lots of ways to free up a ton of space. Please don't lecture me on how to do it. I know how to do it. It's just that the system is working now. The system just kinda grew on us. When we started we had no idea copy machines would have IP addresses. Even the damn VoIP phones have IP addresses! That was a big hit on our numbers. Are refrigerators next? We had no idea we'd have fifty servers instead of three or four. Life has changed and because we are realtively 'wealthy' in terns of addresses, we had the flexibility to change with it.
I look at our Class C's kinda like a fixed field database. There's a lot of air in there. It compresses really nicely if you need to, but disk space is cheap, so there's no real reason to conserve it.
The thing is, even though we have a bunch of empty addresses, our experience shows that we're going to grow into them. We've already encountered congestion a couple of places. As soon as those new fridges show up we'll need some more numbers. My guess is before too long we're going to have to do some subnetting and consolidate a couple of our small sites into one Class C to free up the other one to use in a large site. That should work fine. I don't see any problems pulling that off. Of course, if we build another big site, we'll have to think through what to do very carefully. e'll probably do the new site like y'all want us to. We may not have any choice.
But those Class C's are mine. I own them, and you can't have them back.
NAT is a hack. (Score:3, Interesting)
Granted, it may be cheaper, in the short term, to use NAT than to upgrade to ipv6.
But imagine if no one was using NAT anywhere. This would have two effects:
First, techniques like Skype's UDP hole-punching would be completely unnecessary. You wouldn't even need a central server -- you could just use protocols like SIP the way they were meant to be used.
Port forwarding would be a thing of the past. Far more peer-to-peer technologies would just work.
Second, we'd run out of IPv4 a lot faster.
Re:Why is anyone surprised? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not so much about the little holes, but the ones so big that you could drive a tank through and still have enough room on either side to comfortably fit an aircraft carier through sideways: like the class A block owned by Digital Equipment Corporation, which went belly-up in 1998; or the Computer Sciences Corporation which employs 98 thousand people, but has 16 million IP addresses (for 17 computers apiece, I guess); or the class A loopback adresses, there because somone occasionally pings 127.0.0.2 just for variety.
And speaking of waste, why blow a 10.0.0.0/8 on a LAN when 192.168.x.0/24 will do just fine? It's this mindset that has lead us to where we are now. I'm switching to IPv6 as soon as my ISP can provide it. ping
Re:screw ipv4 (Score:3, Interesting)
All of those things can add IPv6 functionality in firmware, I'd put money on it. Just because the companies are too lazy to do so doesn't mean it's unpossible.
The FCC should just mandate a switch to IPv6, if the US leads, the rest of the world tends to follow. Ridiculous foreign policy demands aside.
Re:screw ipv4 (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see why it wouldn't. It runs pretty much the same operating systems that Macs do.
Re:screw ipv4 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Give back class As (Score:5, Interesting)
NAT is a hassle, when it comes to more complex protocols than simple TCP. I've worked at a customer site which had a slightly... lets put it like this... unorthodox allocation of internal IP addresses. They just gave every site a 10.X.0.0/16, and then they had more than 256 sites (it's a large retailer, that's why). So they started expanding (yes I know, shame on them) into the 9.0.0.0/8 and 8.0.0.0/8 space.
When they bought a company in another country, the sysadmins there absolutely refused to route those nets into the VPN (right they were). So now the customer starts heavily to NAT, so the new company never sees any internal 9.0.0.0/8 and 8.0.0.0/8 addresses.
And now lots of things break. Videoconferencing and VoIP are among the worst offenders, but some complex logistics software they use is playing silly buggers too. And with more than 256 sites it's just not feasible to start readdressing all the IPs. They just don't have the people to do it, and they don't have the time to do it (it has to happen all at once, otherwise just more applications break during the transition period), and they don't have the money to hire enough external people to do it.
It's a lesson why violating RFC1918 never was a good idea, but it is also a lesson that NAT gets you only so far.
Re:Credit crunch (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually this is exactly why nobody wants to change.
Or rather, everyone knows they'll have to change eventually, but nobody wants to be first. Optimally, everyone wants to be last. There's no benefit to being an early adopter -- you spend a lot of money figuring out how to do everything right, upgrading stuff, maybe rewriting software; the Johnny-come-latelies just ride in on the coattails of everyone else. They hire a couple of consultants to do the worst of the work, who've gotten their experience on the early adopters, buy COTS software, cheap hardware, etc.
Right now we're in a sort of 'Mexican standoff' where nobody wants to move first, because there's a risk by using up all that capital being first, your competitors will sit, and watch, and learn, and then leapfrog you when they get around to doing it later.
(Similarly, both the U.S. and China need to move away from oil, but neither want to go first; both would prefer to let the other guy go first, and take the big economic hit from switching over to something else, and burn out the rest of the fossil fuels themselves, and then buy the alternative technology once it's cheap and being mass-produced, with all the R&D subsidized by the other guy.)
Re:screw ipv4 (Score:3, Interesting)
The FCC has no authority to dictate IPv6 usage in the US.
Re:screw ipv4 (Score:4, Interesting)