IPv4 Address Use In 2008 258
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.'"
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.
Re:0.027% (Score:5, Informative)
Re:0.027% (Score:3, Informative)
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: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.
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.
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.
Re:Why did they do it this way? (Score:4, Informative)
Or you put your IPv6 address in ~/.ssh/config
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.
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.
Re:Artificially Increase Demand (Score:1, Informative)
I think what needs to change is to put all the porn on IPv6-only servers.
Something similar to that will happen in the not so distant future: ipv6experiment.com [ipv6experiment.com].
Re:Can someone calculate that for me? (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: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. :)
Re:0.027% (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Someone please answer this? (Score:1, Informative)
1) Addresses can't (or rather, shouldn't) be assigned arbitrarily. The address has to give routers some clue as to what to do with a packet. While it would be feasible to embed an IPv4 address inside an IPv6 address (just like they embed MAC addresses inside IPv6 addresses today), doing so still leaves a host of unsolved problems for routers.
2) Ignoring that, your ISP still does not support IPv6.
3) Even if they did, none of the software you use is compatible with IPv6 yet. (If you were one of the people who are already using IPv6, I doubt you would've asked that question.)
Re:No need for IPv6, ever (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 mistakes does it perpetuate? Which ones does it add? Why is it costly? (I can sort of guess that last one: because there is so much IP4 equipment out there. Well, here is a newsflash: it will be costly to switch to _anything_ other than IP4, whether it is IP6 or something else!)
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.
So... Let's say I get assigned an IP that was previously unused by AT&T (since they have so many). Do you have any idea of the routing complications if this happened all over the world?
How do you think a "smarter" solution than IP6 will look like? Just give us a general idea, I don't need an RFC right now...
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. 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.
How can I write an application that connects from one NATted box to another? Ah, right, I can't. So the fundamental principal of end-to-end communication gets thrown out of the window, and the internet is reduced to a television model, with producers (those who have IP addresses) and consumers (those who do not). And that is something we REALLY do not need.
Re:So many addresses... so why can't I get one? (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 IPv4 address has a corresponding /48 in the 2002::/16 subnet, generated by appending the v4 address to the 2002 prefix. If you have a public IPv4 address, you can use the corresponding 6to4 address range without an explicit tunnel broker.
This sort of thing should be what drives the IPv6 transition - I'm willing to experiment, to find problems and fix them. But the system is such that I am locked out of doing so.
No, your inability to google for basic information is locking you out of doing so. If you want to have it just work without needing to know anything, but a recent Airport base station from Apple and use that as your router - it will configure 6to4 for you and route all v6 traffic from the local network without any effort.
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.
Re:Who cares about extending IPV4 (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 used for VoIP. Eliminating NAT reduces the extra work NAT requires.
"Also, I have old PCs running Windows NT4 and 2000 which (AFAIK) do not support IPv6, my printer also doesn't. So, I would have to have both versions, remember to map ports correctly, so that my PCs can accept incoming connections (for BitTorrent and other services) from v4 and v6 clients (and that the incoming connections do not end up routed to different PCs)."
You may recall that I mentioned that you might need NAT for legacy systems. New systems support IPv4 and IPv6 and do not need any special setup to work with both. Your legacy systems will look up the printer address by name, and get an IPv4 address. Your new systems will look up the printer by name, and get an IPv4 address. Where's the extra work?
I'll tell you where the extra work is, it's mapping ports to work around NAT for BitTorrent. Port forwarding or mapping is extra work required by NAT. If every device has a public IPv6 address, you don't need to forward ports. You simply add a firewall rule to allow access, exactly as you do with NAT. But a firewall rule isn't enough with NAT, you must ALSO add a mapping or forwarding rule. NAT == more work.
"Now, if I want to access my network from outside, I use VPN (L2TP). L2TP, by the way, works even when both endpoints are behind a NAT, given that appropriate protocols and ports are forwarded to the server (client does not need any forwarding). If I cannot use VPN, I can map a port to some service that I want to access even if I can't use VPN, then I have to remember my IP (or hostname) and the port, instead of having to remember IPs for all of my PCs (and ports too)."
You never need to remember IP addresses. They aren't meant for humans. Use names. Numeric addresses are for routing packets, and only routers should care about them. The only time I deal with IP addresses is when I configure DNS and DHCP for my home network. Every system has a hostname.
I access my home systems from anywhere on the Internet the way it is meant to be done. My ISP allows servers, does no filtering, and provides a static IP. I don't need to remember my IP, I have a domain registered that resolves to it. If I change ISPs, my domain will resolve to my new address.
I use NAT because my ISP doesn't support IPv6. I pay for one static IPv4 address. I'd rather have more, but they charge extra. So I use NAT and know how much extra work that involves. IPv6 would simplify my setup, like it would simplify yours, if you only realized it.
When I ran BitTorrent on my desktop, I had to enter a firewall rule to allow incoming connections, and I had to enter a NAT rule to forward the port. I upgraded my router, and now I run a torrent client on it. No NAT forwarding rule was needed, so instead of two rules, only the firewall rule was needed. NAT adds work.
"I am sure that I am not alone thinking all this, because, as we see, v6 usage is kind of limited."
It's limited because too many ISPs don't support it.
"I like to be able to appear as a single PC (just in case my ISP decides that I should also pay for every PC that I have), also, I do not want anyone to know how many different PCs are in my network and whether those multiple connections are originating from one or more PCs."
Your ISP can look at your port usage and tell that you are using NAT. They probably don't care how many computers you use. They care about about how many IP addresses you use, because IPv4 addresses are in short supply. They have no reason to care how many IPv6 addresses you use, because all of your IPv6 addresses will take up the exact same space in the routing tables as a single address.