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.'"
Re:there's plenty of address space (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:0.027% (Score:3, Insightful)
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: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.
Re:ipv6 increases by a factor of almost 8. (Score:5, Insightful)
What ISP isn't batshit insane in the US?
Re:Why did they do it this way? (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:Artificially Increase Demand (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Get back IPv4 addresses assigned years ago (Score:2, Insightful)
There's a whole ton of IPv4 address space that seems to be allocated to people that don't realistically need it. For example, HP, Apples. IBM, MIT, Ford, Digital, Halliburton, GE, Xerox and a bunch more all have /8's. AT&T has two /8's. Do these companies really need 16 million public IP addresses?
I know of many universities that have /16's, and really, same situation - do they really need 65k addresses? Labs, residence PCs, wifi laptops, are all assigned public IPs, and then behind a firewall so nothing is accepted inbound anyways. These systems could easily be assigned private addresses and stuck behind NAT.
Why don't we just tell them they have to justify use of all their IPs, and then in a year or two, subnet the crap out of their space and take over anything they're not using to serve internet-facing services? It would likely free up a few hundred million IPs, extending IPv4 space for a few more years.
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.
Re:there's plenty of address space (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:there's plenty of address space (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Artificially Increase Demand (Score:2, Insightful)
GODDAMN IT. STOP LINKING THIS!
filter filter filter fodder.
filter filter filter fodder.
filter filter filter fodder.
Re:World's biggest consumers of everything (Score:3, 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?
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.
Re:there's plenty of address space (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 up adresses for more lucrative customers. Since this nat is shared between multiple customers the customers will almost certainly not control the nat and will therefore not be able to set up port forwards.
Re:tunnelbroker.net (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 available from anyone in the US retail, and from what I read, many US cablecos are holding out for DOCSIS 3.1 or 3.0 plus proprietary extensions, due to deficiencies in the 3.0 spec meaning it won't let them compete effectively with the telcos for long. But 3.1 could be another year... or two or three given the delays 3.0 seems to have had, and another year or two to deployment after that!
But... I do expect they'll have to do /something/ in a couple years, be it DOCSIS 3.0 or something else, because 2.0 just isn't going to cut it after that, both bandwidth-wise and IPv6-wise.