Vint Cerf Keeps Blaming Himself For IPv4 Limit 309
netbuzz writes "Everyone knows that IPv4 addresses are nearly gone and the ongoing move to IPv6 is inevitable if not exactly welcomed by all. If you've ever wondered why the IT world finds itself in this situation, Vint Cerf, known far and wide as one of the fathers of the Internet, wants you to know that it's OK to blame him. He certainly does so himself. In fact, he does so time and time and time again."
Things people do... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this a backwards opportunity taken for asserting that he is one of the Fathers of the Internet?
Re:Things people do... (Score:5, Funny)
We all know it wasn't him. Seriously - is there anyone here who doesn't know who algoreithms are named after?
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No need to assert; it's common knowledge.
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Is this a backwards opportunity taken for asserting that he is one of the Fathers of the Internet?
It's an opportunity to get attention [google.com]. Perhaps that bring consulting dollars, who knows.
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My thought exactly.
It's like "Sue me, and make me famous, again!".
Re:Things people do... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this a backwards opportunity taken for asserting that he is one of the Fathers of the Internet?
I would say so. Below is the references section of RFC 791 [ietf.org]. Cerf shows up only on the "Catenet" article while the bulk of the heavy lifting was apparently done by John Postel, a rather more humble person it would appear. And Bob Kahn, who for some reason does not appear in these references. On the whole, Cerf seems to have mainly acted as a PM and money man.
[1] Cerf, V., "The Catenet Model for Internetworking," Information
Processing Techniques Office, Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, IEN 48, July 1978.
[2] Bolt Beranek and Newman, "Specification for the Interconnection of
a Host and an IMP," BBN Technical Report 1822, Revised May 1978.
[3] Postel, J., "Internet Control Message Protocol - DARPA Internet
Program Protocol Specification," RFC 792, USC/Information Sciences
Institute, September 1981.
[4] Shoch, J., "Inter-Network Naming, Addressing, and Routing,"
COMPCON, IEEE Computer Society, Fall 1978.
[5] Postel, J., "Address Mappings," RFC 796, USC/Information Sciences
Institute, September 1981.
[6] Shoch, J., "Packet Fragmentation in Inter-Network Protocols,"
Computer Networks, v. 3, n. 1, February 1979.
[7] Strazisar, V., "How to Build a Gateway", IEN 109, Bolt Beranek and
Newman, August 1979.
[8] Postel, J., "Service Mappings," RFC 795, USC/Information Sciences
Institute, September 1981.
[9] Postel, J., "Assigned Numbers," RFC 790, USC/Information Sciences
Institute, September 1981.
Glad thats sorted out! (Score:5, Insightful)
Cool. Now that we've assigned blame, hopefully we can move forward with FIXING the problem.
Since there is already a fix available (IPv6), if/when this DOES become a problem, THAT problem should be assigned squarely on the shoulders of the people who failed to implement the FIX in a timely enough manner.
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What happened to IPv5?
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Same thing that happened to our razor blades [theonion.com].
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What happened to IPv5?
It was the ST2 protocol: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1819.html [faqs.org]
Never went anywhere.
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Since I actually bothered to read the article:
But Cerf, chief Internet evangelist at Google, has long known a good laugh line when he has one. In an Aug. 17 talk at NASA, he said:
This is the amount of IP version 4 address space, about 5% left -- my fault actually. In 1977 I was running the Internet program for the defense department, I had to decide how much address space this Internet thing needs. ... After a year of arguing among the engineers, no one knowing, 32 bits, 3.4 billion terminations, has to be enough for an experiment. The problem is the experiment never ended.
So, since the internet is just an experiment that never ended, can we name this "Endless October"? :)
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IPv6 is a good example of a fix to an existing problem which adds more problems in the meantime.
It's like an application bug/security fix which adds a new user interface, which is entirely different than the original, exports different functionality, and has a massive learning curve. If a vendor were to release something like this, they'd be laughed at and ridiculed until they released a proper 'fix' which didn't break functionality and usability.
Whatever the fix may be, it needs to be backward compatible -
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It's not that I don't believe you, but I would like a little more information than a simple bald assertion by a random Slashdot poster.
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For what it's worth, Vint Cerf was instrumental in ensuring that the putative IPv6 fix would fail massively.
It's not that I don't believe you, but I would like a little more information than a simple bald assertion by a random Slashdot poster.
Ask and you shall receive. Vint Cerf helf the post of "Internet Architect" from 1989 to 1992 [slashdot.org] during which time IPv6, then called IPNG was designed. Vint described himself personally to me as "chairman of the committee" which I accepted at face value, although the documentary evidence does not support that. Nonetheless, wearing his various hats including chairman of ICANN and chairman of ISOC, he played more than a cameo role in the evolution of IPv6.
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You're new here, aren't you?
Omnifarious (11933)
The five digit UID somewhat disputes your position...
-AC
Re:Glad thats sorted out! (Score:5, Informative)
Except IPv6 is hierarchical [isoc.org], for that very reason. Routing tables can be much, much smaller than they are on IPv4.
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It was targeted to be hierarchical as of 1999 (when that presentation was made). That has since been abandoned, and it's now somewhat more free-form the way IPv4 is. To my understanding, there are no restrictions on region or organization as to where IPv6 can be announced, and the criteria for IPv6 Provider-Independent IP space are identical to the ones for IPv4 space.
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It was targeted to be hierarchical as of 1999 (when that presentation was made). That has since been abandoned, and it's now somewhat more free-form the way IPv4 is.
Somewhat, yes. But the v6 space is still very much aggregable, which simplifies routing considerably. This is specifically mentioned in RFC 3513:
Excellent point (Score:3, Informative)
IPv6 addressing is wonderfully simple. Because it is hierarchical, in one byte units, there are at most 256 upstream, 256 parallel and 256 downstream router addresses for any given router. The lowest 48 bits are taken from the MAC addresses.
The only time you need to hold more addresses than 768 is if you are supporting Mobile IP or NEMO using transitory addresses (the original IPv6 mechanism), where re-routing is handled with temporary router entries that last 30 seconds or until the computer/network moves
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>> The lowest 48 bits are taken from the MAC addresses.
Not quite true. The lowest 64 bits are a host address, each host can have multiple addresses, and one of those addresses can be derived from the 48-bit MAC address.
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The IPv4 bloat has a lot more to do with TE than anything else. Basic BGP routing (what the internet uses) is a hot potato system where you get the data as close to the end AS as quickly as possible so the receivers ISP should be doing the majority of the work. Well there were a lot of companies that didn't like that expense they wanted to say they had a national or global network but wanted the other guy to get the data as close as possible before having to do any work. This is where TE or traffic engin
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Funny enough, there is a candidate for sheriff in MD by the name of moran, always makes me laugh when I see the signs "Moran for Sheriff"
http://www.moranivsheriff.com/ [moranivsheriff.com]
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That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Every one of those changes would require just about as much conversion energy as switching to IPv6 does now. If we're going to have to go through that, we sure aren't going to do it just to add another octet. And then do it again. And again.
I don't know where the idea comes from that a conversion to a smaller address space is less of a pain than conversion to a big address space.
NAT wasn't re-invented, it was UN-invented, which is a *good thing*. In any case it
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Wrong. RA provides only a prefix (which MUST be /64 for SLAAC) and gateway (i.e. the thing sending the RA.) That is "all you need" today because IPv4 is filling in the rest of the equation... hostname, domain name, nameservers, etc. Turn off IPv4 and you quickly see how much is left out. Modern systems depend on a lot more than just an address to function productively.
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That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Every one of those changes would require just about as much conversion energy as switching to IPv6 does now. If we're going to have to go through that, we sure aren't going to do it just to add another octet. And then do it again. And again.
I don't know where the idea comes from that a conversion to a smaller address space is less of a pain than conversion to a big address space.
NAT wasn't re-invented, it was UN-invented, which is a *good thing*. In any case it's still possible. DHCPv6 is certainly available for you to use, although you now have the option of not needing it.
Backwards compatibility is a good thing.
Say we used 64 bits rather then 32. When you requested had an "AAAA" record and just requested the "A" record the server would just send out the first 32 bits of the address.
Simple and easy. and no going to the IPv6 version of a website
Instead of extending IPv4 logically, The engineers must of thought, 'well IPX to IPv4 wasn't hard, We'll just start over from scratch'
We've gone through the need to increase address spaces before, From time_t, to CPU address spaces
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The word you want is "whoosh".
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Why did they do this? I mean When we ran out phone numbers the first time we just added an exchange number, when we ran out again we just added a area code, then a country code and so on.
And how would you propose to tell all the IPv4-only apps out there to "just add an exchange number"? Oh, right, you have to modify and recompile them all to so that they will know how to do that.
Why didn't they just add an extra octet? or even just double the address space from 32 to 64?
Because breaking compatibility wit
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Why not just add the FC00:: addresses as aliases on your machines at home? Or just keep the 192.168 addresses in the dual stack configuration? Then the ISP can send you a router announcement and the v6 addresses will autoconfigure and just work.
Your router could then do NAT for v4 like it does now and just do basic firewalling for v6 (a very simple set of rules will perfectly duplicate the "security" of NAT).
Because v6 specifies autoconfig, the ISP pretty much HAS to offer you at least a /64. The router ann
So, this is ALL YOUR FAULT! (Score:3, Funny)
... to quote that hilarious line from Idiocracy.
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Frankly... (Score:4, Insightful)
Vint Cerf should blame himself for the IPv6 mess instead.
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Exactly. I assert that the migration would already have happened (and seamlessly) if we had just extended the address space and left everything else the way it was. To be fair, I believe this is a marketing problem. At the time when IPv6 became serious, all sorts of ideas were floated and sensationalized. A bunch of journalists said stuff like "in the future, a device will have just one static IP wherever it goes" and "we'll do away with firewalls". W
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You could have extended the address space without doing "ships in the night". Add an optional field with "original source IP address" which NAT-routers fill in when they translate addresses. The optional source route fields would be good candidates, since they're universally ignored these days. Hosts answering traffic with "original source IP" set, reflect the value into the "original destination IP" field. When the NAT receives traffic from outside, they check if the "original destionation IP" field is pre
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really? what happens when a packet goes past a NAT router, into a network that's behind another NAT router? I guess you can store every packet that zips past the router in its own memory, but you couldn't store it in the packet itself. Not unless you had 2 optional fields. And then what happens when.. you get the idea.
If we're going to roll out updates to every NAT device and host, we might as well roll out IPv6, its already partially rolled-out. Job done!
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really? what happens when a packet goes past a NAT router, into a network that's behind another NAT router? I guess you can store every packet that zips past the router in its own memory, but you couldn't store it in the packet itself. Not unless you had 2 optional fields. And then what happens when.. you get the idea.
He had the right attitude, wrong implementation. In fact, 15 bits may be borrowed from the IPv4 checksum field for some sensible address extension scheme. Much as IPv6 did, but hopefully without the complete redesign that proved more than counterproductive.
If we're going to roll out updates to every NAT device and host, we might as well roll out IPv6, its already partially rolled-out. Job done!
If done right, we only need to update the last hop which is typically a DSL router.
Don't blame him, thank him. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a good thing IPv4's address space is 32-bit. Without that limitation we'd never move to IPv6 and get all of the other benefits that it offers.
Re:Don't blame him, thank him. (Score:5, Funny)
We should have put Gillette in charge of the solution. I'm pretty sure it would have been "fuck everything, we're doing 256-bit". IPv6 won't last long once we start assigning an IP address to everything* such as light bulbs, toasters, etc.
* no, we won't stop to think if we should. We'll only see that we can.
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I think that the IPv6 space is big enough to give an address to every molecule in the solar system.
Yeah, but there are a lot of other solar systems. That's why I'm switching to IPV7 with 256-bit addresses.
Of course the cross-galaxy ping time is a bit of a problem.
Re:Don't blame him, thank him. (Score:5, Funny)
Eh, that's a lot of toasters to use up 3.4*10^38 addresses. If a toaster takes up a square metre (big toaster), you'd have to stack them ten billion high over every single metre of the Earth to use them up.
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Eh, that's a lot of toasters to use up 3.4*10^38 addresses. If a toaster takes up a square metre (big toaster), you'd have to stack them ten billion high over every single metre of the Earth to use them up.
You can never have enough toasters ;)
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And then we can use multicast to heat up 2^64 Pop Tarts at the same time.
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Current estimates are that IPv6 has sufficient address space to assign every living human approximately 4 billion IPs. I could assign an IP to every single item I own down to the spare buttons for my shirts, and the unused sandwich bags in my pantry, and not even get to the first percent of my "allocation". The population of earth could increase by an order of magnitude and we'd all *still* have a few million addresses for our very own... we won't have anywhere to stand, but we'll have plenty of IP addres
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You mean IBM and Intel, or their associated personel who designed the 8086 and chose it for the IBM PC. MS was constrained by the memory limit of the system with DOS, there's nothing MS could've done to increase the memory addressability limit of the damn CPU. But you knew that right, mr. super hacker?
Well, this "super hacker" would have recognized that superior gear even for microcomputers existed even then and you might want to accomodate for the future.
The 386 was released in 1985. So the notion that the 8086 was "the only crap that Intel had" is clearly bogus.
Vint can be excused for a little "sloppiness". He was conducting an EXPERIMENT. IBM and Microsoft were developing production corporate hardware.
Bogus shortage (Score:2, Interesting)
There isn't a true shortage with companies that are hording large blocks of IP addresses. Example HP has 2 class A address blocks among others which gives them over 32 million IP's. With all the mergers that have happened why isn't there a process to recover address blocks that can be reused properly.
Part of the problem is that no one thought of recovering address blocks when companies merge. You can't tell me that HP needs 32 million plus IP's?
There is also the fact that both companies and ISP's can use th
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By the time companies expend the time and resources necessary to validate that all of their "unused" IP blocks aren't actually being used by something, engineering migration plans for those that are being used by non-critical systems, etc. they could just go ahead and move to IPv6.
Apply a cure, not a band-aid.
Re:Bogus shortage (Score:5, Insightful)
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The question is: why is it growing at all?
Every new device should be IPv6 compatible.
Who's making IPv4 crap? And why aren't we charging them $100 a number?
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Mostly home gateways and some VoIP phones. Host OSen and business routers have had the necessary support for ages. Even most smartphones sold now probably do. But if you want an IPv6-capable Wireless N router, you're either going to have to look very carefully, or buy one that can load a custom firmware.
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Hell, do the Wii/360/PS3 support IPv6? I'm pretty sure the Wii doesn't, but I don't know about the other two. Not to mention Tivos, Slingboxes, Rokus, etc...
That's not to say however that I'm letting ISPs off of the hook. We sho
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You cam hardly blame the ISPs since the most popular os on the planet (XP) does a very poor job of supporting IPv6. More annoying is the fact that MS refuses to support the TLS extensions that would allow servers to virtual host SSL based sites meaning that we can't do proper SSL based virtual hosts until people stop using IE and Chrome on XP. If I could have done that my last job would have had 5 ips instead of over 100.
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I know my 802.11N router at home is IPv6 compatible, but then, it's also a dual radio gigabit port beast.
Honestly enough, I figure that the USA/Europe will be one of the last ones to switch over - we're more mature; our growth rate is slower than China and other developing countries, and our investment is still proportionally larger.
Still, last time IPv6 came around I double checked, and my computers/router have IPv6 addresses. Hard to tell if they're getting used, but that's life.
Re:Bogus shortage (Score:4, Insightful)
There are more people on Earth than there are IPv4 addresses. There is a true shortage, whether companies are sitting on address blocks or not.
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1. The legacy address space is a special case. They were issued directly from IANA before ARIN and the other RIRs were formed and were given out without many rules attached, so reclaiming those is legally difficult at best. Typical blocks issued today can be and are reclaimed when they're not being used and you currently have to go to significant lengths to show you need the address space, especially with RIPE's policies.
2. We've been fucking doing that. NAT is why we are running out of addresses now rat
Build it Bigger (Score:2)
By the way, is Vint short for 'Vincent?' or 'Voila...Internet?"
Re:Build it Bigger (Score:4, Funny)
... the lesson learned is that whenever you are planning on building something technical, be sure to go wayyyy overboard on the size and scope of the projected requirements in order to future-proof the technology.
Yeah! That's why we should be building CPUs with 1024-bit addresses!
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I was going to ask why that's modded Funny, then I realized that yeah, it is.
We should be building network protocols with variable-length addressing, and getting rid of fixed constraints entirely.
Though you should have said "2048". Like the letters 'k' and 'q', it just sounds funnier when used in a joke.
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Another example is Sony when they decided, "One hour of tape is enough." That decision eventually killed the Betamax VCR. The competition called JVC also thought it was enough time but RCA, which was used to dealing with consumer expectations, insisted it had to be 4 hours minimum so Americans could tape football games. JVC complied and VHS won.
I wonder if we'll ever run out of phone numbers? The current US limit is 9,999,999,999 or about 10 billion. That's enough for 30 phones per citizen, so I suppo
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And then you risk a bloated mess that will probably still need to be extended in some way you didn't think about.
Is it a software patents issue? (alan cox) (Score:5, Interesting)
In a speech around 2004, I remember Alan Cox said that the reason IPv6 wasn't advancing was that big software players were afraid to adopt it before it turns 20 in case there are submarine patents / patent ambush.
Anyone got links to confirm / disprove this theory?
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patent_ambush [swpat.org]
an alan cox interview (Score:5, Informative)
Here's an interview where he says it:
http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t576610-alan-cox-on-software-patents.html [velocityreviews.com]
"""Alan Cox: The same has happened with IP version 6. You notice that everyone
is saying IP version 6 is this, is that, and there's all this research
software up there. No one at Cisco is releasing big IPv6 routers.
Not because there's no market demand, but because they want 20
years to have elapsed from the publication of the standard before
the product comes out -- because they know that there will be
hundreds of people who've had guesses at where the standard
would go and filed patents around it. And it's easier to let things
lapse for 20 years than fight the system."""
(More info would be good - any other prominent techs saying this?)
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/IPv6 (Score:2)
Actually, since this problem is sure to boom in the coming months, I've started a wiki page for it:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/IPv6 [swpat.org]
Laches: the doctrine of you snooze, you lose (Score:2)
Re:Laches: the doctrine of you snooze, you lose (Score:5, Informative)
Never, or in more practical terms, less than 6 years after the expiration of the patent. Patents need not be defended like trademarks, and you can "back sue" for up to 6 years of infringement. There was a recent story on /. about a company that bought a little known patent right before it expired, then went about suing everybody and anybody for infringement *after* the expiration, but going back 6 years for damages.
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For patents, not likely ever if you go to trial, and definitely never when the defense simply settles out of court (which is practically always). Trademarks you keep for as long as you're defending them, but patents go until the official expiration date. Unisys was able to sit around and wait for GIFs to become the standard lossless format on the Internet, then spring patent claims on everyone, and got away with it until the patent officially expired.
Aukerman v. Chaides (Score:2)
And a patent does not have to be enforced to be valid - latches and waivers do not apply to patents.
This is one difference between patents and trademarks, but Google patent laches [google.com] produces this document [google.com] describing how laches applies to claims of patent infringement. It cites A.C. Aukerman Co. v. R.L. Chaides Construction Co., 22 USPQ2d 1321 (Fed. Cir. 1992).
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This is not exactly new one, but I read a pretty reasonable article [mises.org] about the effect of James Watt's patents (steam engine) on the industrial revolution - basically how it was delayed by a few decades.
That was 18th century, things moved slower then. Now-a-days within our 5 year obsolescence cycle things completely moved out of whack of course.
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One reason that raising the length of patent protection, rather than reducing it, was a crime against the people.
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That's fucking stupid.
It's way cheaper to set your patent lawyers on a search for related patents and prior art than it is to fight them (in fact, that's a primary part of the application process).
And by waiting you're just giving your competitors all the time they need to eat your lunch before you dare put out your first product. They'll be filing all sorts of patents on the thing you wanted to make, and resetting your 20-year grousing clock every time they click "send to USPTO".
Either Cox is misquoted, o
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No one at Cisco is releasing big IPv6 routers.
Not because there's no market demand, but because they want 20
years to have elapsed from the publication of the standard before
the product comes out -- because they know that there will be
hundreds of people who've had guesses at where the standard
would go and filed patents around it. And it's easier to let things
lapse for 20 years than fight the system.
I'm glad to see our patent system is still "promoting the progress of science and the useful arts". :^P
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If this is true then wouldn't it mean that IPv6 won't get adopted until 2018? 20 years after the original RFC was published.
I personally think the problem is that compatibility with IPv4 seems like it was an afterthought. The designers of IPv6 should have designed the system so that individual computers/routers/networks could be upgraded independently of each other in much the same way you can easily upgrade your network from 100mb to GigE.
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Anyone got links to confirm / disprove this theory?
Short version: Cox was just wrong. Cisco wasn't shipping big IPv6 routers in 2004 (although they were shipping other IPv6 hardware and software), but it wasn't because of patents. It was because there was no demand from the telecommunications companies, who knew they had several years before IPv4 ran out. Furthermore, Cisco's current largest routers (the carrier grade CRS series) support IPv6 (example [cisco.com]), yet 20 years from the publication of the main IPv6
A wonderful failure (Score:2)
The examples of him putting the blame on himself for IPV4 running out of address space is just a modest way of saying "Hey I invented the Internet" in a real way not in an Al Gore kind of way.
I can only wish that I would have such a failure in my career!
Nick Powers
How we got here. (Score:5, Informative)
At the time, XNS, the Xerox protocol for Ethernet networks, was in use. It had 24 bits for the network number, and 24 bits for the device ID. Thinking at the time was that each network would be a local LAN, and "internetworking" would interconnect LANs. Xerox was thinking of this as a business system, with multiple machines on each LAN. So XNS had a 48-bit address spade. That's what we call a "MAC address" today.
The telephony people were pushing X.25 and TP4, which used phone numbers for addressing. Back then, phone numbers were very hierarchical; the area code and exchange parts of the number determined the routing to the final switch. "Number portability", where all the players have huge tables, was a long way off.
The problem with a big address space is that memory was too expensive in those days to deal with huge address tables. A big issue was locative vs non-locative address spaces. In a locative address space, there's a hierarchy - you can take some part of the address and make a local decision about what direction to go, even if you don't have enough detailed information to get to the final destination. IP was originally organized like that - routers looked up class A, B, and C networks. A huge, flat address space implemented using multi-level caches was way beyond what you could do in a router back then. Routers used to be dinky machines, with less than one MIPS and maybe 256K of RAM.
There was a lot of worry about packet overhead. Each key press on a terminal sends 41 bytes over a TCP/IP network. That was a big deal when companies had long-haul links in the 9600 to 56Kb/s range. Adding another 24 bytes to each packet to allow for future expansion seemed grossly excessive. Especially since the X.25 people had far less overhead.
So there were good reasons not to overdesign the system. I don't blame Cerf for that.
The foot-dragging on IPv6 is excessive. The big deployment problem was getting it into everyone's Windows desktop. That's been done.
Uh-oh... (Score:2)
I feel a bit guilty myself now, I got a block of 16 IPv4 addresses last week when I changed ISP. Although they also give me real honest non-tunnelled IPv6 too.
C'mon Slashdot, start supporting IPv6! - even Youtube's on there now!
Why is 127.0.0.1 in a class A? (Score:2)
Here's a question for the day: Why did they pick a class A network to place the local machine address (127.0.0.1) in? Why not 192.168.0.1?
Re:Why is 127.0.0.1 in a class A? (Score:4, Funny)
I don't know about you, but I'm extremely satisfied that my interface's home is in a Class A network.
I mean, who wants to live in a sub-class neighborhood?
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it's a test *network* that RFC 790 made. normally it's used for loopback, but could be used for other testing including socket-like things for a machine to talk to itself.
And it's not just address 127.0.0.1, you'll get a response from any address in that network, but those packets will never appear on real network outside your machine.
Re:Why is 127.0.0.1 in a class A? (Score:5, Interesting)
I could explain this to you, but I would have to write a science fiction novel to do it. Well ok, I'll summarize the novel. Just remember this is a selective summary; pretend that all sorts of really cool things are happening and my characters are totally interesting and the plot is fucking fantastic. Can you do that for me, Wowbagger? Ok.
In an alternate universe, the IP4 designers did just as you suggest, and the loopback network was Class C. In this alternate universe, other things went in a different direction too. By 2010 we all have CPUs with thousands of cores, but they all run at 1 MHz and programmers discuss ways to improve the linearization of their code.
And we all have a weird crippled piece of shit operating system, which got popular despite all its limitations. (This may seem hard to believe to us, but remember I'm talking about an alternate reality.) One of its limitations, is that its networking code doesn't deal with port numbers, because the designers thought that was a waste of 16 bits. (Computers in this reality have about as much memory as what we're used to, but there are more addresses and the words are 4 bits wide, so working with 16 bit data is kind of a pain in the ass.) Another of its limitations is that is has no IPC as we currently know it. Fortunately in the 1990s some programmers "invented" IPC by having each process use the loopback network, but since there are no port numbers, each process has to have its own address on the loopback network so that the OS can sort out what process gets what message. This inevitably led to mocking jokes:
There were terrible hacks for running hundreds of processes and having them all be able to talk to one another, where a proxy process would emulate a sub-loopback network for 254 other processes and present a single loopback address to the OS. It was such a broken, terrible system, that it delayed the popularization of personal computer networking, so there was no "mainstream" use of the internet and the supply of IP4 addresses lasted much longer. In 2010, there was no non-loopback address shortage; it wasn't expected for another decade.
Then one day a poster named whoasacker got on Hyphencolon and asked, "Why didn't they just use a Class A network for the loopback?" And a poster named Slippery answered, explaining, "In an alternate universe, they did..."
IPV6 is the problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
Choosing 32 bits for IPV4 was reasonable at the time when 56kbps was considered a fast link.
The real problem is that when IPV6 was designed it did not allow IPV4 to be included as a subspace.
so you cannot have an IPV4 address that is a valid IPV6 address.
That means that there is no soft migration path from IPV4 to IPV6.
The people who designed IPV6 did not consider the problems of real world users;
they designed in a vacuum. A properly designed IPV6 would be in widespread use by
now, and the problem would be under control.
Re:IPV6 is the problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
IPv4 was created decades before 56kbps was considered a fast link.
I've heard this complaint before about IPv6 not being backwards compatible, but, and no offence, I've never heard a constructive argument about how it should have been designed. I have my doubts that people who make this complaint have actually sat down and worked through the details of how they would have made IPv6 backwards compatible.
Consider a hypothetical IPvA (short for IPvAwesome) which obsolesces IPv4 and is backwards compatible. We have to imagine that the IPvA address space is bigger than 32 bits, either a fixed larger address space or a variable-length "extension" address stuck in the optional parts of the IP header or something like that. The problem is that no matter what mechanism you choose, every packet you send across the Internet is going to hit a 10 year-old router that's never even heard of IPvA. There's a 100% chance this router will have no idea whatsoever what to do with the parts of the IP header it's never seen before. If you're lucky the router will just drop the packet as being malformed. If you're unlucky maybe it'll do something silly like truncate the packet down to the RFC-specified 32-bit IPv4 address and your reply packets will end up getting routed to China somewhere.
The problem is this: whatever protocol you put in to replace IPv4, most of the infrastructure on the Internet will have no idea what to do with it. That means it's virtually impossible that you'll ever be able to seamlessly bridge between stupid old ignorant IPv4 routers and the more aware routers.
What you could do is have routers that nicely bridge between IPvA and IPv4. So you send out an IPvA packet and it magically finds its way to a router that speaks both IPvA and IPv4 and can nicely bridge between them. That would be cool, and in fact, I've just described to you how 6to4 works.
Truth be told, even you sat down and came up with a new protocol that was designed for nothing else but bridging between codgy old IPv4 routers and some kind (any kind!) of new Internet protocol, I doubt you could do better than IPv6 and its cohorts (6to4, 6over4, 6in4, 4in6, etc.)
Maybe I'm missing something, but if you're going to make this complaint, you're going to have to come up with something better than "they didn't think about backwards compatibility". They did think about backwards compatibility and they did it in the best way possible from what I can tell.
Who's gonna be the first? (Score:3, Interesting)
$ host -t AAAA slashdot.org
slashdot.org has no AAAA record
$
'nuff said. Our organisation (that's me) is already 96% dual-stack. We treat non-ipv6 connectivity as fatal. When are you gonna do it?
We will use IPv4 forever (Score:2)
T,FTFReality.
There's zero economic incentive to stand up an IPv6 service, and won't be until a critical mass of clients have only IPv6 connectivity (no IPv4). There's no economic incentive for an ISP to provide IPv6 unless the customers demand it, and they don't care because there aren't any services or content exclusively on IPv6.
It's sad to us geeks, but the future is an internet of many-layered NAT where connections can only be routed from end-user to well
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking of economic incentives - the GP says there's no economic incentive to switch end-users to IPv6 when you can use multi-level Large Scale NAT, but I have one question:
Won't it take money to implement and convert customers to multi-level NAT? Would it really cost much more to convert them to IPv6+NAT64? That's the real question - not whether there is economic incentive to do something you don't have to, but what are the comparative costs/benefits of two alternatives, one of which you will probably *ha
Re: (Score:2)
Wait, I get it now.
blame = attention
Re: (Score:2)
It seems to work with preschoolers. I guess we never really grow up, and there always seems to be some truth in "Any attention is good attention."
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Who is this Vince you speak of and why are we blaming him instead?
Vince, vint, whatever. Listen up unix beardlings because I am about to drop some real history and knowledge on you.
He is some surfer guy who was too stoned on Maui Wowie to figure out we needed more than 3.4 Billion Addresses.
His name is Vint Cerf, and actually is the REAL REASON why we call it "web surfing".
Back in the olden days before young punks like you had global village modems, ISPs and dialup access and stuff,
us oldbeards were sitting
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It was pre-home computer revolution and nobody thought computers would shrink to the size of everybody's pockets (cellphones). Nobody thought we'd be using machines will a billion bits (or more) or memory. Back than ~4000 was considered a lot (it was the hardcoded limit for the Atari console). Everything was smaller in scale, and Mr. Cerf is not to blame for not predicting the invention of the Web Browser (killer app) and how it would reach into every facet of our lives.
Only those with no imagination---
I can say with a great deal of confidence that plenty of us knew what was coming.
Now who do we blame for 32-bit time_t on 32-bit iron? There's a relatively new OS that lots of people use today that didn't have any ABI concerns when it was in its infancy, yet its creator didn't have the vision to see beyond doing pretty much what everyone else had done before him. (And I won't name him because then I'll just get modded a troll. But I bet you can guess who it is.)
Re: (Score:2)
>>>Only those with no imagination---
Were you even alive then - 1976? I was. Remember that was a time when being able to buy a video & watch it at home was an alien concept (pre-VCR). If you had said to someone, "Someday you'll be able to sit on a bus and watch a video from 10,000 miles away," they'd probably lock you in a loony bin. Or just say, "You're a nutty nerd - let's give you a wedgie."
Computers in 1976 were the size of small rooms, and they were just beginning to be shrunk to PC si
Wrong. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
>>>Only those with no imagination---
Were you even alive then - 1976?
Yes, actually I was alive then, and for quite a few years before that.
I was. Remember that was a time when being able to buy a video & watch it at home was an alien concept (pre-VCR).
Not true. I was shooting video on 1" cartridges in my HS film classes in 1976, and believe it or not, there was a movie sale and rental industry then. It was small, by mail order, and expensive, but it did exist.
If you had said to someone, "Someday you'll be able to sit on a bus and watch a video from 10,000 miles away," they'd probably lock you in a loony bin. Or just say, "You're a nutty nerd - let's give you a wedgie."
I think those reactions had more to do with the goofy grin, flood pants, and the bad haircut you had than anything else. :-P
Computers in 1976 were the size of small rooms,
I think you're a little confused about the whats and whens.
I lusted over SWTP 6809s and various Z/80 syste
Re: (Score:2)
ABI nothing. That new OS needed to have software ported to it and a lot of Unix like software expects time_t and int to be interchangeable so changing it would involve fixing a lot of software.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly, even in the late 90s I heard professors talk about it being important knowing how much space a short took as opposed to an int as opposed to a long long and what'd it'd do for CPUs and registers and whatnot. People in the 70s and early 80s at the dawn of the PC skimped bits and bytes everywhere taking the century off the year and many other things that in retrospect seem stupid. But that kind of cost cutting could save you millions of dollars in reduced requirements back then. I'd love to go back
Re: (Score:2)
I'm going to this event in San Jose to hear him speak and perhaps give me some good advice around IPv6.
http://www.gogonetlive.com/ [gogonetlive.com]
Next year will probably be the last year I run IPv4.
We'll think about it, Vint.
Re: (Score:2)
The number of addresses available in IPv4 is ACTUALLY NOT 2**32=~4 billion but 2**32 * 2**24 = ~48 trillion addresses.
Good luck NAT-ing four billion IP addresses behind one NAT box which has one IP address and 65536 ports.
Re: (Score:2)
Good luck NAT-ing four billion IP addresses behind one NAT box which has one IP address and 65536 ports.
This is only a problem if you're Cisco. Sane NAT implementations track connections by the whole 5-tuple.
Re:No need for IPv6 (Score:4, Informative)
Because, since all the hosts behind a NAT share a single routable address, that means to make inbound connections, you need to setup port forwarding. So, say I want to run Skype (which likes to have an inbound port), a game server, and a VoIP application, all of which need to be able to accept inbound connections. Well, to do that, on the NAT Gateway, I need to setup 3 ports to be forwarded to my computer. Only I can use those 3 ports, no one else can. Which means with 64k ports available on the NAT, you can probably only setup port forwarding service for maybe 10k-20k customers. You *might* be able to alleviate this a little bit by using multiple 'public' IPs - say one public IP for every 5000-10000 users on the ISP network.
There's also the issue of 'well known ports' - let's say I want to run a web server - well, almost all browsers expect a web server to respond to connections made to either port 80 or port 443 (for SSL encrypted connections). Likewise SSH, telnet, FTP, rdist, etc all typically use well-known ports. Games using iD Software engines usually accept inbound connections on a particular well-known port (27960). Only one computer per public IP may have port 80 or 443, or whatever, forwarded.
Also, perhaps even more importantly, every outbound connection also uses a port associate with the public IP address being used for NAT. Again, using one public IP for a few thousand users might give you enough ports to mostly work.
Basically, in a world where everyone is behind a NAT, no one can ever accept in-bound traffic from off the 'local' network (I put local in quotes, because in the case of Large Scale NAT, you could probably talk to all the other customers of your ISP directly, but not anyone who uses a different ISP), even when they *WANT* to. Some people like the 'comfort' of thinking that NAT somehow protects them better than a firewall, but I'd personally prefer routable addresses for all my devices, with a firewall that I control on my home router to block in-bound access. That way, I can simply open ports when I *want* inbound traffic, and leave all other closed - but when I do want to run services