The IPv4 Internet Hiccups 248
New submitter pla writes: Due to a new set of routes published yesterday, the internet has effectively undergone a schism. All routers with a TCAM allocation of 512k (or less), in particular Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 7600's, have started randomly forgetting portions of the internet. 'Cisco also warned its customers in May that this BGP problem was coming and that, in particular, a number of routers and networking products would be affected. There are workarounds, and, of course the equipment could have been replaced. But, in all too many cases this was not done. ... Unfortunately, we can expect more hiccups on the Internet as ISPs continue to deal with the BGP problem." Is it time to switch to all IPv6 yet?
Re:Betteridge (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right. It was time 10 years ago. Now it's way PAST time.
Re:Yes, Please (Score:5, Insightful)
Many new home routers are ready but a lot of people haven't bought a router in years
So? Most people hadn't bought a broadband router at all 15 years ago. Most people hadn't bought a wireless router 10 years ago. People don't buy until you give them an incentive. And until you man up and tell people "Look, you have a year to buy an IPv6 router or get one from your ISP, or we're cutting you off" no one has any incentive to get off their fat asses and do what needs to be done to move us ahead.
If we had continued to keep the automobile speed limit at 10 mph year-after-year because a few lazy old farts refused to give up their goddamned horses and buggies, we'd still be driving around today at 10 mph.
Re:IPv6 would make the problem worse (Score:4, Insightful)
v6 makes things better, because it uses 128-bit addresses rather than 32-bit addresses. See RFCs 1715 and 3194 for the details.
Yes, there's a small linear factor of extra memory required for v6 routes vs v4 routes, but that's irrelevant compared to the route count reduction that comes from a lower HD ratio.
Re:Betteridge (Score:2, Insightful)
That doesn't solve the problem, it mitigates ONE aspect of the problem.
It will effect large ISPs with large numbers of IPs, which are few and far between.
It does nothing to resolve the actual problem of router table growth which is caused by the number of networks, multihoming and address portability.
Multihoming and address portability make what you've said irrelevant, and thats where the growth comes from.
Re:IPv6 would make the problem worse (Score:4, Insightful)
but that's irrelevant compared to the route count reduction that comes from a lower HD ratio.
Only if you assume you can reduce routes because there are so many people with diverse blocks in their network, which isn't the case so much.
The route count is much more a result of multihoming and portable address space, which means larger prefixes aren't going to help at all. At no point in my career would my provider having a larger prefix helped reduce the routing table as I have always had either portable address space, which is a direct allocation from a NIC rather than an ISP, or been multi homed which means at best I get the addresses from ONE of the peers and announce it out to another peer, but in that case traffic gets all screwed up if the upstream provider which allocated me the non-portable space aggregates it since aggregated addresses aren't preferred over non-aggregated address space.
I.E. larger upstream prefixes don't really help at all.
Not from what I've seen (Score:4, Insightful)
Not the fact that wifi routers degrade, you are totally right about that, but that people will replace them. I'm amazed at how shitty someone's Internet can be and they have an "Oh well, whatever," attitude about it.
A good example near and dear to me is my parents. They moved in to their current place about 7 years ago and got a cheapass Linksys router to handle their NAT and WiFi. It has been giving them enough grief for me to hear about it for at least 3 years. They are not poor, a new router is not a big deal, yet they didn't get one. So I got tired of it, and also had an easy solution: When they were visiting me this June I upgraded my WAP to a new 802.11ac one and gave them my old one, which was working great.
They still haven't installed it. It's not like they don't have time, mom is retired and dad is semi-retired, it's not like it is hard, it is much simpler to set up than their old model and they can always call me. They just haven't bothered. Their router acts up, they go reset it, and don't bother to replace it.
Another somewhat related example would be a friend of mine. He's a young guy, under 30, and quite technically savvy. He's complained to me that the Internet at his house is not meeting advertised speeds, going quite well below it. Strange, since we are both on the same ISP, and live only a couple miles from each other and my experience has been that they always are right around max. I inquire a bit more and find out he still has a DOCSIS 2 modem. Ahh ok, well that is probably the issue. Though his connection is of a speed that a single DOCSIS channel can handle (25mbps), that modem has one one channel to choose from and it could well be too loaded down by other people on the segment. So my recommendation was to get a DOCSIS 3 modem. An 8x4 modem that is compatible can be had for like $80. That should solve any speed issues since now there's a bunch of channels to choose from, and will be compatible when they bump the speeds in the future.
He didn't want to spend the money, and so just complains occasionally about the speed.
For whatever reason, there are more than a few people who will just use old, failing, technology and bitch about it rather than fix the issue.
Re:Not ready for v6 yet (Score:4, Insightful)
If it weren't for the stupidity of OS and IP stack authors, we'd be able to use the 240.0.0.0 - 255.255.255.254 addresses.
However, most of them refuse to route to those addresses because they're "Reserved for Future use."
Apparently no one stopped to think that blocking routing to those addresses would stop them from being used in the future because people insist on using older technology.
Re:Yes, Please (Score:5, Insightful)