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The Internet

What Happens When IPv4 Address Space Is Gone 520

darthcamaro writes 'We all know that IPv4 address space is almost all gone — but how will we know when the exact date is? And what will happen that day? In a new report, ARIN's CIO explains exactly what will happen on that last day of IPv4 address availability: '"We will run out of IPv4 address space and the real difficult part is that there is no flag date. It's a real moving date based on demand and the amount of address space we can reclaim from organizations," Jimmerson told InternetNews.com. "If things continue they way they have, ARIN will for the very first time, sometime between the middle and end of next year, receive a request for IPv4 address space that is justified and meets the policy. However, ARIN won't have the address space. So we'll have to say no for the very first time."'
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What Happens When IPv4 Address Space Is Gone

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  • by Nerdfest ( 867930 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @02:40PM (#31968778)
    The Internet is full ... come back later.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 24, 2010 @02:48PM (#31968844)

      Just put the internet behind a NAT. Simple.

      • It's quite possible that lots of people will start running hacks of all kinds instead of ipv6. It's not like weird hacks aren't in use all over.
        • by Bigjeff5 ( 1143585 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @03:22PM (#31969102)

          That's not necessary, IPv6 already has the IPv4 address space blocked off and reserved for IPv4 addresses, so all you need is protocol translation for the systems that can't understand IPv6. It's not a hard problem. Yeah it will cost a little money, but really it's a drop in the bucket compared to everything else a business needs to deal with.

          You band-aid it until you can justify the necessary overhaul. Eventually everyone will be on IPv6.

          In other words, the reason nobody is rushing to fix it is because it's not that big of a deal. The problem is small enough that you won't really need to worry about it until it actually comes up.

    • by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Saturday April 24, 2010 @02:55PM (#31968896) Homepage
      Have you tried draining [dilbert.com] your ethernet cable?
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by darkpixel2k ( 623900 )

      "We all know that IPv4 address space is almost all gone — but how will we know when the exact date is? and what will happen that day?

      Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
      Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
      Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
      Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by cgenman ( 325138 )

      Somebody clogged the tubes.

      See, IPv4 is like a 1/2" tube, and IPv6 is like a 3/4" tube. IPv4 is smaller with a higher pressure, and so works faster, but moves less internet overall. IPv6 is better if you have a higher pressure internet, as it can move a greater volume but only if you support it. Lots of people are trying to squeeze their devices onto the intertubes, so the pressure of all of those electrons is really high. This clogs IPv4, freezes the electrons, and causes the web to burst.

      So support IP

      • by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @07:40PM (#31970580)
        More like IPv4 is a 2" tube, and IPv6 is a 79228162514264337593543950336" tube. That's how many more addresses it contains.
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      Why don't we just print out what is there now, give everyone a copy, and then reuse the existing space?
  • dev/null (Score:5, Funny)

    by SimonTheSoundMan ( 1012395 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @02:41PM (#31968786)

    Send users to dev/null.

  • Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WrongSizeGlass ( 838941 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @02:43PM (#31968804)

    However, ARIN won't have the address space. So we'll have to say no for the very first time.

    Hmmm, maybe that's part of the problem? They never say no to anyone. Do all those companies really need all those IP blocks? Maybe if they had said "no" once in a while we'd have another year or so to work out how we'll get everyone over to IPv6.

    • Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)

      by geniusj ( 140174 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @02:52PM (#31968870) Homepage

      Whatever. The world has had how long now to move to IPv6? If we had two additional years, we'd be talking about this two years from now instead of right now. I've been using it for nearly 10 years now. I just hope that this threat is finally becoming significant enough to get ISPs and other organizations moving faster in the right direction.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Bigjeff5 ( 1143585 )

        The reason nobody is rushing to fix it is because it isn't a big problem.

        It's not like the Y2K bug, where stuff could blow up if it wasn't fixed before the clock struck midnight.

        You know what is going to happen the first time ARIN says no? The organization will go "Oh, ok.Can I get a nice block of IPv6 instead?" and add some protocol translation to their network to deal with anything that can't handle IPv6. Done. Problem solved.

        In other words, there is nothing to freak out about at all.

        Seriously people,

        • Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 24, 2010 @03:46PM (#31969276)

          add some protocol translation to their network to deal with anything that can't handle IPv6

          You do realize that you need IPv4 addresses to do that, don't you? IPv4 systems can't talk to you if you don't have IPv4 addresses. Let's say you want to host virtual private servers for 1000 customers and each server must be individually reachable from the IPv4-only internet. What do you do if you can't get 1000 IPv4 addresses? Nothing, you're fucked.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by KiloByte ( 825081 )

          You know what is going to happen the first time ARIN says no? The organization will go "Oh, ok.Can I get a nice block of IPv6 instead?" and add some protocol translation to their network to deal with anything that can't handle IPv6. Done. Problem solved.

          Except, that block of addresses will be worthless since no one who uses brain-dead ISPs (ie, 99% of them) will be able to connect to you.

          And that "protocol translation" is functionally identical to NAT, with all of its downsides. In fact, the popular solutions for that are named NAT64 and NAT46, even though they are a bit more heavyweight, requiring DNS hackery. And both do absolutely nothing a dual-stack node can't do. Hint: all modern systems are dual-stack.

    • Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)

      by slimjim8094 ( 941042 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @02:53PM (#31968888)

      To be fair, we've had almost 10 years. Strike that, 12 years.

      We've even had all OS and router support for 5 years.

      Fact of the matter is, nobody's moving to IPv6 until they *have* to. We can cry doom and gloom all we want (we have been, after all), and nobody cares. When Comcast can't address new customers, they'll get off their ass.

      Though that's a bit of a gamble. The right answer is moving to IPv6, the best answer is doing that in advance, but they'll definitely consider just NATting new customers. Hopefully they'll do things properly, but this is ISPs we're talking about.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by h00manist ( 800926 )

        but they'll definitely consider just NATting new customers.

        Trouble is, 99% of users won't even notice. If they profile the users to figure out which ones won't notice beforehand, even more.

        • 99% of users have computers that handle IPv6 just fine, most consumer routers even do it just fine.

          This is such a non-issue it's just hilarious watching everybody freak about it.

          • 99% of users have computers that handle IPv6 just fine, most consumer routers even do it just fine.

            This is such a non-issue it's just hilarious watching everybody freak about it.

            Look, we pay fortunes for movies about NYC, and every big city or group, being invaded by alien, destroyed by sea monsters, bombed, flooded, attacked, and transformed into a prison. We enjoy fictional death and disaster as entertainment, to blow away the awful contrast in real life, boredom. This is a free story of doom that we want to fantasize about being true, just like y2k. So, fan the virtual flames, and get out the popcorn. IPV4 will be the end of the civilized world as we know it, and that's it, unt

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by h00manist ( 800926 )
      The price for ipv4 addys will go up. Their people who suddenly own fortunes in un-sold ipv4 addresses will start to sabotage ipv6, hiring marketing teams to spew bad news about it all over. The IPV4 price and demand go up more. Trade battles between Japan, the US, China and Europe will break out. IPV4 will be deemed a national security interest, and a government oversight board in the Dept of Commerce set up. IPV6 will be relegated to a hackers hangout meeting space along with IRC. Japan will invade the
    • Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 24, 2010 @03:06PM (#31968970)

      Hmmm, maybe that's part of the problem? They never say no to anyone.

      They definitely say no. Not only that, if the utilization of your existing IP space drops below a certain threshold, ARIN will start taking it back. And they won't take back your emptier networks, they'll take back whatever they want (usually the largest ones, i.e. the ones you most want to keep). They also no longer issue anything bigger than... I think a /22? It might even be smaller.

      Everybody except ARIN was always like this, of course. ARIN could afford to be more generous because the US has a disproportionately large number of IPs for its population (and even for its server count). But now they're in the same boat as APNIC and RIPE, so they've gotten much stricter than they used to be.

    • Address space shouldn't be a scarce resource. The only reason that it is presently behaving like one is because of the cost associated with transitioning to IPv6. However, it really isn't ARIN's responsibility to regulate allocation based on need. Everyone is going to have to transition to IPv6, might as well happen sooner rather than later.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by jsepeta ( 412566 )

      I agree.

      Also I suggest opening up .XXX and make all the porn guys move their sites to the .XXX namespace. Plus make them migrate to IPV6 so the rest of us can just stick with IPV4

    • Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Burdell ( 228580 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @03:21PM (#31969084)

      You conveniently cut out the part of the quote that said ARIN would "receive a request for IPv4 address space that is justified and meets the policy". Have you ever applied for IPv4 space? ARIN does say no if your application does not have sufficient justification. I've had it happen, when someone decided we needed to apply for space when we hadn't really filled our existing space (it was just assigned inefficiently).

    • Maybe if they had said "no" once in a while we'd have another year or so to work out how we'll get everyone over to IPv6.

      The current shortage is a surprise to no-one. There's no reason to think that another year or so is any different if the year or so falls in 2012 or in 2011 (unless the world ends in 2012 and the extermination of the human race frees up all the IP addresses.)

    • Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)

      by divisionbyzero ( 300681 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @03:33PM (#31969180)

      However, ARIN won't have the address space. So we'll have to say no for the very first time.

      Hmmm, maybe that's part of the problem? They never say no to anyone. Do all those companies really need all those IP blocks? Maybe if they had said "no" once in a while we'd have another year or so to work out how we'll get everyone over to IPv6.

      Too late. Hindsight is 20/20, etc. Does MIT really need a /8? No. Does HP need two? No. But as with any scarce resource when no more IPv4 addresses are available they will rise in value and people will auction off their space. The price will have an upper bound at the cost of deploying IPv6. That'll buy us another few years. And then people will NAT even more. That'll buy us a few more. And by that time most people will be ready to move to v6. There really is no need to panic here. I'm not sure where all of the anxiety stems from. The people that understand the issue and care about it are aware of it and on top of it. I suspect an ulterior motive.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by VTI9600 ( 1143169 )

      They never say no to anyone.

      ...a practice that spammers frequently take advantage of to churn through blocks of essentially disposable IP space. They do this to avoid sender-reputation based blocking techniques, which are used by pretty much all modern spam filters these days. The focus used to be on content inspection tools like SpamAssassin, but I digress.

      Spammers typically start out by setting up a "grey" block of IP addressses that they use to basically filter down their lists of email addresses to remove honey pots and emails t

  • Who's even trying to transition to IPv6? Considering how close we are to IPv4 Ragnarök, the changeover should be close to finished by now. I don't see any real sign that it's even started.

    • The changeover will never happen until the IPv4 address space is exhausted. At that point, something will have to be done.

      However.. what that will be is up for debate. They could reclaim blocks from companies and then hand out 1 IP for them to run behind a NAT firewall; they could start to charge for IPv4 addresses on a yearly basis and they'll get loads returned to them; they could just say 'none available' and hand out an IPv6 block instead.

      I'm not sure which of the above will happen, but its going to be

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by fm6 ( 162816 )

        They could reclaim blocks from companies and then hand out 1 IP for them to run behind a NAT firewall

        I believe that's already being done. Though I believe the biggest single owner is DoD.

        they could start to charge for IPv4 addresses on a yearly basis

        Good idea. Never happen.

        I've advocated charging a higher fee for second level domain names for a long time. After all, if you really need one, paying $30/year or even a lot more, is a minor expense compared to your hosting costs. It would put an end to cybersquatting. But every time I suggest it, I get flamed half to death. People won't pay a penny more than they have to for something, and never mind the consequences. Ca

    • by Gerald ( 9696 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @02:54PM (#31968890) Homepage

      Trying? I'm done.

      • by johnw ( 3725 )

        Me too.

        This posting coming to you from 2001:8b0:e9:1:222:69ff:fe07:5046

      • by fm6 ( 162816 )

        Good for you. But hackers who've transitioned their personal networks isn't going to help much if the main Internet infrastructure doesn't support the new stack.

    • My PC has been IPv6 compatible for like, six or eight years now I think. I'm not sure exactly.

      I'm not sure why everyone is freaking out about this, it's a non-issue. Anybody using a home router might have to upgrade, but then again the ISP may just put in NAT routing to IPv4 so they don't have to deal with angry customers who's routers don't work.

      It's not a big deal, and it can be dealt with when it's actually an issue. There is no need to worry about it now. As demand for IPv6 becomes high, routers wil

  • Easy (Score:3, Funny)

    by networkzombie ( 921324 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @02:45PM (#31968826)
    Just do what I do at work. Ping the address, if there is no reply, assign it to something else.
    • You run out of IP addresses on your LAN?

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by lukas84 ( 912874 )

        Happens often in small companies that grow and run only a single subnet with a /24.

        While this is always easy to fix, some companies don't want to risk restructuring their LAN.

  • Every once in a while I think about it, then I can't find a reason. Anyone?
    • by johnw ( 3725 )

      Every once in a while I think about it, then I can't find a reason. Anyone?

      ipv6porn?

    • by fm6 ( 162816 )

      Right, it's somebody else problem. The question is, who?

      • by h00manist ( 800926 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @03:09PM (#31969000) Journal
        An important job had to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done
    • Re:Why run IPV6? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by slimjim8094 ( 941042 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @03:00PM (#31968932)

      The Internet was designed so that any computer could connect to any other computer. This is evident in the design of things like FTP, etc.

      Every phone, watch, fridge, TiVo, computer, and printer should have a public IP address. Imagine if you didn't need to port forward for Bittorrent, if Skype could connect right to your friend's computer, or you could print to your home printer by just entering its address. That's how the internet was/is supposed to work.

      NAT breaks this. Behind a NAT box, nobody can address a specific computer - only the NAT itself. This happens to lend some security, but is essentially accidental. With IPv6, your home router will instead be a firewall. Each computer will be addressable, but will still need to pass through.

      Plus, there's enough address to give each subscriber many thousand. And they don't need to change. No more charging for a static IP...

      Also, routing is more efficient since it can be done properly by hierarchy.

      So there's a bunch of reasons. Pick some.

      • We know that. We also know ways around the problems, and they work. All the stuff behind the NAT communicates. It's painful, but it does. Life goes on.
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          Well, personally I'm not into BSDM. NAT is an unnecessary pain and a ugly hack that raises complexity and breaks stuff.

      • by green1 ( 322787 )

        Plus, there's enough address to give each subscriber many thousand. And they don't need to change. No more charging for a static IP...

        And you've just listed one of the biggest reasons why we don't yet have IPv6, and why the major ISPs are in no hurry to do so. Do you have any idea how much extra they charge for an extra IP, let alone for a static one? if everyone already had multiple statics that revenue stream would dry up instantly.

  • by haus ( 129916 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @02:45PM (#31968830) Journal

    But somehow I doubt it.

  • Sorry you've reached the End Of The Internet [endoftheinternet.com]. Please turn around and come back later.
  • Some company will try to get IPV4 space and won't get it. They will setup on IPV6. They will be in the news. Transition will begin. End of story.
    • by Dragoniz3r ( 992309 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @03:13PM (#31969030)
      You seem to think that that company will be ok with an IPv6-only setup. This is not the case. An IPv6-only host can only be reached by other IPv6 hosts. So all those schmucks out there without IPv6 won't be able to reach the company. That's probably a dealbreaker.
  • it'll be a sad, sad day for lots of startups, that's for sure...
  • 1: multinationals will probablly try to bend the rules to try and get IPs from a different rir (some rirs will run out before others).
    2: isps will push end lusers* behind ISP level NAT in order to free up addresses for more important/lucrative purposes.
    3: some sort of sale of IPs will probablly happen, whether it is sanctioned by IANA and the RIRs or not.

    * we geeks will probablly be able to get public IPs but at a price premium.

  • China will probably cut over to IPv6 first. They started in 2000, and the 2008 Olympics was all IPv6. It was clear long ago that China alone needed more address space than IPv4 could provide. The government also likes the "everybody has a permanent IP address" concept, for control purposes.

    I wouldn't be at all surprised if China went all IPv6 domestically, with any translation to IPv4 at the "Great Firewall".

    All mobile devices should have been on IPv6 by now.

  • The entire 240/ block is reserved. Is there something wrong with those IP addresses?

    • by Trolan ( 42526 )

      Because it's classified as Experimental Use, so who knows what the existing IP implementations out there did to special case it in the code. So then you're out to updating firmwares and OSs to cope with the ability to us 240/4. Now as that's 16 /8s, and we're currently burning through a /8 per month, that's 1.33 years of additional time before we're out of v4 again. The proper solution is to use that time spent updating firmware and OSs, to do just that, but for IPv6, which will be able to go for much mo

  • by JorDan Clock ( 664877 ) <jordanclock@gmail.com> on Saturday April 24, 2010 @03:02PM (#31968946)
    I guess it's time to start filling bathtubs with IPv4 addresses!
  • by Sir_Sri ( 199544 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @03:08PM (#31968986)

    in the short term it will add value to IPv4 addresses, and organizations not using them might *gasp* make money getting rid of ones it doesn't need. That's not a bad thing. We have this problem with spectrum too, there's no particular cost in having a huge chunk idling away once you've got it. Anything which motivated more efficient utilization is good, and money creates a motivation.

    A short term will drive up the cost of IPv4 addresses will, in turn, make IPv6 look much more economically viable to people who actually pay for things. As with everything else in the real wold: money makes things happen. IPv6 isn't magically cheaper than IPv4, so no one has been all that bothered about it, so either you lower the cost of IPv6 or raise the cost of IPv4, and running out of IPv4 addresses manages the latter nicely.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Kjella ( 173770 )

    So, ARIN will say no. Will the Internet collapse because of that? Hell no. Whoever wants more IP addresses will have to go out on the free market and try purchasing them from someone. As it becomes a valuable asset companies and ISPs will see if they can charge extra for having their own IP address so they can sell the others. How many could live off a NAT'd connection? Or if you got say a machine with 100 incoming ports routed to you, could you configure any servers and whatnot to use that range? Eventuall

  • Googling for something on the impact shifting to IPv6 got me to this pre 2006 article: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/IPv6-Support-Microsoft-Windows.html [windowsnetworking.com]

    A good read. Seems that although there is limited IPv6 support on Win95/98, but it is better to just dump the OS when the time comes. It seems that fun times are to be had in the new feature for sysadmins and techs everywhere...

  • by itsdapead ( 734413 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @03:33PM (#31969176)

    ...and offer them some serious wonga to switch to IPv6 and/or make more use of DHCP/NAT etc.

    A lot of Universities have class B blocks (and a lot of those addresses are assigned to Ethernet cards now sitting in dusty cupboards and landfills). Still a non-trivial job, but probably easier for universities than big business.

    Universities are gagging for cash at the moment - and even if all the cash is spent on the switch

    Or the gub'ment can make them do it. Here in the UK, back in the 80s, the powers that be were forcing universities to use the ISO networking protocols: forcing them to switch to IPv6 is far less silly than that (e.g. unlike the ISO stack the IPv6 protocol actually exists and has been implemented by people).

  • like expired domain names.
  • by Marrow ( 195242 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @03:44PM (#31969264)

    Phones, TVs, and millions of other devices that will never need to act as servers will be forced behind NAT walls.
    There will be two price structures, client access and server addresses.

    Client, will be NAT only. Server will have a real address whether it be fixed or variable.

    Maybe they will even charge by DHCP lease time statistics.

    Eventually, the entire IPv4 address range will be relegated to servers. And all the clients will be IPv6. They will be told that the "tunneling" is just temporary, but it will in fact be permanent.

  • by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @03:55PM (#31969320)

    Similar to the expansion of the US "wild west", we're due for years of backfilling and territory arguments. Look ahead to the owners of /8 address ranges having them confiscated. (MIT, for example, hardly needs it: they should be NAT'ing all their internal traffic anyway to prevent "computer science majors" from pulling stupid stunts like the David LaMacchia case (http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=169520).

    NAT is notoriously lighter weight to support than IPv6, and helps provide some border control of undesirable services from inside your network. Replacing the router infrastructure and the configuration tools for stable, legacy systems to support IPv6 is expensive and the benefits of IPv6 are frankly underwhelming. It's exciting "auto-configuration" is, in most cases, a horrendously bad idea for public facing systems, and private systems don't need it. Useful security features, such as IPsec, were backported to IPv4. And the robust technical features of IPsec seem to be overwhelmed by the far easier to use client behavior of PPTP.

    Multicast? Oh, dear. Do _not_ get me started on the flaws of multicast programmers decided that the lack of information about missed packets in multicast forcing them to rewrite TCP, badly, as an unstable software layer on top of multicast.

  • by chill ( 34294 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @04:08PM (#31969380) Journal

    I just relocated to Virginia and to my surprise, Comcast is providing IPv6 addresses on their residential links. I'm going to activate IPv6 on my dd-wrt router and all my PCs sometime this weekend.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @04:35PM (#31969528)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by takev ( 214836 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @05:15PM (#31969750)

    There are currently two companies forcing the hand of the consumer ISPs to adopt IPv6.

    Since February this year Youtube has put all the actual media reachable on IPv6 as default when you access the youtube website through their normal DNS name.
    Apple's time capsule and airport extreme by default sets up IPv6 through tunnels.

    This means that a lot of people with Apple computers browsing youtube movies are heavy users of IPv6.
    As there are only a few tunnel brokers, the load on those will be quite high.

  • It's simple (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @05:25PM (#31969818) Homepage Journal

    The Class A owners will sell off chunks of their space one B class at a time.

  • by Ogi_UnixNut ( 916982 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @05:52PM (#31969950) Homepage

    ...and we can watch the nerds scramble to upgrade their home and work enterprises so they can access it. :-P

    I'm joking, or at least I think I am. If Slashdot did that I'm sure I would put more effort into getting an ipv6 address.

  • by NicknamesAreStupid ( 1040118 ) on Saturday April 24, 2010 @06:18PM (#31970124)
    I was part of Open Systems Interconnection, OSI. We were pushing one of those many technologies like XNS, CHAOSnet, DECnet, IPX, SNA, and ATM/SONET that 'competed' with TCP/IP (NCP had been beaten back by then;^). Before the days of NAT, I had a "very persuasive" presentation that showed the Internet running out of 32-bit IP addresses by 1995 (China and India were my big closers that silenced a lot of TCP wonks). OSI had a 'better' addressing scheme that did everything -- distinguished end systems (ES) from intermediate systems (IS), facilitated class of service, extended addressing to the transport/session/presentation layer services, incorporated MAC layer addressing, facilitated source routing, provided network management hooks, and would give you a blow job that pealed the cover off a plenum cable. It was the ultimate networking addressing scheme. The routing vendors, who were accustomed to shoving the whole network layer address into a 32-bit register, said they couldn't implement a 20+ byte NSAP address, even though they only had to route on a small portion of it. In the 1980s, that was probably true. Most of OSI died (X.500, ASN.1 and a few others survived), partly due to its massive scope (like ADA), and partly due to the fact that the authors ignored the IETF and most of the people who implemented the Internet. Much of what OSI tried to do is now being done by the IETF on their own schedule and their own mandate. To the victors go the spoils and the spillage.
  • by pizza_milkshake ( 580452 ) on Sunday April 25, 2010 @01:54AM (#31972094)
    I paid thousands for 127.0.0.1 years ago in anticipation of this. Cha-ching!

Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem. -- Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"

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