NRO Warns They Are On Final IPv4 Address Blocks 282
eldavojohn writes "According to the Number Resources Organization, they will have issued their final twelve IPv4 blocks in a few months. Each block is 16 million addresses and represents 1/256th of the total addresses issued. We are now down to 12 blocks left in the global pool for issuing to Regional Internet Registries, who will then assign the last addresses that will run out sometime later in 2011. The pool of free addresses works out to be less than half of where we were in January. The new numbers from the NRO indicate estimated global pool IP address exhaustion in a few months, a year earlier than they estimated at the beginning of 2010."
Someone help me out here (Score:2, Funny)
I've heard "we'll run out of addresses in one more year" for the last...well, for certain the last 5 years, but possibly longer.
When will this actually happen?
Re:Someone help me out here (Score:5, Insightful)
When it gets expensive to continue using IPv4, which may not be until well after we "run out."
You're not seeing some magic IP address fairy making them last longer, you're seeing armies of senior IT pros working until after dark trying to sort this all out and deal with things because the pointy-haired bosses on top have been seeing that IPv4 is 'good enough.' As long as IPv4 looks easier and cheaper on paper than IPv6, that's what we'll be using.
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I liked my pointy-haired boss from three years ago.
He was always on business travel.
So does the switch to IPv6 mean I have to throw-out my old Windows XP and Mac OS 10.5 computers? Like many people threw-away their old analog TV sets on June 12 (DTV switchover)? Maybe I better sell them on ebay, so some other sucker gets stuck with the problem. Mu-ha-ha-ha-ha. ;-)
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OSX 10.5 supports ipv6 just fine, so did 10.4, not sure what version introduced V6 support...
XP also supports ipv6, although it's not installed by default and you can't use v6 exclusively.
Re:Someone help me out here (Score:5, Insightful)
They spent HOW long advertising those free-or-highly-subsidized digital converter boxes and people still threw away perfectly functional TVs?
Regardless, no. Both WinXP (unless you're seriously out of date on your software updates) and OS X 10.5 support IPv6 just fine. Of course that's separate from hundreds of badly-coded apps that somehow shoehorned themselves into the IPv4 stack, but that's hardly OS-dependant.
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How long do you give it until ipv6 address space exhaustion?
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Re:Someone help me out here (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, NAT saved us from a certain doom, and also provides extra security (might act as a firewall).
I don't see IPv6 deployed 100% any time soon. Increasing the number NATed Internet users might be the only feasible solution, at least in short term.
Álvaro
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> Well, NAT saved us from a certain doom, and also provides extra security
NAT is a horrible hack. It might be a good solution for some things, but to fix the addressable space option, it is a disaster.
Talk about an almost entirely useless "broadcast" only Internet. Is that what you want?
> (might act as a firewall).
Even worse. I don't even want to begin to explain to you why you are wrong about this. The broad adoption of UPNP makes the idea that NAT provides you with a useful firewall complete idiocy.
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In all fairness, almost all routers I've seen can disable UPnP with one checkbox.
If you know anything about Networks, you're either you're using NAT because you are forced to, in which case UPnP setting up automatic routes helps KEEP a NAT space from being "broadcast only", or you're usi
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Not quite. I have a router that does NAT. I leave UPnP turned on, and I trust my security.
A NAT makes quite a good firewall against outside attacks (port scans and the like). Leaving UPnP tuned on means that you trust what is inside your own network -- you do not currently have any worms/rootkits/malware, and you are not going to visit sites that host that sort of thing. It works great for me! No having to manually open up ports to use a torrent client to get the latest Ubuntu.
Yes, some "trusted" sites
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I don't see IPv6 deployed 100% any time soon.
Or even 1%.
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Unfortunately, I think you are right. 95% of home users won't notice, and so anyone who is currently set up with a dynamic IP address will be NATed.
They'll probably start with the most basic tiers and work their way up, until it becomes so much of a PITA that IPv6 is easier.
Re:Someone help me out here (Score:5, Informative)
May 21, 2007: ARIN predicts sometime in 2010
June 20, 2007: LACNIC sets final date to januari 1, 2011
June 26, 2007: APNIC sets the date to sometime in 2010
April 15, 2009: ARIN says sometime before 2011
So for the last 3-4 years there has been a fairly good estimate on when they are supposed to run out.
Re:Someone help me out here (Score:5, Insightful)
Less than one year (12 months)
For sure before the end of next year, but probably not by the end of this year.
My bet is in Feb or March of 2011.
Keep in mind, despite having 12 /8 blocks left, that really means 6.
Once there are only 6 blocks left, whoever purchases #6 has ended the game, because the remaining 5 left are automatically to be given to the other world registries at that same moment.
So in reality those last 6 blocks will all go at the same time.
So 6 more /8 purchases and we will be out of space.
They just sold off 12 /8's in the past few months, so it will take half of 'a few months' at the same rate, even though I suspect it will go faster now that there is a crunch for it.
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Whoever was telling you that we were going to run out in one year five years ago was probably smoking methamphetamines at the time.
The IANA free pool will run out next year [potaroo.net], probably before mid year.
The point at which you can't actually receive any more addresses won't come until the RIRs exhaust the blocks that they have received from IANA which might not be for another year after that.
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The more likely scenario being that consumer end-points (vs. commercial end points) will be moved over to v6 first and they just won't be given an v4 route any longer. If a consumer types into a v4 address, they'll be translated (through DNS, or nat) to an appropriate v6 address end-point if one exists.
Consumer
V4 (private)
V6 (public)
ISP
V4 (consumer private->NAT)
V4 (NAT concentrator)
V6 (bridge)
Provider
V4 (end point)
V6 (end point)
So a V4 request would be Consumer->ISPv4(private)-NAT->ISPv4(public)-
Re:Someone help me out here (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't want that question answered. Just like when a car's headed for a sheer cliff, you don't want to know exactly when it'll go over it. You want to avoid ever having to have that question answered.
The reason the day of recekoning's been being pushed back is because the IT techies, even as they've been warning of the inevitable cliff, have also been doing everything they can to push the deadline back. They know there's going to inevitably be problems making the switchover to IPv6, and they're trying to buy as much time as possible so we'll have time to fix any glitches, but sooner or later they're going to run out of ideas and tricks and the deadline's not going to move anymore. Ideally by that point it shouldn't matter because we've taken the warning and done what's needed to avoid the cliff entirely. But if everyone keeps assuming that, just because the deadline's been pushed back once, it'll keep being pushed back indefinitely, well, suddenly going into free-fall as the car's wheels pass over the cliff-edge is not a good feeling.
You want really impressive examples? Look back to the big fireball over Cape Canaveral that a few seconds before was STS-51-L (Challenger), or the big fireball over Texas that a few minutes before was STS-107 (Columbia). Challenger blew up because the managers at NASA knew the O-rings were eroding and would sooner or later be breached, and they brushed this off with "Well, it hasn't happened yet so it won't happen ever.". Columbia disintegrated during re-entry because managers at NASA knew pieces of heavy foam insulation were striking the leading edges of the wings during launch and sooner or later one of those strikes would fatally damage the heat-resistant panels, and they brushed this off with "Well, it hasn't happened yet so it won't happen ever.". When we run out of IPv4 addresses the results won't be quite so pyrotechnic, but if we keep saying "Well, it hasn't happened yet so it won't happen ever." we will end up regretting it.
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Actually, it's almost the reverse problem... New devices (mostly) universally support IPv6, which has plenty of unallocated IP Space (we can allocate 200 quadrillion IPv6 addresses per square inch of land on the planet) popular and actively maintained services either have already, or will soon move over to providing services on an IPv6 address. ICANN has already switched over their root DNS Servers to resolve IPv6, and most larger ISPs are following suit. So, if you've got a new device on an ISP who has
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It probably won't be not being able to read your Facebook page. It'll more likely be that one day your Internet connection stops working because your ISP doesn't have enough IPv4 addresses to give one to every subscriber, they can't get any more netblocks, and you happened to be the guy whose computer was turned off when someone else wanted the last free address. Or your company suddenly can't submit it's payroll because the company that processes their payroll started providing IPv6 address resolution and,
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When will this actually happen?
At the rate we're going and projected to be going, probably around the time we run out of oil.
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Yes, and the reason why NAT routers have to do that is because of broken protocols that depend of the incorrect assumption that two hosts have unlimited unfettered universally synchronous connections to one another. They don't, and any modern protocol designer should be writing protocols that understand this principle. Even without NAT, you still have inbound connection blocking from firewalls, so there should be no good reason why someone should run into firewall/NAT issues beyond simply ignorance.
Re:Someone help me out here (Score:5, Insightful)
So let me get this straight.. In the beginning we had a very simple very open design. Any host can talk to any other host on any port. Then, over the years bouts of paranoia, fear, and idiocy have created default drop firewalls and nat devices that fundamentally break the open nature of the internet, protocols that rely on that nature break when presented with that stupidity, and somehow it's the fault of the protocol designer?
How would you suggest we operate? Instead of using my internet connection to accept connections from my peers should I proxy through a 3rd party? Should I use a ridiculous hack like upnp to beg the nat device for a forward? What happens when we're all behind default drop inbound firewalls w/ a nat'd address generously provided by our ISP? Suddenly and even though you have an internet connection and I have an internet connection we can no longer communicate directly with each other? Do you not see this as a problem? Is this still a protocol issue?
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Um, outside of academia, this has always and will continue to always be a problem. There will always be firewalls blocking corporate users from doing stupid things, and ISP's blocking exploitable ports, and QOS based restrictions for arbitrary nastiness. That is not something anyone can magically wipe away over night. I can't blame people writing protocols in the 70's and 80's for the open nature of what was probably a completely open internet. That internet doesn't exist anymore, will never exist again. To
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So let me get this straight.. In the beginning we had a very simple very open design. Any host can talk to any other host on any port. Then, over the years bouts of paranoia, fear, and idiocy have created default drop firewalls and nat devices that fundamentally break the open nature of the internet, protocols that rely on that nature break when presented with that stupidity, and somehow it's the fault of the protocol designer?
Well, no. You got the beginning part right. However, the reasons for NAT are off.
It's more like years of:
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Mobile networks are having to give out public IP address to smart phones, but NAT them such that they can assign the same public address to multiple phones.
People only think NAT works because they're largely shielded from the nightmare it creates.
Re:Someone help me out here (Score:4, Funny)
Really? I kept hearing "We'll run out of IPv4 addresses in five years" about four years ago, and so forth.
I've been hearing about the end of IPv4 space since my very first ISP handed me XXIV.XII.CXXIV.VI via DHCP
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Was that in the great state of Illinios, or did Comcast gobble up the ISP that owned that block and move it elsewhere?
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Make it 16 octets instead.
2012, the year of IPv6 support? (Score:2)
Well, once the large blocks are used up, there will finally be an impact on ISPs/Businesses to start migrating to IPv6. .... right?
Re:2012, the year of IPv6 support? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe there is some hope at the universities, though...
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How many customers would even notice if they got placed behind a NAT?
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or perhaps, demanding higher prices from those customers who refuse to be NATed ...or perhaps just refusing to assign public addresses to anybody. "Don't like it? Tough. Call your congressman."
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I think they've known all along that they will raise prices and as soon as the media starts bombarding everyone with a crisis, they will roll out new more expensive services.
Meanwhile PR departments from a number of major ISP's will go on and on as to why IPv6 is not feasible.
Re:2012, the year of IPv6 support? (Score:4, Informative)
Eh, not really. IPv4 will be gone. If you are an ISP, and you pursue Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) as your solution, you growth limit yourself. It's equivalent to fixing your available bandwidth permanently - you can't add more customers past a certain point without significantly degrading performance for all customers. In a few years, you'll need to deploy IPv6 anyway; your customers will pay a price for the capital cost of your CGN gear, then your customers will pay a further price for the capital cost of your v6 gear.
If you're only concerned about web+mail, deploy dual stack lite. Browsers and mail clients do IPv6 transparently already. CPE devices support v6 out of the box at the sub-$100 price range (Netcomm, Billion, and, uh, the one used in the big v6 trial by xs4all in the Netherlands). Going DS-Lite means that as more software supports v6, and more services appear on v6, the pressure on your public v4 addresses drops over time. You can sustain DS-Lite throughout transition. The capital cost is similar to CGN, and the ongoing expenses of v6 are generally covered by your existing v4 expenses (ie, bits you pay going over a v6 session are bits you no longer pay for over your v4, and if your upstream is charging you more for v6 it's time to go provider independent!)
Some of the services that don't work over CGN include, by the way, XBox Live, BitTorrent, many network games, and most VOIP solutions. Some services do work over CGN, but rely on a reasonable proportion of Internet users having a public address to do so, and thus aren't long term viable: Skype, some of the smarter BitTorrent clients that do hole punching. Some services rely on emerging protocols for dealing with CGNs, like FaceTime: ICE, STUN, and TURN.
You can get a taste for life under a CGN by configuring your home NAT device to ignore uPnP requests, and disabling any manual forwarding settings.
Also, the summary is full of shit regarding the changing estimation. The linked articles are pretty clear that it's still early 2011. Available metrics (http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/ is one of the best) show a pretty unchanging date; that link, in fact, includes a few graphs down the bottom showing the change in predicted date over time. If you're an ISP, you've got a reasonably reliable date to plan around, and it should see you unrestricted on your IPv4 clear through to 2012, plenty of time to get ipv6 upstream (typically free or very cheap, when taken alongside your v4) and implement dual stack in your core.
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Or they could start buying them off of IBM, MIT, GE, Apple, Ford, Boeing, or any of the other companies who have at least 16.7 million addresses allocated to them.
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When v6 rolls out those scarce v4 ips will be worthless.
Re:2012, the year of IPv6 support? (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty much. The largest german consumer ISP recently announced its plan to enable an IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack on all DSL connections by the end of 2011. Source in German. [heise.de]
Several server hosters already implemented IPv6 during the last few months.
It's really overdue. All mobile ISPs that I've seen so far only offer NAT'ed Internet access. Horrible.
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I wish my ISP was as enlightened as this German one and they are one of the biggest in the UK as well and as recently as last March they had no plans to migrate to IPv6.
One thing holding it back from the Consumers is the lack of Comsumer ADSL Modem/routers that support it. AFAIK, the Draytek Vigor series is about the only ones that do it. Sigh
Re:2012, the year of IPv6 support? (Score:5, Informative)
How do I make money on this? (Score:2)
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Get a patent on allowing IP addresses from 256.x.x.x -> 999.x.x.x
And what about claiming IPs back? (Score:2)
As a network admin I've never seen a real check about IP usage for customers without ASs.
This looks like the garbage problem. One side is the production, one is the disposal.
You cannot solve this kind of problem by just lookin gat one of the two sides.
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It has been discussed already - if the class As that were allocated to corporates back when anybody with the money could buy a class A regardless of need were reclaimed, it wouldn't provide more than a few months of extra capacity.
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and that is how the Internet should be, true peer-to-peer communication, more decentralized than it is now.
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I currently run a business-class DSL connection with a block of 5 static IPs. I only use two. So, one may ask if there's any way to reclaim the other three.
The answer is quite simply no. There are technical reasons why you can't assign IPv4 addresses in blocks less than 5 but more than 1. Nor is there any clear way I could share the extra addresses with someone else. The other three addresses are simply lost. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of similar installations at ISPs and colo
Assignment is/was the problem (Score:2)
I work for a small company that at most has had 14 full-time employees that started back in the mid 90s. My boss had full class-C block back in the day which worked out to about 20 IPs per employee. He surrendered it years ago, though.
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I work for a small company that at most has had 14 full-time employees that started back in the mid 90s. My boss had full class-C block back in the day which worked out to about 20 IPs per employee. He surrendered it years ago, though.
Twenty servers per admin isn't very impressive, even by Windows standards... Yes I understand that all 14 employees probably were not admins, but...
Assignment efficiency (Score:2)
I worked for a company that had a /8 and may have been using at most /20 worth of them....
Re:Assignment efficiency (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, this gets posted EVERY TIME there's an article about IPv4 address exhaustion, and every time the answer is the same - increasing assignment efficiency will at most buy us a few months, perhaps a year or two, of time. It doesn't solve the problem, only postpones it a little longer.
In truth, when the addresses are exhausted, I expect all the holders of /8's to start auctioning off their unused allotments to the highest bidder. There's a reason none (or most) of them have not given addresses back voluntarily - they are about to become a very scarce, very valuable commodity for trade. Those companies who got in early and got a Class A will make maybe hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars auctioning off the addresses. When companies who have IPv4 address blocks are going into bankruptcy or up for sale, the value of their allotments will start to be accounted for as assets.
Which, I think, is one reason that some tech companies are not pushing harder for IPv6 adoption - they stand to make a lot of money off of artificial scarcity.
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There is a small hole in that business model... combine:
will at most buy us a few months, perhaps a year or two, of time.
Those companies who got in early and got a Class A will make maybe hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars auctioning off the addresses.
Knowing that quote 1 is a vast exaggeration, probably turn out to be weeks to perhaps months, I'm guessing that it would be hard for the buyers to invest "billions" for weeks of service before they become worthless since everyone will have to go to IPv6
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I hope I'm wrong, but I've come to the conclusion there will be no quick transition to IPv6. When the last blocks get allocated, I think we'll enter a period of several years at least where IPv6 is *starting* to get rolled out, but is not rolled out yet, and companies who desperately need public IP addresses for their servers will pay thousands of dollars to buy IPv4 addresses from the hoarders. It's not like the Internet will suddenly end when IP address exhaustion is reached, it will just become much hard
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From what I've read, the internet back-bone is ready for IPv6, it's just the ISPs that need to start using it.
I know my ISP is handing out IPv6 addresses. Charter Comm. They do get routed to a broker, but if I do a tracert ipv6.google.com I get several hop responses from my ISP with valid public IPv6 addresses before going to a broker, then google.
I even get a DNS name a long with my IPv6 IP. Bit Torrent even starts using IPv6 when I hook up this way. Yay for no port forwarding!
The best part is I don't ev
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The thing is, they will become completely worthless shortly afterward. You can only bid the last bottle of water up so high when there's a huge crystal clear lake just a short hike away.
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Um, assuming my numbers are correct (which was subjective given the size of the company), we're talking about an allocation of 0.000244140625 of the assigned block. You're telling me that even with a portion of that ratio being recycled we can't squeeze out several years worth of IP assignments?
Additionally, another solution would be to start issuing /25, or /26's instead of 24's because I know of plenty of companies that use them have only used maybe 3-4 of them for various things with the rest of them lef
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Sorry, before someone else jumps down my throat about how BGP would blow up due to increased routing fragmentation, I mean that BGP routed traffic remains on /24 increments but that ISP's who are internally routing amongst data centers / etc.. internally segment on the smaller increments for their own hosted IP's blocks so that subscribers using ISP/provider blocks aren't being wasted carelessly.
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They expect to allocate all 6 /8 blocks available to them for allocation by sometime next year. 6 of them. So, let's say there's 6 more blocks worth of 'reclaimable' addresses - at the present rate of demand/consumption, you would also expect them to run out in less than a year, yes? Even if there were 10 or 12 blocks of reclaimable addresses, again, that only delays the inevitable - there's simply not enough addresses to keep up, indefinitely into the future, with the growth in demand around the world.
IPv6
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It's pretty inconceivable that 128-bits will be exhausted in any foreseeable timeframe. 128 bits is a really astronomically (literally) huge number.
It seemed inconceivable that IPv4 would run out, or that 640K wouldn't be enough (well maybe not that one). I'm curious -- can anyone see a way that IPv6 address space could run out in (say) 50-100 years?
It really does seem inconceivable to me, but I have learnt to be very skeptical about this feeling.
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I think the number of IPv6 addresses is supposed to allocate something like 2^34 IPs per atom in the universe, or some equally absurdly large number. I think we'll be OK for a while if that's actually the case.
From Wikipedia:
The very large IPv6 address space supports a total of 2^128 (about 3.4×103^8) addresses—or approximately 5×10^28 (roughly 2^95) addresses for each of the roughly 6.8 billion (6.8×10^9) people alive in 2010.[13] In another perspective, this is the same number of IP addresses per person as the number of atoms in a metric ton of carbon.
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Gah, that should be 3.4x10^38, not 3.4x103^8. But you get the idea. Maybe once we get IPv6 deployed, we can work on getting superscript text to stay as such on the clipboard.
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3/4 x 10^38 addresses is only enough to address the atoms in about 10^15kg of material -- hardly anything at all, really. Slightly less unrealistically, if we made IP-addressible robots the size and mass of a smallish bacterium (1 pg), that is enough addresses for 10^23 kg or about 1% of the mass of the Earth. Doesn't seem unreasonable that we could need more addresses than that, although probably not within 100 years.
Another scenario I can imagine is addressing points in space-time, in the context of route
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Apples are better than oranges; they're whiter.
IPv6 doesn't provide 2^128 independently routable addresses. The design of the system is such that routing decisi
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IPv6 doesn't provide 2^128 independently routable addresses. The design of the system is such that routing decisions may only be made on the first 64 bits of address, the remaining 64 bits being reserved for local network addressing.
Something similar was true of the original IPv4 spec, but the limitation was circumvented by changes to routing protocols. Could something similar be done with IPv6 if necessary?
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It only seemed inconceivable that IPv4 would run out because it was never expected to be used by pretty much everybody - it was originally thought the Internet would only be used in some government labs, military faclities, academia, and a few defense contractors. For the scope of that particular problem, 32 bits was conceivably "enough". However, the Internet grew out of that "scope" and become a globally available common communications system. Suddenly the old scope was no longer sufficient, so the IETF *
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can anyone see a way that IPv6 address space could run out in (say) 50-100 years?
Hardly conceivable. The worse I can get is by imagining exponentially reproducing nanobots (and enough resources to sustain that growth).
Some estimations are giving 10^11 neurons in a human brain. Roughly 2^37. Let's say there will be 17*10^9 human in 100 years: 2^34. That's 2^71 human neurons...
If you imagine a constant allocation rate to fill 2^128 addresses in 100 years, that would be 10^23 addresses allocated each microsecond (2^128/(100*365.25*24*3600*10^6)).
IMHO, there is definitely some margin.
Humbug! (Score:2)
It will pass silently. Just like the Millennium Bug.
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About 75 for me.
Cue the Ostriches (Score:5, Insightful)
We will just NAT the NATed NATed NeTed NAT and run the entire internet on a single IP address TRA-LA!
Then there's the free market cool-aid crowd who can't see why bidding wars driving the price of a single IP into the thousands a year is a big deal.
Next up, the "It's so HAAAAAAAAaaaaaRRRRRRRRrrrd!" crowd who don't understand why they should burn their geek card for saying that. That and their close relatives who still haven't realized that very simple firewall rules grant 100% of the security NAT does.
Re:Cue the Ostriches (Fixed it) (Score:2)
I, for one, welcome our new IPv6 overlords (Score:5, Insightful)
Fast forward to 2010, 4-byte IPv4 address running out. A new protocol exists but much of the old software and networks cannot use them. The only solution is to hire a massive number of programmers and rewrite the software..
Think of this, every piece of software on every computer that accesses the internet, has to be rewritten. How big is that codebase? A lot larger than Y2K. I can see this pulling in programmer after programmer like some huge vortex, in a race to be done before last address is given out..
You see why I welcome the new of IPv4. The end of the recession in the tech industry and plethora of new job.
US IPv6 (Score:2)
ARIN has made small IPv6 address acquisition expensive and complicated.
Two things really need to happen. Large providers need to be forced to offer IPv6 to the doorstep.
In order to prevent the fiber rip-off perpetuated on the American people, any monetary reimbursement to be made only after the fact, but the claim and the validation (by trusted 3rd party or gubmint) of completion should be streamlined (under 90 days).
The U.S. gubmint needs to claim, finance (or declare eminent domain on) the allocation of a
What are you doing to get on the IPv6 train? (Score:4, Insightful)
We hear plenty of people acting as if we can duct tape IPv4 for ever and plug their ears at the shear mention of IPv6. The truth is instead of spending energy trying to hold afloat a sinking ship, it may be time to start putting the gang-plank out to that shiny new boat that can take us the rest of the way. It doesn't make sense to wait for the boat to be sunk before jumping ship, since you will find yourself having deal with bigger issues. Then again overpopulation and lack of natural resources may have started world war three in a few years, so none of this is worth worrying about ;)
For those of you that have already decided that its time to make the move, what steps have you put in place to ensure you get to IPv6 in one piece.
BTW Akamai is already working on upgrading its network to support IPv6 [networkworld.com] and have a target date of 2011. The admit that its going to be a tough challenge, but at least they have recognised it makes sense to start moving now, rather than later.
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I'd like to see you try.
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Yes! Let's revoke blocks from AT&T and Level 3! Then we can hand out addresses to everyone that suddenly and mysteriously lost connectivity.
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Believe it or not, people have suggested that very thing on Slashdot before.
Re:How about a revoke? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do we have to have this conversation every single time the issue comes up? gods...
We have allocated 14 /8 networks since January of 2010 (source: http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.txt [iana.org] )....meaning we go through about 1.5 /8s every month. Reclaiming a /8 will take more than a couple weeks, so the simple fact is that reclamation isn't worth the effort: we would burn through several /8s in the time it would take us to reclaim one of them.
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We use up almost 2 /8's every month.
You could go through every one of those and fight the massive legal battle to get them all back ( probably taking us well beyond the date when we are out anyway ), and you have only bought a year or two.
Save yourself the trouble and deploy IPv6, instead of making lawyers rich and then deploying IPv6.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
We use up almost 2 /8's every month.
Don't you mean 1/4 every month? Remember! Always simplify your fractions.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Again?... (Score:4, Insightful)
This has been debunked so many times, in this thread and others, that I'm fully in favor of banning anyone who mentions it ever again.
Re: (Score:2)
This sounds like a previous employer of mine. They have a couple hundred employees at most and have an entire class B. They could easily NAT their entire network since they use very few public IP addresses for services and use public IP addresses internally behind a firewall. I think they also have one or two class Cs as well only because they've been around for so long.
Re:Again?... (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet none of those would make more than a dent.
They're allocating /8s, even the addition of several /8s would only extend the time frame by a few to several months, compared to the siginifigant effort required to reclaim them.
Re:Again?... (Score:5, Informative)
To build on this post, we've gone through 14 /8s just since January of 2010. Reclaiming a /8 would buy not even a month, and it would take more than a month to reclaim it.
Reclamation is wasted effort. Implement IPv6.
Re: (Score:2)
It's important to have SSH access in case of malfunction, so NAT'ing a device is not recommended. It's in the manual.
Temporary Fix (Score:2)
That's the same mentality as pawning the stuff in your house because your unemployment insurance is about to run out, rather than putting yourself to work and getting a job.
What happens when you run out of IP blocks to reclaim? (Please don't say NAT.)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually there are plenty of places where a /30 is used where they could go address less and use a loop back IP only so that gear goes from a /30 per point to point interface to a /32 for the whole box. In any event it's just wasted time we can not reclaim things fast enough to matter just move on to IPv6 and be done with it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No. IPv4 specifies that the host portion of the address with all-0's is the network address, and the all-1's address is the broadcast address for that subnet. If you assign these to an actual host, you will break things very badly. Since a /31 would contain only address 0 and 1, it has no addresses that can be assigned to a host. The /30 subnet is the smallest block that can be given out.
Re: (Score:2)
We have assigned 14 /8's _this year_ so far, so if you magically get all of those back, you don't even get a years delay. I guess when you say 'That's a LOT of unused IP's' the missing information is that 'We go through a LOT of IP's'.
Spend that effort and money on deploying IPv6 instead.
Re: (Score:2)
The home routers and modems don't support IPv6. Mine certainly doesn't, even though I got it quite recently from the phone company.
Re:Why not do multi-level branching? (Score:4, Informative)
So what happens to all the companies that have already spent thousands of dollars to get an IPv4 block get their addresses taken away from them?
How would you deal with all the internet sites that are now completely unroutable?
If both sides are NATd how would you communicate?
How would you get around the port restriction of NAT? You're assuming 1 ip == 1 computer.
Why would to waste time coming up with some contrived solution that takes much longer and is less supported then simply switching to IPv6 without problems?