After IPv4, How Will the Internet Function? 320
An anonymous reader writes "36 countries in the world have over 100% per-capita usage of mobile phones, and this is driving a real crunch on IPv4 addresses as more and more of these devices are data-capable. The mobile network operators are acting fast to deploy IPv6, and T-Mobile USA has had an IPv6-only trial going on for over 9 months now using NAT64 to bridge to IPv4 Internet content. It is interesting to note that the original plan for IPv6 transition, dual-stack, has failed since IPv4 addresses are effectively already exhausted for many people who want them. Dual-stack also causes many other issues and has forced the IETF to generate workarounds for end users called happy eyeballs (implying that eyeballs are not happy with dual-stack), and a big stink around DNS white-listing. How will you ensure that your network, users, and services continue to work in the address-fractured world of the future where some users have only IPv4 (AT&T ), some users have only IPv6 (mobile and machine-to-machine as well as developing countries), and other Internet nodes have both?"
Dual stack failed? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems ludicrous to claim that the dual stack idea has failed when more and more devices are suddenly finding themselves with IPv6 addresses and are putting them to use. My home and work LANs are dual stack and everything Just Works. For being a failed experiment, it works amazingly well in everyday usage.
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Right now, today, everything has an IPv4 address that needs one. Junk technology line NAT will keep IPv4 limping along for a while until IPv6 finds its momentum. But beyond that, the root problem comes down to networks not transitioning quickly enough. If they won't rapidly adopt something as relatively simple as dual stack, what makes you think they'll willingly and quickly roll out a wholesale change that actually breaks stuff?
Re:Break Stuff (Score:2)
What about variations on that theme we're all hearing about the Premium Internet - can they hook that stuff up to nice new IP6 addresses, with not a titty to be found, leaving the "ghetto" kids in IP4?
Re:Dual stack failed? (Score:4, Informative)
That's remarkably ignorant. The possibility of reclaiming those class A addresses has been studied and put aside, as it would be too costly and, assuming we get every single class A back, would only give us about 1.5 more years. This is too much cost for too little gain, so the efforts were focused on migrating to IPv6 instead.
You might want to read the wikipedia article about it : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion [wikipedia.org]
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Ignorant? the only reason there would be difficulty and/or substantial cost with companies relinquishing large unused blocks of a CLASS A is because they have a horrible subnetting system already in place. aka bad network architects. The issue, from your link, and from my comment is (copied from it):
Re:Dual stack failed? (Score:4, Insightful)
in reality, if someone does anything even remotely competent, it should be a 1 day process, maximum - after all, using NAT or IPv6 internally should make it even less of an issue.
I think if you were to estimate the time it takes to change the company fleet of cars from summer to winter tires, you'd budget about ten seconds per car - that's how long it takes in Formula One, right? Companies don't plan to redo their network structure, ever. They do as little as possible as rarely as possible because it's pure cost. What you're looking at is an endless amount of cruft with IPs hard coded all over PCs, routers, configuration files, scripts, scheduled jobs, firewall configurations, stored server information or URLs, documentation, the works. Sure you could blow away millions of dollars on optimizing "network reoganization" process, making the company a world leader in that until someone with the money asks "Why the f*ck are we spending all this money on THIS? What in heaven's name do we get for it?" and you'd better have a better answer "So we can give some IP addresses back to ICANN for free." Otherwise cleaning up all that cruft will be on your project time and project cost, and if you still think you can do it in a day you're a monkey on crack.
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This is simply wrong. Please don't spout this anymore - you are spreading a myth.
There are about 40 /8 blocks allocated to organizations.
Since 2004 we've used at least an average 10 blocks each year and I'm not including the rush in 2010 when 19 blocks were allocated.
If we could magically reclaim all 40 of these /8 blocks today it would buy us no more than 4 years. And remember - those organizations that lost their space would be eligible to immediate regain some percentage of their space based on their a
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Only that it would buy more time during the transition
The IPv6 transition doesn't need time, it already had tons of that. What IPv6 needs pressure to force people to actually start doing it and for that a shortage of IPv4 is actually a good thing.
Re:Dual stack failed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Engineering of application-layer protocols is far easier when everyone is addressable. The deployment of NAT has had a cascading effect on many application layer protocols that would have had a simple, obvious implementation were every node equally addressable. Instead, every new application protocol has to consider and work around NAT.
So sure, as we stand today that ship has sailed and NAT has created a hierarchy of nodes that is unavoidable in today's network engineering, but I wonder how much innovation has been stifled by time spent working around NAT.
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If all the devices in your network only speak IPv6, then the missing you would just need a router that translates IPv6 to IPv4 (of course it will may also need to convert any DNS A record to a DNS AAAA record). A subset of the IPv6 range is actually allocated to cover the IPv4 address range - basically any address with a maximum value of 2^32 in the 2^128 bit range is an IPv4 address. So your IPv4 address 216.34.181.45 as an IPv6 address is ::D822:B52D.
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To be fair, we were SUPPOSED to be doing this back in 2005 or so at the latest. By this point, IPv4 was supposed to be nearly irrelevant to the world except as a historical note.
Dual stack is just fine. The people who put off even trying it untinl now are the failures.
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Dual stack WAS fine. The people who put off implementing a perfectly reasonable solution until it would no longer work have doomed us to increasingly ridiculous schemes to clean up their mess.
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IPv6 is not at all complicated. It does have a few more complicated OPTIONS that 90% or more of users can completely disregard without a problem.
The addresses are longer, but that simply cannot be helped. How would you vastly expand the global namespace without having a longer name?
Even without ISP support, there's 6to4. That would have been at least good enough to gain some experience with it. Now, when your ISP does get up to speed you'll have even more to catch up on.
Complicated is when you request a new
Re:Dual stack failed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dual stack works but is has failed in the sense that it can't be the singular solution during the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.
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IPv6 is still not nearly as "polished" as IPv4. Talk at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin: "Recent advances in IPv6 insecurities" [events.ccc.de] in about 4 hours [timeanddate.com]. The talk is in English, a live stream available. [fem-net.de]
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My D-Link router
I found your problem!
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If someone can't afford to buy a router that's hundreds of dollars, at least look at MikroTik (routerboard) hardware. Similar price range without the brain dead functionality of the typical D-Link or Linksys.
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If someone can't afford to buy a router that's hundreds of dollars, at least look at MikroTik (routerboard) hardware. Similar price range without the brain dead functionality of the typical D-Link or Linksys.
Or if they get (or already have) a Linksys, installing dd-wrt [dd-wrt.com] turns it in to a pretty decent little box. That's been my personal preference over the last couple of years.
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I use openwrt myself, but dd-wrt was my 'gateway drug' :)
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Pretty much every PC, server or even smart phone OS ships with dual stack. Enable IPv6 on your home gateway and poof, IPv6 in your PC lights up. AT the same time, your PC can keep using IPv4 for non IPv6 web sites, or for that old Ethernet enabled printer in the basement. It works pretty much as expected. Not having unique IPv4 addresses does not change anything to th
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The solution is probably carrier-grade NAT for IPv4 (so you only get a private IPv4 address) with dual-stack. But that has it's own problems.
IPv6 of course (Score:2)
IPv6 of course.
Client sites have nothing to worry about straight away, unless they want to access the new IPv6 server sites that will be coming online. The issue will be new sites needing IP addresses will be IPv6 only. If everyone started the move to IPv6 today, then the internet, from the average joe point of view, will look pretty much the same. The problem is that they will start seeing the breakages because we are almost out of IPv4 addresses before anyone has really started upgrading their infrastruct
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IPv6 of course.
The issue will be new sites needing IP addresses will be IPv6 only.
"Not an issue, it's a feature!"
This almost out nonsense needs to stop (Score:5, Interesting)
Geeks should know better. The way it is talked about, you'd think in a couple days someone will plug in a device and there'll be no more IPs. Not hardly. We are approaching the first milestone in an eventual crunch. That is that there will be no more addresses not assigned to a registrar. The remaining class-As will be handed out to the regional registrars. While that means at the highest level we are "out" that doesn't mean we are out on a user level.
I'm not saying that we don't need to move to IPv6 but people on /. keep talking like we are going to be out of every single IP address real soon. No, rather we will be starting a process of scarcity. So far there's been no real scarcity of IP addresses. That will change. However all that means is that costs will change.
That will actually probably be a good thing for IPv6 adoption. If you are a company and want some static IPs and your ISP says "Sure, you can have IPv4 addresses at $30/month each, or as many IPv6 addresses as you want for free," well maybe you decide there's good reason to go with IPv6 and upgrade your stuff.
Re:This almost out nonsense needs to stop (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are a company and want some static IPs and your ISP says "Sure, you can have IPv4 addresses at $30/month each, or as many IPv6 addresses as you want for free,"
That won't work. Problem is, if you are a company without an IPv4 address, you are not reachable by 99% of Internet users, i.e. you don't exist.
Companies will pay whatever price, though. They have to. But to suggest that the company can solve this by migrating to IPv6 is short-sighted. The company can only solve this by migrating all of its intended customers to IPv6, in other words: they can't.
You have made me realize an interesting point, though: as long as ISPs do not migrate their users to IPv6, they can charge extortionary prices for the remaining IPv4 addresses; ISPs have an incentive to create this artificial scarcity. Time to call for government regulation? ;)
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IPv6 machines all have to run in dual stack, which means they all need an IPv4 address, which means IPv6 is solving exactly zero problems.
To quote Robert Bolt: "I wish we could all have good luck, all the time! I wish we had wings! I wish rainwater was beer! But it isn't!".
The IPv6 transition plan amounts to--and in fact simply is--wishful thinking. If everyone, everywhere transi
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it is standing in the way of a real and workable solution to the problem.
So no, IPv6 is not the solution. IPv6 has simply become part of the problem.
So let me guess the solution ... "AOL keywords"?
What a load of nonsense (Score:2)
No country has close to 100% of its residents connected via multiple mobile Internet connections at the same time, and many countries provide a NATed private IP anyway.
Dual stack is an absolutely fine solution for the current Internet and the "many other issues" usually means someone is about to sell an over-complicated and unnecessary transition solution. But wait, "Happy Eyeballs", ah... today's salesman comes from Cisco. And I find it very difficult to read a proposed standard for seamless transition whe
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> No country has close to 100% of its residents connected via multiple mobile Internet connections at the same time
My Android phone syncs to Google while I'm not paying attention. If I had an iPhone, it would do similar thing for handling push messages.
> many countries provide a NATed private IP anyway.
Err... you mean company, right?
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My Android phone syncs to Google while I'm not paying attention.
OK; does that mean you have to maintain a static IP connection 24/7? Does the same apply to even a large minority?
Err... you mean company, right?
I was thinking of typing that but decided against it. The practice generally varies by country/region and telecoms corporations are so intertwined with national and transnational governments that it would be intellectually dishonest to imply otherwise.
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After having worked for an ISP I can tell you that most of the customers will want to log in at the same time so you really do need an ip for everyone.
Large-scale NAT in Qatar (Score:2)
many countries provide a NATed private IP anyway.
Err... you mean company, right?
Countries too [wikipedia.org].
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And the "solution" is only needed because so many have screwed up their v6 so badly. Often because they didn't realize that when vendors (like Cisco) said v6 ready, they meant horribly crippled in capacity but technically it will route a v6 packet or 2 so marketing called it good.
Mobile, home and small office equipment? (Score:2)
Either all that stuff needs be upgraded to IPv6 or operators will need to deploy IPv6-to-IPv4 gateways.
If you're lucky you can mod your routers with OpenWRT [openwrt.org] or its derivatives [dd-wrt.com].
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Most of those items are using IPv6, at least now. One of the ITU 4G requirements is that the hardware can use IPv6. Most phones bought in the last four years already have IPv6 address from the provider. I noticed that I loose my address on my phone when I leave an EVDO or LTE area with my phone. So maybe 1x networks lack the ability to carry IPv6, really don't know the answer. However, most phones either use IPv6 to talk to tower and IPv4 the rest of the way or dual-stack, depends on the phone and carr
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Explain to me why all that stuff needs to be upgraded, but other stuff - your stuff and my stuff - doesn't?
The short answer: (Score:2)
lots of IP4 only cable / dsl modems and routers (Score:2)
lots of IP4 only cable / dsl modems and routers are out there. Do any of E-mta (that the cable force you to rent (if you have cable phone) do IPV6?)
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Do any of E-mta (that the cable force you to rent (if you have cable phone) do IPV6?)
Can you find one that does not? I believe a DOCSIS 3.0 certification requirement is ipv6.
As with cellphones, the question is rarely what the manufacturer made possible, but what your provider felt like allowing you to do.
Wrong problem (Score:2)
We aren't out of IPv4 addresses, we are out of IPv4 block allocations. This started back in 1992 when Cisco and Bay Networks decided that forcing new allocations into consolidated routes was easier than building routers that could cope with 2^24 (or even 2^32) unique routes. The original / notation wasn't about talking about /16 or 24 but /36 was a way to describe taking 4 extra bits from the source and destination port range. That system would allow most existing hardware (even from the late 80s) to wor
Easy.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks to finally embracing NAT64, this becomes easy.
If you are providing 'server' access, you pretty much *have* to get an IPv4 address, and preferably an IPv6, but not absolutely required for now. Short term, don't sweat it, medium term go dual stack at first opportunity that presents itself, long term you may take down the IPv4 network one day, but don't explicitly plan when that day will come. The common strategy may continue to be ignore v6 entirely, however moving dual stack at your pace ensures that in the slim, but real possibility that your next-hop provider stops IPv4 routing or starts penalizing IPv4 use via unreasonable fees won't put you in a tight spot. The scenario of next-hop penalizing/dropping v4 is the only scenario I see as sufficient motivation to get servers to bother with v6 at all. I think even brand new servers will do what it takes to secure IPv4 space, which may free up some given the next point...
If you are setting up a network as 'clients', you can get by with either IPv6 or IPv4 for a while. Giving dual stack when available is nice, but whatever you have would be sufficient. ISPs without IPv4 addresses available for new clients should rapidly pursue IPv6 for residential customers and give them most internet via NAT64 on their end. Doing IPv4 private addresses would doom them to crappy service indefinitely, whilst IPv6 would only be semi-crappy for a more temporary interval. If you *really* want v6 to catch on, then start allowing v4 addresses to be carved up more free-market style. All technical experts agree that this would completely fubar the v4 network performance in aggregate, but you would entice adoption of v6+NAT64 with the profitable opportunity to reclaim addresses and sell them to places that *really* need them. The v6 network would be nice and cleanly routed, and getting on the v6 network just becomes that much more important.
Some would argue that any sort of NAT at the carrier plays right into the hands of those who hate P2P networks, including NAT64 as those behind NAT64 are unreachable by peers who are v4 only. However, the reality is there are two possible outcomes, residences getting 10/8, 172.16/12, or 192.168/16 which *completely* breaks P2P (and probably many wireless routers presuming those prefixes won't come from the WAN), or NAT64 where the P2P graph may not be as connected, but all v6 peers can reach each other. Since P2P designs are inherently tolerant of unreliable ability to reach peers, this should suffice for a while.
Major architects in v6 world advocated the dual-stack method as the way to theoretically move on with no thought to the practical motivations to move forward. They hated NAT in every way as it breaks the peering model they hold dear. They hated accepting the practical view that most of the internet are clients and few are servers. If they had embraced it from the beginning, then I suspect most residences would be v6 by now.
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Sure, it will break all the P2P traffic that relies on IPv4-only, but that will quickly force those services to support IPv6.
It will prety much suck for quite some time. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is the asshats that came up with IPV6. It should be scrapped here and now. IPV6 is just plain and simple flat out stupid.
Using a hexadecimal address was pure stupidity. All you needed to do was turn each segment of an IP address into a word sized ( 64 bit addressing ) or a long sized ( the magic 128 bit ) value instead of a byte sized value since:
2600000.35.1254.1785
Is one hell of a lot easier to remember then
2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334.
And using the colon for address separation is equally as stupid since that is how we designate port numbers. Ohh wait I know don't forget to surround the unrememberable POS with square brackets!
To make IPV6 useful it requires anything and everything to have a DNS entry since it is pretty much unrememberable and quite frankly I have devices that I never want in the DNS system yet I will be pretyy much forced to since trying to remember an IPV6 address will give me a fucking stroke.
And lets not forget you omit parts of the address eg: 2001:0db8:85a3::0000:8a2e:0370:7334 but ONLY once! I mean why did they even bother with this crap, is that supposed to make it easier?
IPV6 was written by a bunch of head up their ass academics, and even if the members of the committee were not academics their head was still firmly planted in their ass.
The guys who came up with IPV4 new they would have to work with it and made it pretty damn simple in most respects, but these clowns have turned something that should have just made the address space bigger into to something that will require massive kludges to transition since it will pretty much cause a mandatory replacement of pretty much 90% of the hardware out there.
Never ever let an academic design anything. They will fuck it up every time.
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trying to remember an IPV6 address will give me a fucking stroke
Awesome post.
There just isn't anything amazing enough in v6 to warrant the switch from an understandable, base10 system to an insanely complex base16 one, especially when half the people smart enough to understand it are genuinely concerned that it will break everything.
Why didn't they just use base36 addresses instead? At least those would be nice and short.
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Why not four UTF-32/UCS-4 characters instead of four decimal numbers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-32/UCS-4 [wikipedia.org]
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All you needed to do was turn each segment of an IP address into a word sized ( 64 bit addressing ) or a long sized ( the magic 128 bit ) value instead of a byte sized value since:
2600000.35.1254.1785
Is one hell of a lot easier to remember then
2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334.
Whats your plan for delegated reverse DNS for a /48 allocation? (This should be interesting)
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The number one obstacle to IPV6 deployment is an inability to make sense of the addressing scheme. If it's hard to wrap your head around what should be a simple concept, it stops working.
People can understand addresses that are blocks of numbers like IPV4. Expanding the numbers used above 255, or adding a 5th space would have made MORE sense from a humans point of view. It really is like it was designed by peopl
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It really is like it was designed by people who forget that DNS is not self-administering, and people have to deal with these things even if DNS has gone down.
You should be thankful they got rid of DNS A6 and stuck to AAAA records. Oh you'd really love those.
Once you set up your automation, the whole situation is really quite boring.
Re:It will prety much suck for quite some time. (Score:5, Informative)
Using a hexadecimal address was pure stupidity.
Hexadecimal is used because a network is designated by an N-bit prefix, and it's *much* harder to manipulate bits in decimal, especially when each number is 16 or 32 bits long.
And using the colon for address separation is equally as stupid since that is how we designate port numbers.
Once you've gone to hexadecimal, using dots to separate the address leads to ambiguity. Is a.b.c.d.e.f.beef.de an IP address or a hostname?
it is pretty much unrememberable
With IPv6, your network will have its own 48 to 64-bit prefix. Once you remember that prefix, you can choose your suffixes to be as simple as you'd like.
you omit parts of the address ... but ONLY once!
You can only omit one run of zeros, because otherwise the length of each run would be ambiguous.
Re:It will prety much suck for quite some time. (Score:5, Informative)
It's difficult to manipulate binary digits in hexadecimal, too. I don't see any advantage to this.
Every hex digit represents exactly 4 binary digits. If you flip a bit in a hexadecimal number, then exactly one hex digit will change. To know how it will change, you only need to remember the binary values of 0-F.
With decimal, you could flip a bit and change every digit in the number.
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> IPv6 is a potential privacy nightmare.
You have a loony definition of "privacy". I'm sure you will be able hide your IPv6 address behind a proxy, just you now conceal your street address by having all your snail-mail delivered to a PO box (after all, you wouln't want anyone to know where you live) and never give out your unlisted phone number.
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You don't have to make long addresses if you don't want to. You can drop leading zeros and the :: compression replaces any range of zeros, not only one set. So a prefix you might get from your ISP becomes:
2001:DB8:A::/48
I can remember that easily and then make up a plan such as "/64 corresponds to VLAN". Say you have VLAN 5 and a statically assigned host 9 on that VLAN.
2001:DB8:A:5::9/64
Although it still has scary A-F in the number. Or you can stick with the crazy long addresses if that's easier.
Re:It will prety much suck for quite some time. (Score:5, Informative)
All you needed to do was turn each segment of an IP address into a word sized ( 64 bit addressing ) or a long sized ( the magic 128 bit ) value instead of a byte sized value since: 2600000.35.1254.1785 Is one hell of a lot easier to remember then 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334.
You don't know what you are talking about. Of course '2600000.35.1254.1785' is easier to remember, you aren't using all the bits. If you used the full 64 bits, it's going to be longer no matter what base you are using. Your hex example, if you converted it to decimal, would look just as bad: 536939960.2242052096.35374.57701172. It's not actually easier to remember.
::FFFF:192.168.0.1. Not particularly harder to remember than an IPv4 address now. IPv4 was designed by people who thought before talking. Unlike you, apparently. Work on that: try to figure stuff out before blathering.
There is also a shortcut built in for IPv6 addresses. For example, if you had an IPv4 LAN with addresses in the 192.168.0.1 range, you could represent them in IPv6 with
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2600000.35.1254.1785
Here's a subnet mask for that. FFFF:FFFF. Now, in your head, quickly apply that to your base10 IP.
Who uses IPs anymore anyway except in a few corner cases for debugging? Use DNS or add an address to your fav list. Post its also work great for doing general network work where you need to know an IP.
Why assign IPv4 to phones? (Score:2)
Make a 'Your Own IP' feature for the cell providers which gives you the option of your own unique IP. Everyone else can just pull from a rotating pool of ___ IPs.
I don't think most average iPhone users give a crap if they have IPv4/IPv6 support or what their IP is at the moment, as long as their phone works and they can play Angry Birds.
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Make a 'Your Own IP' feature for the cell providers which gives you the option of your own unique IP. Everyone else can just pull from a rotating pool of ___ IPs .... as long as their phone works
And when you have more subscribers than IP space available...
Even RFC1918 space 10/8 if by some miracle of perfect efficiency were used 100% maybe in a giant worldwide VLAN, you'd only support 16 megacustomers. But thats small potatoes for the big monopoly cellphone providers.
Lets say you decide to steal the entire ipv4 space. thats only 4 billion cellphones, so 1/3 the population won't get one.
It turns out to be way more expense and work to patch around the limitations of ipv4 than to upgrade to ipv6 and
Movistar - Argentina - Mobile - 10.x.x.x network (Score:2)
Internet is a series of peaches (Score:2)
ZOMG THE SKY [isn't] FALLING! (Score:2)
Guys, look at This list of Class A [wikipedia.org].
Prudential insurance? A class A? Almost 17 million addresses?
Ford motor company? General electric?
DoD has 11 class A chunks? That's almost 200 million addresses. You could give almost everybody in the united states a mobile phone with that.
These are just the most obvious ones. Does Apple really need 17 million addresses? Does HP? Xerox PARC?
This FUD has been getting spread around since the late 1990s. I think we're fine, and I think we're going to be fine for quite
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Assuming that the chunks will be released to the public, then yes, you are right.
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You listed 17 /8 blocks in your post. If you managed to reclaim every single one of those, you'd almost make up for IANA's 19 allocations in 2010.
And let us know how it goes when you try to take those addresses from the US military.
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Having over 100% per capita usage just means that there are more people with two (or more) mobile phones than there are without mobile phones. Given that in the office I work in (~25 people), at least 5 have both corporate issued phones (Blackberries) and personal phones (mostly iPhones, to my great dismay), I don't find this all that surprising.
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Foreigners sometimes have service, too. I've got prepaid AT&T and T-Mobile accounts for my US trips (each has different advantages), so I count toward 2 Americans having service, even though I'm not American and don't live in the country. 100% saturation merely means there are as many active lines as there are people, but it says nothing of how those lines are distributed.
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Why does it bother you what other people choose for a personal phone? If it's truly a personal phone, you can refuse to support it, given that they have a company phone as well.
He probably works at an android software development shop (just kidding...)
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You mean like...
"One phone for family, one phone for work, one phone for the girlfriend, one for the wife, one for the other girlfriend...", and one evil company that binds them all in darkness.
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From The Wire
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Don't forget one phone with DNS, so in darkness bind() them.
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> That already exists, it's called "using both".
Seems like that would be IPv10.
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What happened to IPv5?
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Re:IPv7 (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2003/06/what_ever_happened_to_ipv5.html [oreillynet.com]
It was assigned to an interesting, but ultimately not implemented, protocol.
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In the real world ( read as 'unix world' ) odd numbers are always "experimental" .. There is a 5 .. but it was never meant for mass consumption
Which is why OSPFv3 is used with IPv6.
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Maybe you should Google what IPv5 was for. Here, I'll help. Read this [oreillynet.com].
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Because a lot of services don't work well through NAT. VPN and voice services are good examples.
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it doesnt scale up well. NAT is also somewhat heavy on routers and massive NAT tables would require investment in equipment.
essentially all modern computing platforms are IP6 capable, the best choice is to make the switch and not mess with large scale NAT.
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Funny, my home NATed systems seem to work with VPNs, Skype, and all that. What's the problem again? I suppose it's something to do with the routers?
This is partly because a number of these services use NAT busting techniques and I suspect in other cases you have had to do port mapping on your router.
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IPv4 NAT can cause problems for some communications protocols. These include, but are not limited to:
Things will only get worse on IPv4 when the ISPs increasingly move towards carrier NAT [wikipedia.org] as a solution to avoid the perceived complexities if IPv6, when really it's just an excuse to do less work and squeeze more money out of the users.
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Skype relies on other people running Skype with a public IP address acting as a proxy. When everybody goes NAT, Skype breaks down as well.
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my home NATed systems seem to work with VPNs, Skype, and all that. What's the problem again?
Using a proxy server to communicate between two machines behind NAT doubles billable Internet traffic, costs money for the provider of the proxy server, and creates a point of failure at the proxy server.
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Here is an example of one that doesn't
I wrote a program that provides streaming text to the hearing impaired. It uses a smaller webserver on the providers computer that serves a java applet and then streams the text to it.
If the provider is behind a NAT router they are unreachable by the viewers unless they are on the same network.
That can be a problem sometimes with remote events.
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How can you route packets to the location the cell phone is currently roaming at?
Your phone would probably need a unique ID and a service where it could announce its current IP address. When you try connecting to your cell phone, then a check with that service would be made and you have the IP you need to talk on. The simplest of solution would be for your phone to have a unique DNS name and then using dynamic IP service. In this case, even if the IP is in flux the name isn't. The rest is basic network architecture.
TCP handoff? (Score:2)
The simplest of solution would be for your phone to have a unique DNS name and then using dynamic IP service.
Which would still cause connections to time out and the parties to have to reconnect at the new IP address. Or is there a way to hand off a TCP connection from one IP to another in the same way that a cellular voice connection is handed off from one tower to another?
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Your smartphone might not need a public IP address but it certainly could benefit by having a unique IP address within the mobile operators network, right?
Do you know China Mobile has hundreds of millions of subscribers. Did you know even T-Mobile has 150 million subscribers globally? Any guess as to how large private IP space is? Hint - it isn't big enough for any of the major operators to supply a unique IP within their networks.
These large operators have had to choose between partitioning their subscr
Each region could have its own /8 (Score:2)
Any guess as to how large private IP space is? Hint - it isn't big enough for any of the major operators to supply a unique IP within their networks.
How big is a service region? Each region could get its own /8 of sixteen million IPv4 addresses in 10.* for connections back to the IPv4 net.
These large operators have had to choose between partitioning their subscribers which makes phone-to-phone applications a mess
Or they could just require a land-based proxy server between phones for phone-to-phone applications where neither side is on an "enterprise" service level agreement. According to acceptable use policies that I've read, "running a server" isn't something that one is supposed to do on a telephone.
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A smartphone may have rich applications or be used for tethering, opening it up to all sorts of awkwardness. If game servers and peer 2 peer applications try to run and fail, it will look bad.
Also, as others note, carrier level NAT is a demanding proposition that will degrade performance. With NAT64, the same thing is incurred, but there is the likelihood that over time, a smaller proportion of traffic will hit the NAT alleviating the degradation. That possibility does not exist with v4 only NAT using pr
Run a server and get TOS'd (Score:2)
game servers
Have you read the typical Acceptable Use Policy of home Internet access lately? Game servers are supposed to be coloed in datacenters the way CCP, Blizzard, Zynga, etc. do it, not using one of the clients as a server the way most Xbox Live games do it.
peer 2 peer applications
Carriers have been seeking affiliations with MPAA studios in order to use "watch movies" as a bullet point to attract paying subscribers, and most noninfringing files too big for HTTP are also too big for the 5 GB/mo cap on typical 3G plans. So why would carri
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If IP4 space isn't being used it should be reclaimed by ARIN
Prove "isn't being used" in a cost effective non-spoofable manner. I guarantee its impossible.
For that matter, just defining "isn't being used" is going to be a heck of a job.
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And as reiterated in various publications and on this very site over and over again....
Reclaiming IPv4 addresses is a waste of time as the reclaimed addresses will be used faster than one can reclaim more.
Band-aids wont work.
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You clearly have not heard of our solution in the lab: use complex numbers for each octet.
Oh you also oppose the tyrrany of the powers-of-two addressing space? Excellent. Personally I've been working on an Egyptian fractions representation. Imagine the entire IP addressing space between the intervals of zero and one. And we'll never need a larger space, merely subdivide more aggressively. Regular expressions and routing tables are a bit tedious of course. But, string handling technology has been neglected for years by the tyrrany of floating point accelerators, its time for a new paradigm.