Whatever Happened To the IPv4 Address Crisis? 574
alphadogg writes "In February 2011, the global Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the last blocks of IPv4 address space to the five regional Internet registries. At the time, experts warned that within months all available IPv4 addresses in the world would be distributed to ISPs. Soon after that, unless everyone upgraded to IPv6, the world would be facing a crisis that would hamper Internet connectivity for everyone. That crisis would be exacerbated by the skyrocketing demand for IP addresses due to a variety of factors: the Internet of Things (refrigerators needing their own IP address); wearables (watches and glasses demanding connectivity); BYOD (the explosion of mobile devices allowed to connect to the corporate network); and the increase in smartphone use in developing countries. So, here we are three years later and the American Registry for Internet Numbers is still doling out IPv4 addresses in the United States and Canada. Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?"
NAT (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:NAT (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup. NAT isn't really too troublesome on phones since they rarely run servers, are usually connecting to cloud-based services, and they move around so much that they'd probably have an IP change every 10 minutes if you handled them like a traditional routable IP.
If I were using cellular service as my actual home ISP it would drive me nuts, though.
IPv6 is needed more than it ever was. We just haven't reached the end of v4 yet.
Re:NAT (Score:5, Funny)
We need to get the ground work done so that IPv8 can be introduced smoothly - the galaxy demands to be properly served...
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128 bits are enough for the whole solar system.
Let's wait for intelligent life to show up before we scare them away with our inability to quadruple the size of our addresses.
Re:NAT (Score:5, Funny)
Until each electron, proton, and neutron needs an address......and each quark....etc.
Re:NAT (Score:5, Informative)
This is far more troublesome for people who *do* run servers...
If you are getting abusive users from a mobile ISP, how do you ban those users?
Block the IP and you block every customer of that isp.
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well since you usually have to pay money anyways to get a static IP the users are unlikely to have static ip's anyhow even on their landline connections...
Re:NAT (Score:5, Informative)
Re:NAT (Score:5, Informative)
depending on the provider you don't get a new ip address when do those things either. from my limited experiments with Comcast and Time Warner they give the same IP address to the same Mac address every time.
I replaced a router on both and got new ip addresses. however when i cloned the mac address from the old routers to the new I got the old ip addresses.
Now this is really limited. 4 routers on two service providers. so take it with a grain of salt and a shot of tequila .
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Re:NAT (Score:5, Informative)
Most ISPs assign staticish addresses. They are technically dynamic, but change very infrequently - in my case, no more than once or twice a year, baring a change of modem or network card.
Re:NAT (Score:5, Informative)
Any sort of peer-to-peer communication is problematic, if NAT is involved. Lots of the communication you want to do on phones is peer-to-peer in its nature, but actually implementations have often chosen inferior cloud based implementations, simply to work around NAT. Why else would you involve a cloud service, when what you really want to do is to move some data from one phone to another?
Additionally, even communication with cloud based services is problematic when NAT is involved.
Connecting to a cloud service in order to get a notification, once there is a new email or a new chat message is something you often want to do on a phone. But you cannot do that through a NAT, unless you a prepared to send a constant stream of packets to keep a connection tracking entry alive. Now your phone has to wake up every so often just to send another keepalive packet through the NAT. This consumes battery power, it also consumes bandwidth and if everybody does it, it consumes entries on the NAT.
If the NAT does run out of entries for connections, it will have to lower the lifetime of connections. That will lead to applications sending keepalives more frequently, and we are back in the same situation as before, only wasting more battery power and bandwidth.
NAT does not solve that problem, it actually makes it worse. You still have to keep track of the local IP you assigned to the phone if it is behind a NAT. The tracking of the IP address is not any harder just because it is a public address. But by introducing a CGN you introduce the requirement that all the traffic from the phone gets routed through that CGN even as the phone is moving. If you did not have the NAT layer, you only have the challenge of routing packets to the phone as it is moving, there is no need to get it through one particular NAT as well.
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Additionally, the DHCP server wouldn't know that a client had left, so the addresses would be occupied long after no longer being in use.
I agree with most of what you said, but there is no reason that the DHCP server couldn't know that the client had left. The cell tower knows what phones are and are not in the area. Plus, lease times could be really short - maybe a minute or two - even if that were not handled.
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The mom &
Re:NAT (Score:5, Insightful)
There are 2 dimensions to the IPv4 problem - the user end; and the server end. Except for newly formed companies looking to provide internet access to their users through a proxy server; the individual users are largely oblivious to the crisis; as you rightly mentioned.
But try hosting your own server (non-cloud provider) - your ISP forces you to acquire IPv6; and you have to jump through hoops to make it smoothly accessible over VPNs and the general inernet.
Probably the home router... (Score:5, Insightful)
When that particular comment was made, the ubiquity of the home router dolling out DHCP addresses probably wasn't considered. Nowadays, you only need one IP address for your home and let the router sort it out.
There's still a problem, but people seem to prefer to adapt and come up with (very) clever workarounds rather than get some new solution shoved down their throat that renders existing equipment obsolete for no good reason.
Re:Probably the home router... (Score:4, Insightful)
How does it even work any other way?
Are you/the article saying that it is possible to have a single connection to your ISP, but for every computer, fridge, toaster, TV, etc. to have its own global IP address?
Your ISP can give you a block of dynamic/static IP addresses, which your router assigns instead of 192.168.1.X?
Re:Probably the home router... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, that is exactly how IPv6 is supposed to work.
Possibly, but not necessarily even that. You could be set up to simply automatically generate IPv6 addresses from your MACs, and the ISP doesn't even explicitly grant you an address block.
Re:Probably the home router... (Score:5, Informative)
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And this is where fundamental assumption #1 of IPv6 falls flat. Even with IPv6, every endpoint will not be reachable.
This is the age of firewalls and all that (and even NAT provides a very basic level of firewalling). There's no guarantee that despite an endpoint having a publicly availabl
Re:Probably the home router... (Score:5, Informative)
That is not correct. A properly configured firewall does not cause nearly the same level of breakage as a NAT does.
That is true. NAT is hurting IPv6 deployment in many ways. Had NAT never been invented, we could all have been running IPv6 years ago, and the transition would have gone smoother. For example a large part of the difficulties in using IPv6 through tunnels is entirely due to the IPv4 connections being infested with NATs.
With IPv6 there are enough addresses, that this should happen very rarely.
Then use DNS and/or RFC 4193.
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Agreed. And for those reasons you should avoid being dependent on the assignment from the ISP being static forever.
There was an attempt at building some renumbering logic into the DNS records (with the A6 records). But A6 records were eventually dropped with the reasoning that AAAA records were simpler and using proven methodology (due to their similarity to A records), and that the r
Re:Probably the home router... (Score:5, Informative)
As it stands, your carier does NAT themselves and gives your router one IP address, typically in the 10.0.0.0/8 address space. Your home router then does another layouer of NAT, and gives internal devices their own IP address range in the 1902.168.1.0/16 address space. The advantagie is that one can support a _tremendous_ backend infrastructure without public IP addresses. This is also a tremendous security advantage: it reduces the exposed attack surface for script kiddies and casual network scanners to attack your home devices, they have to successfully gain control of the router or another device inside your network to pass along their attack.
The disadvantage, which dismays some people, is that NAT channels _publication_ of services through those NAT enabled routers or through externally hosted web space. It effectively makes the allocation of IP addresses and ports for exposed services require more thought, and allows easier throttling or monitoring of traffic at those NAT routers. I've found it to be a tremendous security and network management improvement: it makes firewall and routing design _much_ more stable and helps prevent people from running dangerous, unauthorized services from office networks, such as running public NFS servers without telling anyone aware of the security implications.
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(proper) CGNAT uses 100.64.0.0/10, so it doesn't collide with RFC1918 reserved addresses. See: RFC6598.
Re:Probably the home router... (Score:4, Informative)
As it stands, your carier does NAT themselves and gives your router one IP address, typically in the 10.0.0.0/8 address space. Your home router then does another layouer of NAT, and gives internal devices their own IP address range in the 1902.168.1.0/16 address space.
Not where I live, and that sounds quite limiting! Thank ${DEITY}, ISPs here in Finland assign their customers genuine public IPv4 addresses, usually via DHCP. Typically, you can even get several of them – the maximum on a consumer connection could be something like 5. (I’m using 2 right now.) Only something like the port 25 (SMTP) is blocked for inbound connections so you’re free to run a personal web server, SSH box, VPN to your home network, etc.
Finnish cellular carriers – as opposed to the actual fiber/copper/cable ISPs – have a different practice, though: they will usually NAT the 3G/4G customers by default, which is quite understandable, as you generally do not want inbound connections to a cellphone. Still, at least my carrier (Saunalahti) lets advanced customers choose a different APN which will give a public IPv4 address even for a 3G modem or a cellphone, which is quite nice and handy as well for some situations.
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Please stop arguing that NAT gives you a security advantage. NAT in and of itself does not provide any additional security. The advantage is simply that of a stateful firewall, which is typically what is used to provide NAT -- except you can't really configure it. If you want security, run a stateful firewall and manage your services correctly at that firewall. NAT is lazy, NAT is sloppy, and NAT doesn't allow you to prevent users from connecting to remote services you don't want them to.
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Your ISP can give you a block of dynamic/static IP addresses, which your router assigns instead of 192.168.1.X?
That's how the internet works to begin with, and it used to be the norm for IPv4 networks. A lot of large networks still do it that way -- the computer I'm on at work has a globally unique IP address. You can still get a block of static IPs if you buy a business-class connection. That used to be almost the definition of a business connection, back when more people ran their own servers instead of using hosting services. IP addresses cost money [arin.net], so ISPs try to have as few as possible. NAT came about when peo
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Re:Probably the home router... (Score:5, Informative)
Good luck with web apps that use IP based sessions.
Are you kidding me??? That stopped being even remote practical about 20 years ago.
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Re:Probably the home router... (Score:4, Insightful)
Being horrified by NAT is all well and good, but the fact is, ISPs look at the horrible bandaids that work 80% of the time and say, "Good enough. Now I don't have to rebuild my entire infrastructure for IPv6." You may want something that works 100% of the time, but the people who own the equipment don't want to *pay* for something that works 100% of the time.
Re:Probably the home router... (Score:4, Informative)
Being horrified by NAT is all well and good, but the fact is, ISPs look at the horrible bandaids that work 80% of the time and say, "Good enough. Now I don't have to rebuild my entire infrastructure for IPv6."
And yet Comcast is rolling out IPv6. I'm on IPv6 at home today.
Re:Probably the home router... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most carrier-grade equipment has a useful service life of 7-8 years and practically all carrier-grade equipment that got on the market in the last 10 years does support IPv6.
At the customer edge of the network, those upgrades are necessary to enable VDSL2 and DOC3. In the network core and backbones, router upgrades are necessary every ~7 years because new router generations have 3-4X the routing capacity per RU and bandwidth per watt as older equipment which is a major saving in floor space, power and cooling bills. Trying to cope with the 40-70%/year traffic growth using hardware from 6+ years ago would be practically impossible.
Until traffic growth collapses, carriers and everyone else involved in large-scale transit does not have a choice to refresh large chunks of their network periodically to accommodate demand.
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Grownups that work at proper telcos replace their entire infrastructure on a regular basis anyway, so that part has already happened.
v4 to v6 migrations are pretty well thought out, people just need to actually do them.
CGN, perhaps? (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, even ARIN is now starting to tighten the screws on the size of netblocks they are assigning out, so I suspect providers are being a lot more careful about how they subnet and assign out IP addresses than they used to be. I suspect that just moving stuff like DB servers and other backend infrastructure onto private IP space instead of just dumping them in the DMZ for convenience has helped a bit too, not too mention being a better security practice.
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I've had getting more into IPv6 and DNS (Bind9) on my todo list for about two y
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carrier grade NAT double NAT, etc. is a lot more complex than an IPv6 network. the only real complexity in and ipv6 environment (excluding bugs in firmware, but that isn't TOO bad these days) is having to maintain dual stack until the laggards wake the fuck up and upgrade.
That may be true, but carrier grade NAT, double NAT, etc. run on today's infrastructure.
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I think the key word is customer transition.
The appealing thing about carrier grade NAT is most consumers won't even notice.
Some people might claim that ipv6 could be done transparent to the end user, but personally I think that's a load of BS, and I suspect so do ISPs.
How to transition from ipv4 to ipv6 would to me seem the most important consideration when designing ipv6, but form appearances it seems like it was an afterthought, which is probably why we'll have ipv4 for quite some time.
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The appealing thing about carrier grade NAT is most consumers won't even notice.
Some people might claim that ipv6 could be done transparent to the end user, but personally I think that's a load of BS, and I suspect so do ISPs.
Either approach will cause problems for the end users. In both cases the users will have no clue what is the root cause of the problem, and they will believe whatever bullshit their ISP tells them. My ISP ran out of IPv4 addresses, thus some of my devices got no reply from the DHCP server. The ISP tried to convince me that it was due to a defective network interface on my end.
Re:CGN, perhaps? (Score:4, Informative)
Switches shouldn't need to do IPv6. They operate at the next level down, so it makes no difference, except for the management interface. That's the idea anyway - there are sometimes issues with programers assuming things they should not assume.
10 years (Score:2)
Re:10 years (Score:5, Informative)
Even through all addresses have been given out
They haven't:
the American Registry for Internet Numbers is still doling out IPv4 addresses
ARIN currently has “approximately 24 million IPv4 addresses in the available pool for the region,” according to President and CEO John Curran.
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Cool! I wonder what I can get for 127.0.0.1... I never use it.
Only if you can't get addresses (Score:5, Interesting)
It's only a crisis if it affects you. (sic)
That's basically what is happening, a giant stand off between the access networks and the hosting providers looking who will blink first.
From then end user perspective, you should see what happens to Skype and games when both end-users are behind a double NAT, it's hilarious. But most people seem to cope just fine.
For the hosting providers then fun really starts when you can't get a public IPv4 for your new webserver, that'll be fun. There's no NAT workaround for that, some european hosting providers are already feeling the crunch in their IPv4 blocks, you can only host so many servers. So what can you do? Jack up the prices ofcourse, isn't the free market wonderful!
If you are a business in the EMEA and you still want or need your own PI space for BGP, tough cookies, you can't get it anymore.
Re:Only if you can't get addresses (Score:5, Interesting)
This. This is why IPv4 will stick around for decades to come. There is too much profit potential in it, and IPv6 costs too much money to implement.
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Having implemented ipv6...bs. It does cost some time and effort, but it's not huge, particularly if you do it incrementally and dual stack. It's fear of change that's holding it back, not cost and effort, and as a result people are missing out on getting out from under that shackles that ipv4 puts around everything you do. But "the devil you know" rules in all too many cases.
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There is certainly a NAT-like workaround for lack of IPv4 for webservers. It's called a load-balancer. Since the domain name requested is in the HTTP hea
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Large corporate entities are also selling address space. Bought a class B for a Million last year. Not personally, but the corporate entity I represent.
If the ipv6 standards group had made an incremental change to address address space and left the rest of the protocols, then things might be different. As it was they threw in a bunch of features that no one wanted, and no one needs. IPv6 is a rehash of the failed and unused OSI transport and intranetwork protocols, which were soundly rejected by the market.
I'm waiting for (Score:5, Funny)
IPv8.1
RFC 1918 (Score:3)
They probably looked at the last mile problems (Score:4, Interesting)
and figured out they better find a better solution than ipv6. There is too much ipv4 only hardware out there to abandon it all. It would just be insane.
Arin is alone (Score:3)
While things have slowed down here the other regional IP registars have run out. APNIC and RIPE both have no IP addresses left. Arin has only about 1.4 /8's left.
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IPv6 has this tiny problem (Score:2)
"Hey Joe, what's your IP address?"
"Oh, let me see... it's fe80:0:0:0:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf"
Holy crap that's long. The second IP addresses become this difficult to exchange verbally, we're going to stop referring to them altogether.
Re:IPv6 has this tiny problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'll point out that the OP asked for an IP address, not a hostname.
While indeed this is the problem DNS addresses, many development and internal networks are not running DNS for a variety of reasons.
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Loops like for i in {1..50}; do ssh host${i}.cluster1.domain.com stuff; done work just fine with v6, and are no harder to remember than the same thing for v4 (since all you do is use AAAA records instead of A records.)
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So my parents have to learn how to configure a DNS in order for me to troubleshoot their networking problems over the phone? :)
On a more serious note, I don't see the possibility of getting non-techies to configure DNS entries for their computer.
Re:IPv6 has this tiny problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Fixed:
"Hey Joe, what's your IP address?"
"I don't have one, I'm behind a NAT and firewall that I don't control."
Of the two problems, I find yours the lesser of two evils.
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"I was going to ask if you'd start up the starcraft server and play a round."
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Bad summary (Score:5, Informative)
Unsurprisingly, address exhaustion still going on. APNIC and RIPE are down to their last /8 and are now handing out addresses as slowly as they can. ARIN and LACNIC will reach their last /8 this year. AFRINIC won't run out for years, so I suspect their new infrastructure will be built on IPv6. Here's the relevant data. [potaroo.net]
There's a finite number of addresses, guys. They're not going to magically stop running out.
ISPs taking IPs back from customers (Score:5, Informative)
I called their support, who said the lack of reply from their DHCP server was due to the network interface on my computer being defective (which was obviously a lie). When I pointed out that their conclusion was directly contradicting the symptoms I had already explained them about, they just hanged up.
Calling their support one more time, I was able to get to a supporter who knew what was going on, and didn't just invent a lie. It turns out they had run out of IPv4 addresses, and were now enforcing a maximum of two devices online per customer regardless of what limit had been in effect previously.
A few days later I called them again asking for native IPv6, which I considered only fair, given that they had taken away some of the IPv4 addresses, which I were using. They promised me native IPv6 before the end of the year. That was in 2012, they still haven't delivered.
Other ISPs are putting all new customers behind CGN unless they pay an extra fee for a static IP address. You'd think they'd give you native IPv6 along with that. But alas, according to the majority of ISPs, there is no shortage of IPv4 addresses in this country, so nobody needs IPv6. And since nobody is buying IPv6 connectivity, the ISPs will not offer it (completely ignoring the fact, that the reason nobody is buying IPv6 connectivity is that the ISPs themselves aren't offering it in the first place).
From what I am told, native IPv6 plus CGN for IPv4 is already fairly common in Germany, but that's not enough to make me want to move across the border. I have yet to hear about ISPs putting customers who previously had a public IPv4 address behind NAT, but I would not be surprised if it happened.
IPv6 usage IS increasing (Score:2)
Google's statistics of IPv6 usage [google.com] show a seemingly exponential increase, which is now up to 3%. It could be 10%, 20%, or 50% in 10 years' time. Countries like mine (the UK) need to wake the fuck up and start having major ISPs offer IPv6. It really sucks that so few do.
Comcast and ipv6 (Score:3)
Comcast brags (http://comcast6.net) that they are the largest ISP that supports ipv6. Oh wow, cool. I have a new modem that supports it as well as a home router.
So I go to figure out how to do it and find that they are only assigning /128s (single IPs) to only certain markets.
Who has a single computer hooked up to the Internet at home and nothing else?
No wonder it's not going anywhere. Even early-adopters can't get on easily without tunneling or other hack.
Re:Comcast and ipv6 (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm on Comcast, and I'm getting a /60 from them.
Your WAN interface might be on a /128, and that is fine. You need to make sure your gear is telling Comcast what size of prefix you want delegated to your router.
Of course, this varies by market, so it might really not be there yet, but read up on prefix delegation & make sure you've got your end setup correctly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
Also, don't trust the tech support with this. They are clueless. According to them, IPv6 isn't available in my market.
useless summary. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I've been complaining about this regularly in recent months. Far bigger issue than beta that so much content isn't nerdworthy.
Wolf! (Score:2)
The IPv4 crisis was around when I got into IT back in the early 90s. So thats...over 20 years? That can't be right because, counting forward from...D'oh!
Get off my lawn!
The real crisis is the routing table size problem (Score:4, Interesting)
The real problem is routing table size with BGP. As we continue to divide the internet into smaller routable blocks, this is requiring an exponential amount of memory in BGP routers. Currently, the global BGP table requires around 256mb of RAM. IPv6 makes this problem 4 times worse.
IPv6 is a failure, we don't actually _need_ everything to have a publicly routable address. There were only two real problems with IPv4: wasted space on legacy headers nobody uses, and NAT traversal. IETF thumbed their noses as NAT (not-invented-here syndrome) and instead of solving real problems using a pave-the-cowpaths-approach, they opted to design something that nobody has a real use for.
Anyway, I'm hoping a set of brilliant engineers comes forward to invent IPv5, where we still use 32 bit public address to be backward compatible with today's routing equipment, but uses some brilliant hack re-using unused IPv4 headers to allow direct address through a NAT.
Flame away.
Re:The real crisis is the routing table size probl (Score:5, Informative)
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I sat in on a router design meeting for IPv6. It took me 20 minutes to stop laughing when I heard them seriously say that it was acceptable for the system to crash if it encountered a router loop, because users will "just be careful and that won't happen". Then I took the copy of the presentation and my notes to my stock analyst and pointed out "these people ar bozos, do not invest in them or trust anyone who has invested in them". I didn't make money, but it helped keep me from *losing* a good chunk of mon
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It is just costing us $$$ at this point (Score:2, Informative)
At work we wanted to set up some VPNs with a cloud provider but our ISP doesn't want to give us the IPs so we had to forgo the VPN and instead lease a line for $5000 a month + we'll end up with dev and production envirnments that don't match which will probably hit us as some downtime in the future (we're just using OpenVPN in dev which doesn't require an IPv4).
So in the case of my team of eight workers the IPv4 crisis is costing $5000/mo + countless meetings and endless paperwork. Not a showstopper, but en
What happened? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What happened? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad you brought this up, as it is an excellent parallel. The Y2K crisis was real just as the IPv4 shortage was real. In both cases people took pro-active steps to head off disaster. Now, because those proactive steps averted the disaster all those who had no hand in it and didn't understand it proclaim: See! It was never an issue! It didn't happen!. No shit sherlock; it didn't happen because people saw the potential for disaster and took steps to avoid it.
Re:What happened? (Score:4, Interesting)
The human tendency for hyperbole happened.
Or more accurately "does not effect me"
It was the same for Y2k, is the same for just about every winter season snow storm, and is ceaseless in our politics.
In the IPv6 case the projections for run out have been right on the money. The only people screaming "the world didn't end" are media people looking to whore hits to their sites. Addressing authorities and publicized events ( IPv6 Day) all included FAQs clarifying the end of the world does not happen at exhaustion.
Just recently John Kerry referred to man-made global warming as weapon of mass destruction.
I have a feeling if you were head of state for some dinky island nation in the middle of nowhere and you looked at the projections for sea level rise vs land area of your country effectively consumed or endangered by conditions (tides, storms) you would not be so quick to sound the hyperbole alarm.
The same goes for small VM/hosting provider who runs out of IPs to assign to new customers... these things are a "big fucking deal" to them but for everyone else it is hyperbole or even beneficial. Climate change has winners and so does IPv4 exhaustion. CGN vendors, competitors who "planned ahead" hoarding more addresses than they were supposed to or those blessed with massive legacy allocations have market advantage with respect to IPv4 exhaustion the rest of us don't.
Re:What happened? (Score:5, Funny)
Thankfully they keep discovering new fields of IPv4 addresses. Peak IP is never going to happen!
Reusing ranges (Score:2)
A lot of the lower /8 ranges [wikipedia.org], that were assigned to companies and organizations(some of them that don't exist anymore) got reused to make ipv4 last a little longer. They will stil
Also don't help a lot that companies and ISPs may still be deploying hardware/software that is not ipv6 capable, replacing legacy systems is one the things that slows down adoption.
The US has nothing to worry about but... (Score:5, Informative)
Europe and other parts of the world is a totally different story. When the Internet was created and we started handing out the IP addresses we were quite stingy when giving them to other parts of the world. The United States is one of the biggest hoarders of IP addresses in the IPv4 world while Europe and the rest of the world got relatively few IP addresses with compared to how many the US holds. There's where we are seeing the problem.
Europe has the issue, Europe has no choice in the matter; they have to move to IPv6 or their side of the Internet is pretty much crippled. So unless we all implement 6to4 to allow United States Internet users to connect to European web site (that's fugly) or finally get on the bandwagon in converting to IPv6 in the US, there will eventually be two Internets; a US and a European Internet with IPv4 and IPv6 being the limiting factor.
Already on IPv6 (Score:3)
My fiber ISP provides 6rd connectivity with a /62 prefix address space, and will bump it to /54 when they implement dual-stack on all systems.
There are still legacy routers on the system apparently.
However tomato on my rt-n66u handles the 6rd just fine.
A lot of systems are on ipv6 already, and I think I have around 50/50 ipv6 and ipv4 traffic now. There is no real difference in use for a regular user. Even all the phones, tables and the chromecast use it without me having to do anything except connecting the router.
I still have a regular fixed ip for ipv4, but all my devices are behind nat.
It's there, just wait and see (Score:4, Insightful)
In short, it's just too early to tell. Just because the RIRs ran out of addresses, it doesn't mean that the LIRs have yet (the ISPs).
Based on my experience as a network engineer at an ISP, the following is happening already:
Small ISPs and ISPs that have not been in the business for a long time* have either run out or are on the verge of doing so. They are doing the following:
* Purchasing legacy IPv4 addresses from enterprises with /16 networks from the old days where available.
* Deploying CGN-like solutions for their end-customers if their end-customers are residential users.
Larger ISPs and older ISPs with allocations from ye old pre-RIR days continue to hold addresses and are often able to free large quantities of addresses from old deployments. Mind you, a lot of public IPv4 space have been "wasted" on infrastructure addressing, and management of devices that were not even connected to the internet. Devices such as modems, DSLAMs, CPEs and similar.
One could easily speculate that the business of ISPs will be severely affected in the future, as customers will go to the old providers that have plenty of v4-space available at the cost of newer players who followed the RIR regulations of only applying for the address space they needed based on relative short-term predictions.
If you are a registered LIR you will see a flood of SPAM from so-called IP brokers who are trying to purchase unused IPv4 space in hope of selling this to LIRs in need. That market will probably become quite desperate in the coming years.
Oh, and by the way, I see no evidence that IPv6 deployment is taking any noticeable speed.
*) Long as in they were in the game when classfull allocations were made.
Excerpt from wikipedia entry July 2018 (Score:3)
After the technological meltdowns consistently failed to appear, IPv4 was finally replaced when IPv7 was adopted globally in the year 2017 as a result of a world trade agreement.
The incongruous IPv7 clause was widely seen as the result of an unlikely alliance between the RIAA, MPAA and various repressive regimes such as China, Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom.
Frustrated by the inability to trace internet usage to a single user via IPv4, these organisations lobbied for IPv7 to be adopted so that individual phones and computers could be mapped permanently to a single device and user. Unlike IPv6, IPv7 includes a direct mapping to the mac address of a device and the user's global internet ID, so that (in theory at least), all downloads can be linked to a specific person.
Although the EFF and various other organisations campaigned vigorously against IPv7, the arguments around catching terrorists and preventing pedophilia prevailed.
For anybody paying attention... (Score:5, Informative)
For anybody paying any attention over the past few years, this shouldn't come as a surprise.
The IANA ran out of IPv4 address space available for doling out to the Regional Internet Registries (of which there are six) three years ago. APNIC (Asia Pacific) and RIPE NCC (Europe) went below a single /8 three and two years ago respectively. The IPv4 address exhaustion has already begun.
ARIN (North America), however, has 82 /8s. If you consider that there are only 221 /8s in total (the IANA keeps 35 for reserved use), this means that ARIN has 37% of all usable Internet addresses assigned to it, for roughly 8% of the worlds population. More than a third of all possible addresses for less than a tenth of the worlds population.
Even still, ARIN now only has about 1.3 /8s free. Projections have them running out next year. They've always been estimated to be one of the last RIRs to run out (with AfriNIC being last, as they still have just over 3 of their nearly 13 /8s free) due in part to the huge number of /8s already in use in North America (way out of proportion to the population of the continent).
I feel really ashamed every time this topic comes up on /. at the complete and rampant ignorance of the issues surrounding IPv4 and IPv6. We will run out of IPv4 address space, but address space is hardly the only problem with IPv4. The bigger problem is ROUTABILITY -- the IPv4 routing tables have become seriously unweildly, they are getting progressively worse (in part due to InterRIR transfers of address blocks now that Europe and Asia have run out of addresses), and they continue to need more and more compute power thrown at the problem just to keep up. The number of BGP forwarding entries has doubled from roughly 250k to nearly 500k in just the last six years. The algorithms used for determining routes in IPv4 are complex. The computability is difficult, and it's slowing down the Internet today.
IPv6 solves a lot of the routing problems inherent in IPv4, making routability a lot easier to compute. IPv6 packets have a simpler header, routers don't need to provide fragmentation services, and there is no header checksum. IPv6 also avoids the routing anomalies present in IPv4 due to things such as the switch to CIDR. We know a heck of a lot more about packet routing now than we did in the 60s when IPv4 was first defined, and these improvements are available in IPv6.
This is why I cringe whenever I see a post in an IPv6 address exhaustion related /. story complaining about a lack of backwards compatibility in IPv6, or anytime anyone says that NAT is good enough for everybody. As the address space fragments even further, and historic /8s and /16s are broken up into ever smaller units which are then distributed to diverse geographies, the routing table in IPv4 is going to continue to blow up, becoming ever uglier -- it simply wasn't designed to scale in the manner in which we're using it. IPv6 brings sanity to global routing again, in a way that no backward-compatible solution could achieve.
The IANA is out of addresses. RIPE and APNIC are virtually out of addresses (with only enough reserved to aid in IPv4 - IPv6 tunnelling and translation services). ARIN is down to less than 1.5 /8s, and survives purely on the fact that it has a disproportionate number of /8s compared to the population it serves. And worst of all, IPv4 routing is an absolute mess that requires a ton of processing power and compute time to maintain. Remember these things before you post something silly about being pro-NAT, pro-some-untested-IPv4-address-extension-proposal, complaining about backward compatibility, or how people have been predicting IPv4 exhaustion for the last 25 years (just because you see the train coming towards you way off in the distance does
the skynet is falling the skynet is falling (Score:3, Funny)
had to say that
Re:Chicken little (Score:5, Informative)
It was never a crisis to begin with? This is why you don't listen to chicken littles.
I don't know where you live, but at a guess I would put you in a country such as the USA or in United Kingdom. If you look at how many IP addresses there are per 1,000 population [wikipedia.org] you will see that the USA has about 5,000, the UK 2,000 but that India has 29. So it might not be a problem for you, but for for some it is. It is not just 1st vs 3rd world, overall the EU has 19 per 1,000.
Many people use more than one IP address (think: office, home, mobile 'phone). Yes NAT can help, but it is not the complete answer.
Re:Chicken little (Score:5, Interesting)
Another part of the answer...take back the class A allotments that were given to companies/organizations early on.
Why does this myth persist? Modded Interesting, even. This proves that education is the major barrier to IPv6 adoption.
We can't "take back" the class A allotments because there is no "back" to take it to. Those were given by Jon Postel before IANA existed, and IANA does not claim any more legal authority to those addresses than anybody else. It's an unwise investment of limited resources to challenge those companies' legal departments.
Also, with the rate that IPv4 addresses were being allocated, and the acceleration of the rate before 2011, those addresses would have postponed IPv4 exhaustion by months at best. It's surely not worth the expense to force all those companies to release their class A networks just so we could collectively fail to do our jobs, that is, switch to IPv6.
Re:Chicken little (Score:5, Informative)
You can't get new IPv4 addresses in Europe or Asia. End users are already on DS-lite, with IPv6 for their only public address. You can not initiate a connection to millions of Europeans and Asians if you don't use IPv6. Not soon, now.
Re:Chicken little (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, ipv6 adoption seems to be higher in the US than anywhere else in the world... I run a bunch of dual stack websites, and v6 accounts for about 15% of american traffic and considerably less from other countries.
Re:Chicken little (Score:5, Interesting)
Google agrees [google.com]. They're probably a bit less US-centric.
As bad as the ISPs in the US are, we're actually a world leader in v6 traffic. Comcast, Time Warner (the ones I have personal experience with) and apparently Verizon are all doing v6 natively and properly. That accounts for a huge percentage of customers - as they get around to replacing their gateways, it should "just work".
-- reply ends, general comments begin --
Just so everybody's clear what I mean by "just work" - when I moved into my new apartment, I rented a modem/router from the cableco (I of course bought my own a few weeks later like a good nerd). Out of the box, it requested a /64 prefix and delegated it to the internal network, including the v6 DNS servers. All OSes made in the last 10 years know how to do v6 properly, so everything from my desktop to my phone to my smart TV can access v6 resources just fine.
v6 is here. It works great, and you get real IPs! Like, you can actually paste an IP to a friend so he can download a file from your box just like the old days, without doing any NAT port mapping bullshit. Want to play a game, or video chat, or VNC or something? Just open a damn socket, no STUN or UPnP or any other crap.
I don't get why so many Slashdotters are bitching/FUDding about v6. There's no money in it - all the ISPs are doing it happily - so it's not astroturfing. And the comments don't fit the typical troll model. What gives?
Re: (Score:3)
Interestingly enough, both Germany and Romania have a higher adoption rate.
I'm from Romania and gave IPv6 a try. I have a router that allows both IPv4 and IPv6 connections at the same time, so I enabled both and worked like that for a while. For some unexplained reason, the IPv6 connection took a huge amount of time to get its IP (literally minutes) and after both connections were enabled, many things wouldn't work right. I experienced repeated loss of connectivity in pretty much all online games, Yahoo Mes
Re: (Score:3)
Let's shitcan IPV6 right now, who needs it, because clearly because some people were concerned it's a reason to ignore it all now and keep using ipv4
Your analogy fails, because IPv6 brings extra functionality, including routing advantages. It's not just an attempt at dumbing down for MBAs and the unwashed masses.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That wasn't an analogy. That was sarcasm.
Re: When you migrated to IPV6, I re-used your IPV4 (Score:2)
Businesses that migrate to IPv6 don't drop their IPv4 addresses. They still need them to talk to legacy clients.
I've migrated to IPv6 at home but I still have an additional IPv4 addresses internally and externally for talking to IPv4 servers and devices.
Re:Privacy Benefits to NAT? (Score:4, Insightful)
To embellish smash's response, no there is no privacy benefit to using NAT. If you want some sort of a privacy benefit, you still need to add a firewall to your connection that can monitor your traffic for the very same things it would have to monitor for if you use global addressing. The only thing that NAT provides is an address translation interface, too allow you to have a larger pool of addresses to use than your provider can grant. If there is a port forward for a service set up either statically or dynamically (upnp) any flaws in the service that is being forwarded can be exploited in the same way it would be if there were no NAT involved.