All quiet in the IPv4 Internet?

http://blog.apnic.net/2016/09/15/quiet-ipv4-internet/

by okket • 10 years ago

152 121 10 years ago

blog.apnic.net

okket3• 10 years ago

Slides from IETF96: https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/96/slides/slides-96-maprg-1...

Paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.00360.pdf

Edit: If you have some time and like high quality networking commentary (aka 'rants'), I strongly recommend to listen to this packet pusher episode with Geoff Huston, where he plays devil's advocate for IPv4.

http://packetpushers.net/podcast/podcasts/show-275-future-of...

nmc2• 10 years ago

(I know this is drifting off.) Geoff Huston is a phenomenal speaker (and researcher of course). If you have even more time and want to learn more about how the address spaces and routing tables are evolving, I definitely recommend his talk on BGP at RIPE 68 (2014) which I was lucky enough to attend.

Video: https://ripe68.ripe.net/archives/video/131/

Slides: https://ripe68.ripe.net/presentations/156-2014-05-12-bgp2013...

[EDIT] In another talk he indicates where you can get that kind of data on the Internet address space: http://www.routeviews.org/

okket3• 10 years ago

Great talk, thanks for the link!

stock_toaster• 10 years ago

What a great interview. Thanks for linking to it!

Sniffnoy• 10 years ago

A note -- if you're linking to arXiv, it's better to link to the abstract (http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00360) rather than directly to the PDF. From the abstract, one can easily click through to the PDF; not so the reverse. And the abstract allows one to do things like see different versions of the paper, search for other things by the same authors, etc. Thank you!

jedberg• 10 years ago

The lack of usage in static blocks isn't entirely surprising. A lot of universities got their IP space early and utilize it poorly. I know this because it is in part my fault.

When we were assigning IP addresses for the dorms at Berkeley, we gave every dorm a /24, and then reserved the first 50 IPs for "future use" and "internal use". Most of those were never used. And unless 200 people signed up per building, some of the top end was missed too.

My understanding is that they have since fixed this on the wifi since many people bring three or four devices now, but the hard wired connections are still poorly utilized.

soulnothing• 10 years ago

It was the same thing when I was at University of Delaware. Each hard wire got a IPv4 public address. I lived in one of two apartment towers. From what I recall there were three /24s split between the two.

Much like your setup the first 25 were reserved. In addition anything past that was rate limited. I recall anything past that was ~10->25Mbs. Going into the lower range though got around 500Mbs. I know similar stories from other state employees. The times when IPs were more prevalent.

sp00ls• 10 years ago

Same thing at SUNY Polytechnic (previously SUNYIT). Its been a few years since I left but when I was there all hardwired devices had a public IP address.

freehunter• 10 years ago

I have several clients that have a class B or class C and use it mostly for their internal address space instead of using private address space. What a waste.

Scarbutt• 10 years ago

NAT is clumsy ;)

geofft2• 10 years ago

It's a very good way to make sure that if those clients need to route their internal networks to each other, they don't have to renumber. If two companies using 10.x.y.z networks merge, you are likely to end up with a mess. Heck, if you need to VPN to a 10.x.y.z network and your local network is also 10.x.y.z, you'll end up with a mess.

(The IPv6 solution here is Unique Local Addresses, where fdXX:XXXX:XXXX::/48 are all permissible local networks, and if you use a decent RNG to generate the 40-bit number XXXXXXXXXX, you're unlikely to hit a collision with any other actual, active site, let alone one you might want to route to.)

aidenn0• 10 years ago

HP owns two /8 subnets. I know they use them at least partly for internal address space.

euske• 10 years ago

To me (a non-expert) it feels that we have the same problem as land use. Vast unused lands are just sitting there fenced, while some other parts of the town is crazy crowded.

Of course, IP address might not have the same physical boundaries, but instead they have organizational barriers, which can be equally tricky ones, if not trickier.

The bottom line is that we suck at resource management and distribution at nearly every field.

bradleyjg2• 10 years ago

The answer for land was property and inheritance taxes so families couldn't just sit on valuable land non-productively forever.

If it cost $1/year*address most entities with a /24 or /22 would barely notice, but HP might decide that they don't need 33.5 million IP addresses after all.

KMag2• 10 years ago

My fraternity house had a housing license for up to 22 people. We had a /16. Though, my understanding is that only the first /24 is currently routed to the house, and we moved to a larger house that's licensed for 50-something residents.

Recall AllAdvantage.com, which had a pyramid-scheme style payout for installing spyware on your computer and browsing the web. Payout capped after browsing 48 hours per month with the spyware on. One of the guys trimmed down Win95 and bought a student VMWare license. A gig of RAM was about $4k at that time. He scripted everything up so that at boot time, the Win95 guest would mount an SMB share from the host, remove the first line from a shared CSV file containing fake account details, and proceed to register a fake account at AllAdvantage with him as the referrer, and randomly browse for 48 strait hours (using a local caching web proxy) like a meth head on a bender, and then shut down. Monitoring software on the host would see the shut down VM and spin up a new one with a new IP. The VM IP assignment code hopped all over the /16 to reduce suspicion. AllAdvantage went out of business before it failed to ban him. 30 VMs ran simultaneously. In a 30-day month, he had 450 VMs run, and got just under $2 in referral fees per VM. The fake accounts never made enough money to get cheques mailed to their fake addresses, so AllAdvantage didn't get returned mail or un-cached cheques, but he was still very surprised that he never got caught. He figured he had less tan 50% chance of making it 4 months and paying off his 1 GB of RAM. He wasn't really doing it for the money, but saw it more as a kind of cat-and-mouse game.

He was always doing stuff like that, enjoying being the mouse in a cat-and-mouse game, with almost none of it for money. He just got a kick out of seeing people doing silly things and demonstrating the silliness of their ideas. You can get into a fair amount of mischief with a /16, which is presumably why now they only route the first /24 to the house.

Dylan168074• 10 years ago

So did he make enough money to pay off the ram? You didn't specify if they went out of business before or after he got a payout.

Animats• 10 years ago

They're only looking at IP addresses that access a big CDN as clients. They won't see servers that way.

As mobile devices migrate to IPv6, the address space problem should be less. It's too bad that most mobile devices don't have permanent IPv6 addresses - more peer to peer applications would be possible.

korethr• 10 years ago

I'd say it's more like most mobile devices don't have IPv6 period, at least not here in the US. Every time I've done or seen network tests on a phone on the major cell carrier networks here in the US, there's been no IPv6 to be found.

okket3• 10 years ago

"Major Mobile US Networks Pass 50% IPv6 Threshold for IPv6-Enabled Hosts"

http://www.worldipv6launch.org/major-mobile-us-networks-pass...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12338993

cmurf• 10 years ago

tmobile, ipv6 on lte everywhere I've been in the U.S. in the paste year with a Moto G (2015).

daenney• 10 years ago

That site barely loads for me and I can't find an archive/cached link. I would expect a RIR to be able to handle this internet thing a bit better.

j30977362• 10 years ago

Works on my machine

azdle• 10 years ago

Working for me. Looks like Archive.is has it already too: http://archive.is/yhSBN

madsushi• 10 years ago

Public IPs are about $10/each on the market. If you're running a serious service, $10 is a fairly small cost, so you just buy whatever you need. IPv4 exhaustion has mostly affected people that were getting addresses for "free".

blowski• 10 years ago

This has confused me too. All this talk of IPv4 exhaustion, and yet I get a free one with every $5 Digital Ocean box.

jsmthrowaway• 10 years ago

Because DigitalOcean fought, and possibly paid, for their blocks for you. I don't do it any more but even in 2010-2011 getting blocks from ARIN took real work (ask for /18, get /19, lots of justification and explanation, etc).

Now everybody's pretty much out. So I don't know DO's blocks, but very likely if they're running out they're having to buy more. Depending on how they cut it up a /16 -- I know they have at least one /16, because it came up here yesterday -- can serve at least 60,000 droplets or so.

slyall• 10 years ago

A couple of months ago I sold two networks (a /22 and a /24 ) that I had accumulated over the years. I got closer to $5/ip but a fairly small volume. A little bit of paperwork but not too bad.

I thought it was interested that only a couple of years ago paying for IPs was very much against policy and now they even have pointers to brokers on the APNIC website.

wtbob2• 10 years ago

I thought it was interested that only a couple of years ago paying for IPs was very much against policy and now they even have pointers to brokers on the APNIC website.

Selling things for what the market will bear is the only way we've managed to figure out to fairly provide resources to those who want them the most.

PhantomGremlin2• 10 years ago

Public IPs are about $10/each on the market.

Bah.

mostly affected people that were getting addresses for "free".

There are still a lot of "free" IPv4 addresses out there.

The problem is the cost of IPv4 addresses is not evenly applied. There's hoarding by some early adopters. E.g. I see that Stanford gave back its original /8 allocation, but MIT did not.[1] And why is Prudential Securities still sitting on a Class A block?

If MIT or Prudential had to pay 16,777,216 * $10 per month for their IP addresses, you can bet that most would be returned within 48 hours! Even if they had to pay only $16 million per year, you can bet they'd return most of those addresses.

A true capitalist solution to the IPv4 "shortage" never happened. That's why you have the current situation. Some organizations are sitting on huge swaths of unused addresses, others (the free market) are forced to pay $10 per month.

There are about 4 billion possible IPv4 addresses (sure, some are reserved for e.g. multicast, but those could have been reclaimed). If each and every IPv4 address cost $10 per month, there would never have been a need for IPv6. Even if each and every IPv4 address cost only $1 per month (about $50 billion per year in aggregate), there would never have been a need for IPv6. Or at least IPv6 could have been postponed for a while and "done right".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

CountSessine2• 10 years ago

The market for IPv4 addresses is ultimately a band-aid solution because it affects routability. The more efficient such a market becomes at distributing addresses topologically, the less efficient packet routing becomes.

IPv4 markets are a dead-end and are no substitute for a real solution.

pc2g4d2• 10 years ago

Feels like real estate. The move to IPv6 could be seen as a socialist land redistribution scheme, since it imposes a cost upon the entire system (by requiring network upgrades) in order to make cheap "real estate" continually available to the masses.

wmf5• 10 years ago

Note that a secondhand IP address costs $10 to buy, not $10/month.

IMO Postel's allocation of IP addresses can be rationalized from a capitalist viewpoint as a form of homesteading. Some people end up with windfall profits three decades later, but it's a small price to pay for a peacefully functioning market. Owning a $100M asset that's underutilized is already an economic incentive to free up addresses (just don't tell my company); a Georgist property tax on IP addresses would provide even more incentive but it would also likely cause a revolt.

Since there are going to be 4B devices on the Internet soon if not already, talking about "there would never have been a need for IPv6" seems to imply the existence of an address-less underclass.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 10 years ago

"Some people have much more than they need while others pay through the nose" sounds exactly like a true capitalist solution.

voltagex_2• 10 years ago

How do I buy one? How do I then use it?

I "rent" a static IP from my ISP (Internode) because IPv6 still breaks random devices on my network (Xbox One, I'm looking at you).

wmf5• 10 years ago

First become an ISP, then look at https://www.arin.net/resources/transfer_listing/listings.txt and https://www.arin.net/resources/transfer_listing/facilitator_...

nvarsj2• 10 years ago

I'm happy that my ISP gives me a /29 ipv4 block :).

An example of a real world effect is one of the largest fibre ISPs in the U.K. They are the only provider afaik to assign users internal IPs, which is then NAT'd. This then gets NAT'd on the router again - double NAT, woohoo! :) I know they desperately tried to get enough public space for all their customers, but were unable to buy a large enough space for it, so were forced into this position.

Interestingly, the U.K. has at least two /8 ranges that aren't even advertised on the public internet, owned by MoD (25/8) and Department of Work & Pensions (51/8). That's 32 million addresses unused as far as anyone can tell from the outside.

nmc2• 10 years ago

Seriously? They assign internal addresses (10/8, 172.16/12, 192.168/16) to all customers?

Are you able to name the ISP?

knorker• 10 years ago

Is it rare?

I think BT's cheaper broadbands do this, for one.

the84722• 10 years ago

That's fairly normal these days. The combination of ipv6 + cgnat for ipv4 (carried over the v6) is called DS-Lite[0]. ISPs in asian countries have been doing that for years now european and american ISPs have been ramping it up recently too.

[0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6333

ckuehl• 10 years ago

ISPs usually use the designated block (100.64.0.0/10) for this to avoid collisions with home networks: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6598#section-7

Webpass is an example of a "good" ISP that does this. It's my only qualm with them. Besides that they are outstanding. IPv6 works great.

klackerz• 10 years ago

ISP's in India have started using this method. I am currently using such an ISP.

CountSessine2• 10 years ago

Question - given that they've condemned you to an awful carrier-grade-NAT, do they at least support IPv6?

I'm of the opinion that this is probably the future for all residential internet users - ISPs that put everyone on an IPv4 NAT so that grandma can still get her hotmail and yahoo, while hopefully providing unencumbered IPv6 access for everything else that requires a real network connection.

zigzigzag2• 10 years ago

That's the world I'm in. Carrier NAT for IPv4, fully working routable IPv6 as designed.

Unfortunately this still screws me over because nobody who I might want to connect to my home network has IPv6 yet.

vertex-four2• 10 years ago

AAISP and Sky are the only two ISPs to provide IPv6 in the UK. BT Consumer have been promising it "real soon now" for the last few years, and the rest of the ISPs are sitting on their hands.

mordae• 10 years ago

Some ISPs provide /64 per household. Ugh.

TazeTSchnitzel• 10 years ago

Huh. Does the DWP really need 16 million addresses just to deny people benefit payments?

virtuallynathan3• 10 years ago

They started selling them off: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32826353

lloeki• 10 years ago

the largest fibre ISPs in the U.K
so were forced into this position.

Well it's not like they could have deployed IPv6 (with NAT64) instead (/rant). Most ISPs around here (France) provide IPv6, some of them since like 10 years ago.

Not supporting IPv6 today is just ridiculous, and I've jumped ship† regularly during those 10 years, explicitly mentioning IPv6 (lack thereof or unsatisfying support) as the reason when cancelling. I understand that not everyone has this chance (due to choice availability) to pressure their ISPs, but seriously they weren't forced: they dug themselves into this hole.

† One of them even dropped a previously perfectly functional IPv6 support for me purely due to a contract update and argued it wasn't possible to bring it back. Seriously.

kyledrake3• 10 years ago

I've pondered the IPv4 issue a lot, having recently acquired a /24 block for running an Anycast network (blog post coming soon).

People have asked me my thoughts on IPv6 adoption, and I have to honestly say I'm pretty bearish on IPv6 being quickly adopted. I try to enable IPv6 on all my friends' routers, but even today, many routers, though they support 6 (notable exception being DD-WRT.. WTF), don't enable it by default, which means they don't enable the dual-stack configuration needed for transition. People then place these routers in a dusty area under their computers or behind their couches, where they sit, basically untouched, for 10+ years until they blow up and require replacement.

The people I've talked to that happen to control a lot of IPv4 addresses tell me that even at the current ~$10-12/ip strike price, nobody is interested in selling because the IPs are more valuable to them for use with datacenters and leasing than for selling them at auctions. And nobody's putting pressure on the people that own huge IPv4 subnets (and I genuinely doubt use all of it) to start splitting them up and releasing them. Not to name names, but the original developers of the Internet come to mind (huge research universities like MIT).

As such, I'm expecting the price of IPv4 addresses to increase substantially over the next 10 years, and I'm really not anticipating that price to drop for longer than that even. Because at the end of the day, if you want to support everybody, you need 4. And even today, dual stack is not the default option (despite ISPs like Comcast being ready for it). IMHO, If you need IPv4s for something like an Anycast network or a hosting service, the time to get them is now.

As for IPv6 transition, the best way to improve this problem is to do your part to get ready for it: https://blog.apnic.net/2016/05/04/you-have-ipv6-turn-it-on/

johnbatch• 10 years ago

Sometimes last year it looks like Xerox split the 13.0.0.0/8 Selling a /11 to Microsoft (13.64.0.0/11) and a /14 to Salesforce (13.108.0.0/14)

kyledrake3• 10 years ago

Which means it won't be available for people that want to run their own IP subnets. I doubt they'll be splitting it into /24-/16s and reselling it anytime soon.

joshstrange• 10 years ago

Are you sure about DD-WRT? I found this https://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/IPv6#Enabling_IPv6_Sup...

wmf5• 10 years ago

Let's count the ways this is broken: IPv6 is off by default (and it sounds like some builds don't have it at all). To enable it, you have to enable two settings (presumably if you only enable one you'll end up with half-broken IPv6). Firewalling is not included. There's no mention of prefix delegation, but there's plenty of instructions for configuring deprecated 6to4 or deprecated tunnel brokers.

mgbmtl• 10 years ago

Most people run the modem/router combo that their ISP provides them. The ISP can flash that modem remotely to upgrade it to IPv6. As far as I know, that's how Comcast in the US managed to deploy ipv6 massively. It often surprised me that in some small US towns, I'd be in AirBNBs or B&B, and they had IPv6.

In my neighbourhood in Canada, looking at the wifi routers, 80% of my neighbours are running the default configuration of their ISP.

Also, people need to replace their modems more often than we think. In the past 5 years we had the switch from 5mbps DSL to FTTO (25-30mbps) and now the switch to FTTH. A neighbour switched from 5mbps DSL to FTTH, for basically the same price (but the same ridiculously low monthly quota). He's using FTTH for an empty house to connect his alarm system to the monitoring company. In 6-12 months (rumours were 2017-Q2 unless they * again), when Bell finally decides to enable IPv6, that network will be IPv6-enabled.

byuu• 10 years ago

On this topic, does anyone have any advice for pressuring ISPs to move on IPv6?

I've tried calling and public shaming Wide Open West to no avail. They don't seem to care at all. Time Warner Cable is the next fastest ISP (and they do support IPv6), but they want almost the same price for 1/12th the speed (600mbit/s WOW vs 50mbit/s TWC); so I begrudgingly stick with WOW anyway =(

dreamcompiler3• 10 years ago

Assuming consumer-grade router manufacturers started fully enabling IPv6 by default (and ISPs did too), how does Grandma get the automatic firewall-ish security benefits NAT provides? Does the end of NAT mean Grandma has to start caring about firewall settings?

sitharus• 10 years ago

No, consumer grade routers simply have a stateful ipv6 firewall that blocks incoming connections, just like NAT did.

dreamcompiler3• 10 years ago

Exactly the answer I was hoping to hear. Thanks.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC3• 10 years ago

NAT does not provide any security benefits at all. A stateful packet filter does, with IPv6 just as with IPv4.

therein• 10 years ago

It does provide somewhat of an isolation on the WAN side.

If your grandma installs ElasticSearch on her box, she won't get pwned because it listens on 0.0.0.0 on her laptop and she didn't get the latest updates and is vulnerable to RCE.

jauer• 10 years ago

By using a stateful firewall with a default-deny policy on the external interface?

One would hope that SoHo routers that ship with IPv6 support are configured that way by default so they mimic the apparent behavior of NAT (though NAT is not, and is less effective than a firewall).

marcosdumay2• 10 years ago

Notice that this should still be easier to implement, and use less memory (read cheaper devices) than NAT.

NAT is an ugly hack. Uglier yet when you remember that the internet is not only TCP.

shmerl• 10 years ago

Still waiting for any ISP in my area to start supporting IPv6. They seem to have fallen asleep about it.

swingbridge• 10 years ago

As the article points out theres a big difference between addresses being allocated and addresses being used.

nashashmi• 10 years ago

One thing I cannot understand about the transition to ipv6 is why weren't all ipv4 addresses converted via encoding to ipv6. This way ipv4 and ipv6 could talk to each other.

And all service websites could jump on the ipv6 bandwagon without hiccups.

By encoding, I mean every ipv4 segment would be encoded as a hexadecimal set and that would be merged into an ipv6 category under a special prefix.

calumrobinson• 10 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4

XorNot3• 10 years ago

That is not the problem. The problem is how does a 32 bit address represent all possible 128 bit addresses?

It can't, period. Ipv4 devices cannot route to ipv6.

wmf5• 10 years ago

That sounds like a good idea until you try to implement it and discover all the problems: http://archive.is/eHvKF HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10854570

All quiet in the IPv4 Internet?

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