IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/18/ipv4/

by gregschlom • 16 years ago

47 67 16 years ago

techcrunch.com

wccrawford• 16 years ago

I don't think my router even supports IPv6. This is going to be -such- a fun transition.

I really thought people would get serious about it 2 years ago.

zandorg• 16 years ago

It would be fixed with firmware updates in an ideal world.

jsz02• 16 years ago

Devices that don't support IPv6, or don't have IPv6 enabled, will just share an IPV4 address in a NAT pool at the ISP level. It's not pretty but it works.

tptacek13• 16 years ago

That still means that everything anyone wants to get to needs to be dual-stacked for the forseeable future.

TheCondor• 16 years ago

Sort of. There are some very real limitations what what how much you can NAT too.

Never mind what happens when various services break due to double NATing and the various port filtering, think VOIP and the like. Probably not terribly difficult for a few P2P programs to DoS your ISP wide NAT as well.

wmf• 16 years ago

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-ipv6-cpe-router-... Once this is published as an RFC we can all start asking the vendors to support it.

tptacek13• 16 years ago

Most of your software doesn't support IPv6, which I think is a bigger problem. Most everything that works with sockets assumes that a network address fits in a machine int type; IPv6 addresses aren't even scalar.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

You computer have SSID registers, which are 128 bytes.

So it still fits.

jfr3• 16 years ago

You mentioned twice that IPv6 addresses aren't scalar in this discussion. Why?

Are you talking about the scope identifier or the flow label? The scope identifier is not used by the Network Layer, it is used to disambiguate between addresses in different Data Link Layer outputs by the operating system, but plays no role in routing after the packet leaves the network card. There is no field for it in the IPv6 packet.

The flow label is part of the IPv6 packet, but it is used for routing and quality of service, it is not used for addressing.

So, the IPv6 address is actually just a 128-bit scalar integer, that goes from 0 to 340282366920938463463374607431768211455, with different sub-ranges designated to different purposes.

rbanffy• 16 years ago

Will it be auctioned on eBay?

DeusExMachina2• 16 years ago

Every host on an IP network, from servers to personal computers to networked printers, is assigned an IP address, a unique identifying number that is used to communicate with other hosts on the same network, or globally.

This is misleading: computers (and especially printers) attached to a local network do not deplete public IP addresses, even if the network is connected to the global internet.

Should not the TC crowd be a little more computer savvy than this?

randomtask4• 16 years ago

> This is misleading: computers (and especially printers) attached to a local network do not deplete public IP addresses

A device connected to a LAN in someone's house will often just have a private IP and go through a NAT for its internet access.

However many big organisations will have been allocated a large address space at some point, often the size of a Class B. Their machines internally will often use a global IP address. The printers I use at university have their own public IPs. I'm guessing that's not unusual.

DeusExMachina2• 16 years ago

Good point. I thought that there is not much use for a public IP for a printer, but I did not think about big address allocations.

But is there any convenience in this? Can't they just switch a private LAN infrastructure connected through NAT?

mfukar• 16 years ago

This statement stands for itself. I don't see where it is implied that locally assigned addresses deplete the global IP space. Are you sure you aren't misappropriating the "or globally" part?

kilian• 16 years ago

Haven't we been told that IPv4 will run out "next year" for the past couple of years?

I mean, yeah, it's a legitimate concern and all, but if you keep crying wolf...

jsz02• 16 years ago

It was a best estimate at the time. Reclaiming unused/wasted IPv4 space has helped some but routers have probably had a bigger impact. 5 years ago most ISPs were working under the assumption that the average customer was going to need (at least) 2 IPv4 addresses. My guess is the economic meltdown probably slowed down the growth of the Internet worldwide as well. I haven't seen any firm numbers to back that up it though.

mhansen• 16 years ago

No - the estimates I've seen have always been 'the space will run out in a few years'.

mike-cardwell• 16 years ago

http://ipv6.he.net/statistics/

Check the "v4 Exhaustion" widget on the right. It currently reckons there are 228 days left. I wrote an article about it on the 28th of May this year, and on that date, the widget calculated there were 427 days left.

nanijoe• 16 years ago

There are a lot of addresses that should be 'reclaimed' . These days, most enterprises really only need a few public addresses, and many of them are 'sitting on' large chunks of addresses they acquired in the 90s.

mgkimsal• 16 years ago

While I agree, reclaiming them would only delay the inevitable by a few months or a couple years, perhaps.

demallien• 16 years ago

It would be a better use of everybody's energy to actually get to work on the IPv6 transition, rather than trying to squeeze another couple of years out of IPv4. I think it should be pretty much obvious to everyone by now that until we actually hit the wall of IPv4, no one is going to get serious about the transition. NAT is not a great solution - it's a hack, and as anybody that has had to set up a server behind a NAT knows, it can be a real pain.

tptacek13• 16 years ago

I'll wager that most residential Internet users are NAT'd, as are most corporate Internet users. The Internet works better today than it did back in 1996, when virtually nobody was NAT'd (back then, the big imposition was dynamic addresses instead of static).

loewenskind• 16 years ago

Please don't. This would just be another temporary solution allowing us to get even more invested in a flawed technology. We need to do the move as soon as possible so I really hope no "hero" comes in and buys us 5 more years on this.

tshtf• 16 years ago

There certainly is. As of a couple of years ago IBM's 9.0.0.0/8 network was only used for their intranet and not routed outside. I believe several legacy /8's are in the same boat.

gamble• 16 years ago

IIRC, HP is still sitting on three /8 networks - one from HP, Compaq, and DEC.

kbyers2• 16 years ago

As opposed to "reclaiming" addresses i.e. returning addresses to the registries, we should come up with a scheme were institutions can sell their addresses (i.e. IPv4 addresses should become property). This would give institutions that possess very large blocks of addresses a large incentive to effectively utilize their address space.

We could go on for a long-time with IPv4 if the above were to occur.

iwr• 16 years ago

I wonder if it wouldn't just be cheaper to design NAT-friendly apps. By the looks of it, the transition would last a decade and there would still be large legacy infrastructure in place after that. So why not learn to love NAT and ipv4?

mpk• 16 years ago

Because then we're still loving NAT and IPv4 in 2050.

clistctrl• 16 years ago

I can't wait for the last IPv4 address to be handed out. There is going to be so much opportunity for profit here.

jrockway2• 16 years ago

I already got 2^33 entire IPv4 spaces for free. I only need about 3 addresses and I have 36893488147419103232 of them. Not sure how you're going to monetize that ;)

jrockway2• 16 years ago

I'm already on IPv6. Find yourself an old 486 in the trash somewhere, get an OpenBSD install CD, and you can be too.

RodgerTheGreat• 16 years ago

I know this is going to sound silly, but it runs through my mind every time there's an IPv4/IPv6 discussion:

Consider a pair of random IPs in standard written form:

   v4: 209.85.225.147
   v6: 2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e8

From a purely aesthetic standpoint, IPv6 addresses look nasty. They vary in length, they're hard to remember, they're a little bit harder to parse and print than v4s. Much like an email address, an IPv4 address is iconic (to the right people) and immediately recognizable, whereas it would be easy to confuse a v6 for a MAC address. Is it at all possible that this is hampering adoption of IPv6?

tptacek13• 16 years ago

It is, but not in the way you think. IPv4 addresses are also cognitively nasty (try to remember two of them, walk to the other end of your building, and recite them from memory). People don't often use them directly.

The problem is that IPv4 addresses happen to fit in machine registers, and so virtually all of the world's networking software has been written to assume that they are just a gossamer-thin semantic layer on top of a scalar integer. IPv6 addresses emphatically do not work as scalar integers.

It's not just that this means you can't do math on an IPv6 address (though without a bignum library you can't). It's also the case that, as far as a lot of C programmers are concerned, you can't even directly assign them; they're "memcpy big".

When Daniel J. Bernstein talks about the "IPv6 mess", this is one of the things he's talking about; it's not just that the whole world needs to be renumbered (note: hasn't ever been done before), but also that all our software needs to be upgraded.

contextfree• 16 years ago

Do you think it would have been better if they'd gone to a 64-bit format instead of 128-bit?

joeyh• 16 years ago

Out of curiosity, what software do you use that still lacks support for ipv6? Most everything I use has been ipv6-capabable for years. Earlier this week iftop got ipv6 support, and so the last non-ipv6-capable software I use is rtorrent. There are only about 100 packages out of all of Debian that have ipv6 problems: http://bugs.debian.org/tag:ipv6

My experience converting software to ipv6 has mostly been of converting from gethostbyname(3) to getaddrinfo(3), and those are really the common cases for anything that simply needs to do dns lookups. Neither exposes an IP address outside a semi-opaque structure.

woodrow• 16 years ago

I remember hearing some apocryphal story about a tech being frustrated that the numpad on your keyboard doesn't have a-f or ':' keys. Another way in which it doesn't fit with the way we do things in v4.

More to your point, I think this illustrates two things -- the need to use DNS more instead of static numbering in v6, and to number your infrastructure in the lowest /48 or /64 subnet of your allocation so that you can enjoy the benefit of omission of leading zeros for things you might actually need to type in by hand (e.g. 2001:db8:1f70::1)

eru• 16 years ago

You can use hexadecimal for IPv4 already.

By the way, you can also give IPv4 addresses directly as one big number. E.g. `ping 1249729897' pings 74.125.93.105 (which is google.co.uk for me).

You can also go to http://74.125.93.105/ with your browser. (Though it depends on your browser, if it can parse this format. Chrome does.)

jfr3• 16 years ago

From a purely aesthetic standpoint, IPv6 addresses look nasty.

IP addresses are supposed to be used by machines, not humans (considering network administrators are not humans). Humans should deal with domain names.

They vary in length,

IPv4 addresses also do. strlen("10.1.2.4") == 8; strlen("192.168.123.234") == 15.

The physical addresses don't vary in either case. IPv4 is always 32 bit, IPv6 is always 128 bits.

they're hard to remember,

As an administrator, you can make the particular addresses that you need to remember simple. The last 80 bits of the address are entirely yours, and the first 48 bits are fixed for your entire organisation. With IPv4 you end up having multiple very different /24s dispersed through your organisation, and having to fit your important servers in whatever free address space you can find.

So, for example, you know that 2001:db8:1245::/48 is the prefix for your organisation. It is only one you have to remember. Then you can set your DNS to 2001:db8:1245::1, your web server to 2001:db8:1245::2, etc... Not hard to remember.

they're a little bit harder to parse and print than v4s

This is the sort of problem that you have to solve only once (and it was already solved), then use that function/library wherever you want. See inet_ntop(3) and getnameinfo(3) (as a bonus, these functions work identically to both IPv4 and IPv6, the application becomes agnostic to the address class being used).

js2• 16 years ago

Most recent previous discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1742305

buro9• 16 years ago

Can I buy cheap IPv6 SSL certificates yet?

mateu• 16 years ago

I just keep thinking about some of the "greybeards" as @tptacek said. The US Dept of Defense owns TEN class A blocks. HP owns two class A blocks, due to acquiring DEC (indirectly) Do they need that much space? I doubt it. Getting them to give back some space is not a long-term solution, but it would give this a little more time

IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011

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