ARIN down to 1.00 /8 – Akamai got 104.64.0.0/10 yesterday

https://www.arin.net/

by Amfy • 12 years ago

70 82 12 years ago

throwaway2048• 12 years ago

Seems a little absurd that one company just got 1/4th of all remaining ARIN ipv4 adresses when there is such an insane crunch looming, no matter how big and important they are.

nemasu• 12 years ago

I can't wait till subnets are a thing of the past with ipv6.

pjd7• 12 years ago

Most people at this stage are probably happy to push along ipv6 more so.

ams6110• 12 years ago

Don't hold your breath. I think ipv4 will be around for a long time. With NAT, there's really no shortage of numbers for many sites.

roeme2• 12 years ago

You should know that subnets are not a past with IPv6. Unless you meant to say "I can't wait to have one big net for all of my $CORP".

Even then, I wouldn't rule out partitioning your big net - there is enough stupid software and OSes around which happily blabber (ie. broadcast) to the attached subnet. Becomes quite a nuisance when you've got hundreds of Nodes.

Amfy• 12 years ago

Exactly! They should not hand out anything bigger than a /16 or so. It's really unfair for the others.

Arnt3• 12 years ago

That's just an effect of how the roadmap works. The registries defined about number of points at which the allocation rules became/become stricter. They could have defined more points, ie. smaller and more frequent rule changes, but what would the benefit be, really?

Btw, your math is off. ⅕, not ¼.

aidenn03• 12 years ago

Still no ipv6 address from my ISP at home :(

darklajid2• 12 years ago

Better than the abomination called Dual Stack Lite imo (which is what I got).

zokier2• 12 years ago

Whats wrong with DS-Lite?

ay2• 12 years ago

tunnelbroker.net - works pretty well and is easy to setup.

aidenn03• 12 years ago

Yep, I recommend it to anyone here on HN; just remember to install a firewall for your LAN if you have any non-public facing services.

zaroth3• 12 years ago

I remember reading about full IPv4-space scans showing some fairly massive blocks that were allocated but unused. As I recall it was well over 10% of the overall space that could theoretically be reclaimed and redistributed with a hand-wave.

Anything that gets IPv6 adoption to mainstream is a Good Thing, but more likely we'll just start seeing the $1/mo/IP become $2/mo/IP, and upward... The squeeze will just continue as people make more money off of it, and we'll still need IPv4 addresses for compatibility with people running Windows XP in 2020.

yuhong• 12 years ago

I think XP has partial IPv6 support, though not installed by default.

zaroth3• 12 years ago

You're right, the "Windows XP User on IPv4" is just an allegory of the critical mass of users that will keep us from dropping our IPv4 addresses many years into the future.

Put another way, what is the incremental value to provide access to your service to those IPv4 only users/devices? Whatever that value is, in theory you would be willing to pay a portion of that for access to IPv4 address space.

Luckily supply is not really constrained, so much as it is controlled. You can always get more IPs if you need them, but the cost associated I think will continue to increase... until enough people not only just support IPv6, but actually abandon their IPv4 addresses.

When the only devices that your software or service is designed to run on all support IPv6, then there's "no point" in having an IPv4 address. You almost have to get to the point where IPv4 is "not worth the trouble". And we are very, very far from that point I think. More to the point, more people are likely to think that it's IPv6 that is not worth the trouble.

jlawer2• 12 years ago

There is no requirement for (historical) IP addresses allocations to be publicly routable. Unfortunately many companies own large allocations that they are quite rightly able to use for internal allocations.

The only way they are going to give them up is if the is worth their while financially.

nwh• 12 years ago

Yeah, IPv4 is pretty much empty. Lots of companies own a /8 all to themselves, like Xerox (13.0.0.0/8), Apple (17.0.0.0/8), USPS (56.0.0.0/8) and Ford (19.0.0.0/8) to name a few. None of them allocate even the tiniest portion of them.

zaroth3• 12 years ago

There are usage requirements for IP addresses now. I have to substantiate the allocation.

I think if ARIN wanted to, they could give everyone a year to "substantiate their allocation" and set the policy something like "companies must return for reallocation any overallocations."

The risk of not returning an overallocation, well I'm not sure. ARIN certainly has teeth, and companies should simply be expected to correct these huge overallocations.

Just like the open source community comes together to solve serious problems, if we as a community enforced an ethical standard and some key people stood up raised this as an issue, I'm willing to bet ARIN could replenish a stockpile of IPv4 space.

So the question I'm asking is, since ARIN is empty, clearly they aren't interested in keeping a stockpile of addresses. Why not? I guess the more generous alternative is simply they have failed spectacularly at their stated goal.

Arnt3• 12 years ago

Take back those four and you can delay the v4 armageddon by about three months. Longer if you still apply the extra-strict rules used during the armageddon runup.

When the three months are up you can go looking for four more companies, and hire some more lawyers too.

roeme2• 12 years ago

I remember reading about full IPv4-space scans showing some fairly massive blocks that were allocated but unused.

Just because an IP doesn't answer to someone - especially coming from the general internet - doesn't mean it's not in use. This should be obvious to anyone even with the tiniest amount of understanding of TCP/IP networking and IT in general. Hence the authors of such a 'scan' aren't that credible to me. Unless 'scan' is something totally different.

kijin• 12 years ago

If a machine doesn't answer to the Internet, it has no need of a public IPv4 address. A machine that only answers to other machines in the same organization should be assigned an address in the 10.0.0.0/8 range. If the organization is not large, even 192.168.0.0/16 would do. In fact, many people would argue that assigning public IP addresses to intranet resources is very bad for security.

Of course, some of these machines actually might have valid justification for squatting on a public IPv4 address. Perhaps their firewalls are configured to drop all packets except those from a handful of "trusted" IP addresses, so a random scanner on the Internet gets no response.

But I doubt that such cases account for the majority of "seemingly unused" IPv4 blocks. What's more likely is that some large organization was assigned a massive block of IPs 20-30 years ago and never found much use for them. IBM owns 9/8. Xerox owns 13/8. HP owns 15/8. Apple owns 17/8. Ford owns 19/8. Several pharmaceutical and chemical companies also own an /8 each, as do some universities. Do they really need 16.7 million public IPv4 addresses? Of course not. But I wouldn't be surprised if they started to sell bits and pieces of their blocks once the price per IP goes up enough.

microtonal• 12 years ago

The squeeze will just continue as people make more money off of it, and we'll still need IPv4 addresses for compatibility with people running Windows XP in 2020.

Why? A router could still offer private IPv4 and encapsulate IPv4 packets in IPv6. The carrier can decapsulate IPv6 packets and perform NAT.

In fact, this is how my home cable connection works (per DS-Lite [1]). Our modem/router only gets an IPv6 address, but IPv4-only devices work fine.

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6333

AhtiK2• 12 years ago

I'm not sure if the OP referenced Win XP purely based on the IPv4->IPv6 discussion but Win XP is also extremely relevant for IP address space consumption due to not supporting TLS extension SNI [1].

SNI removes the requirement from HTTPS websites to host one domain per IP. This is done by having hostname part of the initial handshake.

Many websites or at least most (hopefully all) webapps these days serve over https, at least the ones that require user input like login. So there's the need for at least one public IP per site.

With SNI these could be all served from the same IP.

Now imagine CDN services like AWS CloudFront -- to support sites with SSL certificates you must use one IP per cert in EACH region or whatever the distribution granularity is.

Now this my friends is why AWS CloudFront asks $600/mo for each custom SSL cert domain and with SNI custom SSL it costs $0/mo.

As soon as all the 99.9% browsers/clients support SNI we'll be living in a better place with more free IPs. So we can finally distribute static content from CDN through custom SSL without the $600/mo pricetag.

It's naive to think everyone would go to SNI-based hosts with IPs shared with strangers but at least within the same datacenter for the same company IPs can be more easily conserved.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

runlevel1• 12 years ago

For instance, T-Mobile is using the UK Ministry of Defense's 25.0.0.0/8 allocation to extend their private network address space.[1]

[1] https://blog.wireshark.org/2010/04/t-mobile-clever-or-insane...

lmm3• 12 years ago

10% wouldn't last us very long - that's less than two years at current growth rates, and growth is still accelerating. At some point the cost is higher than just getting on with switching to v6.

kiallmacinnes• 12 years ago

10% gets us something like 6 months from memory - more than nothing, but not enough to hold off the inevitable!

Windows XP is a pain all right, the lack of SNI along with the limited v6 support means anyone using it really is stuck on v4.

Maybe the recent EOL for XP will cause a dramatic shift in the number of people continuing to use it? At least in the more well-off countries like the US, UK etc, opening the door for SNI :)

rasz_pl• 12 years ago

some fairly massive blocks that were allocated but unused

Watch this clip to understand why fractional solutions wont save us : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

Warning, its "Perhaps the most boring video you'll ever see, and definitely the most important."

owlmanatt• 12 years ago

ARIN does not have the authority to reclaim the blocks allocated before ARIN existed.

This is the source of a lot of problems.

spullara2• 12 years ago

Maybe they should have come up with a version of IPv6 that didn't basically require both to exist forever.

Arnt3• 12 years ago

All the proposed variants required that. Some hid the requirement a little better than others.

Some proposals were superset-like, so v4 and v6 addresses could ping each other. But not all v6 addresses. As soon as the v4 space was used up, those variants had to allocate v6 addresses that could not ping v4 addresses, so you got a sneaking incompatibility. Worse: you'd never know for sure whether there were any v4-only hosts left on the network.

Clean break or sneaking, what's your preference?

spullara2• 12 years ago

Clean break with the new protocol NATing the old protocol. IPv4 addresses not behind the NAT are not accessible on the new internet. Exploit the asymmetry inherit in services vs clients.

martinflack• 12 years ago

I work for Akamai and it's worth noting that we also do a ton of work around IPv6: http://www.akamai.com/ipv6

alexgartrell• 12 years ago

Why did you guys need a /10?

muppetman• 12 years ago

I'd love to know the justification for this too. SSL hosts is the only thing I can think of.

ay2• 12 years ago

I am curious if this news affects how many HN readers which are involved into the product development are developing their products / websites with IPv6 support ?

If maybe this helps folks managing news.ycombinator.com to click the button and dualstack their site ? (Being behind CloudFlare, it is really just a click away, I am told).

bananas2• 12 years ago

We've been IPv6 entirely for about 3 years internally. Externally our peering is shit and they don't do IPv6 competently at all.

We run Windows and Linux machines.

My ISP (Andrews and Arnold) in the UK give us IPv6.

nextw33k• 12 years ago

Could you expand on the peering problems?

I was thinking of switching to either A&A or fido.net this summer as they are the only ISPs in the UK that offer reasonable priced IPv6 broadband.

davidw4• 12 years ago

This seems to be a problem that markets will solve pretty well: as the resource gets scarcer, the price will go up, meaning people will have an incentive to use it more efficiently (selling unused address space), and/or look for alternatives (IPv6).

bashtoni• 12 years ago

Not really; there's a mismatch between the people who incur the cost of getting IP address space, the content providers, and the people who would incur the biggest costs switching to IPv6, the connectivity providers.

davidw4• 12 years ago

Markets are usually not perfect, but tend to work decently even under imperfect conditions.

Edit: it's kind of mind boggling that people on a site about startups are so anti-market. Lord knows they don't solve all the world's problems, and all of us can think of examples where they don't work, but they generally work pretty well, and I don't see evidence that this is not the case here.

lsc4• 12 years ago

The major cost of IPs is routing table bloat. Every time I announce a new block, every router on the internet (that carries a full table) needs more (very expensive) memory.

The size of the routing table has been growing faster than the cost of fast router memory has been falling for some time now.

I mean, if you are only pushing a gigabit of traffic (and /maybe/ 10 gigabits, especially if the packets are large.) it's not that big of a deal; you can use dram and CPUs with large caches, and it's fast enough. But if you own a real pipe and have to push 40 gigs, or really, even 10gigs of small packets, my pair of vyatta routers on Xeons just isn't going to cut the mustard.

It's kind of a 'tragedy of the commons' because when I buy IPs, that money goes to ARIN (or to the previous owner of those IPs) - none of that money goes to all the router owners who have to pay for more fast router memory - even though I'm costing those people money.

The problem with runout intersects with this. If I need, say, 4000 IPs, I can get one /20, and occupy only one routing slot, or I can get 16 /24s and occupy 16 routing slots. From my point of view, from the point of view of the person who owns the IPs, there really isn't much difference between one /20 and 16 /24s. But the rest of the internet has to pay 16x as much if I get 16 /24s.

davidw4• 12 years ago

So with a few rules, you can design a market that works pretty well:

http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/09-091_0077c0...

dcc1• 12 years ago

A lot of websites could use ipv6 to connect to a proxy/security provider such as cloudflare which would output the site to ipv4/ipv6 end users with all the other bells and whistles that cloudflare offers.

The end user then doesnt even know or care that the website he/she is using is ipv6

btw does cloudflare support ipv6 only domains?

baudehlo• 12 years ago

There's still some issues with HTTPS which need further roll-out to completely solve this problem (i.e. not everywhere supports SNI yet), but yes, for a lot of web sites this would work perfectly fine, and indeed is how many PaaS providers work.

exabrial2• 12 years ago

Ipv6 is still a terrible solution for so many reasons. Running out of addresses wasn't and and still actually isn't a problem, so stop pretending like it is.

IETF should have taken a pave-the-cowpaths approach and cleaned up ipv4, not created a huge incompatible ipv6 mess.

aidenn03• 12 years ago

ipv6 is a terrible solution for many reasons, but running out of addresses is a problem, and the best solution available right now is ipv6

exabrial2• 12 years ago

sadly... you might be right. I wish there was a collaboration group to fix ipv4 incrementally

tszming• 12 years ago

If the certificate authorities can reduce the price of a SAN cert (multi-domains on a single IP, not to be confused with SNI), I guess a vast number of IPv4 can be saved, e.g. we host quite a number of client sites and we need IPv4 for each site just for SSL.

ARIN down to 1.00 /8 – Akamai got 104.64.0.0/10 yesterday

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