The exhaustion of IPv4 address space

The exhaustion of IPv4 address space

[MPython here, if u cn rd]

Re:Is NAT Better?
(Score:5, Funny)
by MSZ (26307) Alter Relationship on Monday October 17, @12:24PM (#13810256)
The benefits of IPv6 are numerous, however.
Cisco marketing rep:
NOBODY expects the IPv6!
Our chief benefit is length... greater length of the packet header and and unrememberable addresses...
Our two benefits are greater length of packet header and unrememberable addresses... and rewrite of all network apps....
Our three benefits are length of packet header and unrememberable addresses... and rewrite of all network apps.... and an almost fanatical devotion to some broken standard....
Our four... no...
Amongst our benefits... Amongst our array of benefits... are such elements as greater length of packet header and unrememberable addresses...
I'll come in again.

But seriously, if IPv6 was so good, it would not require so much pushing. If the IPv4 exhaustion was real and imminent, it would not rquire so much pushing.
--
The moon is not fully subjugated. I demand a second assault wave preceded by a massive nuclear bombardment.
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well, it's not "better" as such, just a different solution. NAT is not a golden bullet though. Yes, it does, by and large prevent random machines on the internet directly contacting your unpatched windows desktop at home, but a firewall will do that too, and virtually every dsl router has a firewall these days too. I would like to see home dsl routers supporting native ipv6 but I don't know of any.

I think that ipv6 is a good thing to go for, but it's not finished (but then, is ipv4? :). there's lots of advertised features for ipv6 (mandatory encryption, mobile ip etc) that are good on paper, but aren't all that in the real world.

Mandatory support for ipsec is great.. except how many of us would use it? as there is currently no support for mndatory ipsec encryption to unknown strangers. you've got to be pre-configured for crypto. I'd like to see something like ssh. if you know the key then great, if you don't then you can accept and save one and then while you may not have verified the destination, you're at least protected on the wire. yes, they also need to sort out authentication and perhaps some form of certificate distribution, but lets make a start on something useable.

mobile IP. sounds great! I can be using my ipv6 pda via my mobile phone and as I walk into my house, it picks up my wireless net and my downloads speed up instantly, all the while not dropping the voip call I'm making. or I'm using a laptop on the train and as it flits from hotspot to hotspot I don't lose any of my connections. sounds great! how does it work? you tell me, details are not easy to find. ots of talk, few working implementations (if I'm wrong, please tell me, I'm genuinely very interested).

working with networks as part of my job, I know how useful and really annoying NAT can be, and I really think it should be an option, not a requirement. I'd love to see ipv6 rolled out and see what changes it brings, but I also think it needs a fair amount of work still.

dave
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Re:Is NAT Better?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by saikatguha266 (688325) Alter Relationship on Monday October 17, @12:27PM (#13810285)
Actually, NAT is better because it provides address space isolation. If your organisation has 500 computers that all have a public IP address, it is harder for you to switch providers (500 IPs is too small to get your own address space for). When you switch your provider, you have to renumber all hosts, fix config files, fix DNS servers etc -- a royal pain in the ass. A NAT allows your to keep your internal structure exactly the same while you switch providers. That address isolation is very important for small-mid sized companies.

Second, NAT helps multihomed corporations. For large companies, your 10k hosts are going to be distributed over many states/countries/ISPs ... and each site advertising its own address space is expensive for the ISP's because they cannot perform route aggregation (since your address space may not line up with the address space of each ISP). NAT solves this by having each site be NAT'ed behind that ISP's IP address (convinient for the ISP, cheaper for the company). The internal company network runs in the private space and when traffic crosses to the public internet, it gets an IP from the ISP it came out of ... consequently replies come back in through the ISP. Read: If you send a packet out of India, the response won't come back inthrough America ... which would otherwise require you to then forward it to India through your company's routers.

It is this address isolation and multihoming support that drives NAT use in small and large companies. Address space depletion has nothing to do with it. IPv6 does not fix these problems; companies will continue using NATs because NATs do.=====

blah3 --same contest 2 months ago here in /.

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My cold, dead hands
(Score:5, Interesting)
by BJZQ8 (644168) Alter Relationship on Monday October 17, @11:52AM (#13810004)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 02, @11:20PM)
Until I absolutely HAVE to switch to IPV6, I will keep my much easier-to-remember addresses. Try to remember something like these:

fe80::02d0:c1ff:fe5c:0010/10

2002:c0a8:1122::5efe:0a01:0101/48

2001:7f8:2:c01f::2
I mean, DNS goes a long way towards turning that hex into something memorable, but as a sysadmin it does NOT make my life easier. Let's reclaim some of those /8 blocks allocated to people that barely use them, first. Does E.I duPont REALLY need 0.39% of the internet address space? Does Eli Lily? That is 16777216 addresses, for what? Does Eli Lily even have 16 million adressable devices? It seems to me that we have plenty of IPV4's, it's just the allocation stinks.
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Not any time soon.
(Score:5, Insightful)
by dills (102733) Alter Relationship on Monday October 17, @12:02PM (#13810085)
(http://www.xecu.net)
I have worked in the internet service business for over a decade now. I have seen a lot of things come and go, and a lot of predictions about when we would run out of IP space.

The bottom line is that the only people who realy WANT a rollout of IPv6 is Cisco. Why? Because the vast majority of their existing installed routers will not support IPv6 with anywhere near the same feature set and packet rate as those routers can handle with IPv4. Thus, IPv6 means people upgrading equipment that isn't really deficient.

Most people have no concept of:

a) How much IP space we have left.
b) How extremely inefficent we have been with a large percentage of the address space.
c) How much assigned, announced, and routed space is completely unused.
d) How much the rate of growth has flattened.
e) How wrong every prediction about when we run out of IP space has been thus far.

If you search the nanog archives, you'll see posts by myself going back many years stating essentially "Somebody tell me why we need IPv6 again?"

Do not hold your breath. We're 10-15 years away from IPv6, because it will take an even larger gross expenditure for the service providers to upgrade to support IPv6 than it did for the broadcast industry to upgrade to HDTV.

This is what industries that rely on revenue growth do when their customer growth flattens. They invent a new widget, come up with reasons why everybody needs it, market it, and hopefully everybody buys the product all over again. IPv6 is admittedly a good bit different; it was created by geeks in attempt to solve a perceived problem. However, it was siezed upon by the router vendors as a future "upgrade when growth flattens" path.

Don't buy into the hype. IPv4 is here to stay for a long time. Even when IPv6 starts to have some decent degree of market penetration, you will always find most of the devices on the net are IPv4 behind IPv6 to IPv4 NATs.
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