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MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

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Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#111

Post by apostacy »

klodolph wrote: post #108
apostacy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the ip addresses really aren't useful to them, they can provide them to someone who could carry on their spirit of improving society. How about providing services to the general public in some way, then? Transfer them to a non-profit trust that will allocate them to anyone who would do something important with them. If a university had extra land, I would argue that they provide it to someone who could give it bac…

I don't think we agree on what the purpose of a university is. I'd say the purposes of a University are research and post-secondary education. MIT is not some kind of general-purpose charity with the vague goal of improving society. It sounds like they decided that $50M is more useful than an /8 block for achieving their mission. All I'm hearing in response is the unjustified assertion that the IPv4 addresses are mor…

Obviously IPv4 addresses are useful, because people are offering money for them. My understanding of what they are used for, is to support clients behind NAT. But there could be some further application that I am not aware of.

If IPv4 addresses are useful to Microsoft or Amazon, then perhaps they can be useful to the general public, in some way. Indeed, MIT already provides IPv4 hosting to anyone who physically shows up at their campus. Maybe MIT could grant their IP addresses to a non-profit that would find a way to improve society.

It's debatable what universities should be doing. I've talked about this with several people who work in grant writing, and administration of well respected universities. What I have been told, is that it is generally the job of universities to educate certain people, with the end goal of improving society, and the world. And that is what justifies universities hand picking who they educate; affirmative action. So, picking out students from poor and marginalized communities, and targeting them for education, would arguably do more good for society as a whole. Universities played a part in ending slavery, by demonstrating that black people could indeed compete with white people intellectually. And that this mission is explicitly laid out in the charters of many universities.

But, I'm aware of how indirect that is. Not everyone will agree. And certainly not all, if not most universities are like this. I think a lot of universities are just educational and research facilities.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#112

Post by mirashii »

mortehu wrote: post #100
throwaway2048 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not how it works, if you only have IPv4, AAAA records have no effect. Google et all continue to work via IPv4.

I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say "Thats not how it works". I was referring to people with broken IPv6 setups, mostly Teredo and 6to4 (old Mac OS X versions), for whom IPv4 worked but IPv6 was not actually routable. At the time, publishing AAAA records would lock out all of those users.

> If you can't access IPv6 enabled sites, you can't access Google

He was referring to your lack of qualification in the above. An IPv4 user can indeed access Google, which is an IPv6 enabled site.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#113

Post by syncsynchalt »

flyinghamster wrote: post #54
buzer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound correct. Are you absolutely sure you aren't also getting a prefix delegation thru DHCPv6? That's currently the common way to provide IPv6 connectivity currently for residential users. From what I remember hearing, Comcast was giving /60s thru PD.

No, I don't get a prefix. No /60, no /64, not even a /120, just one single address. A /128. Maybe I should jump on their forums and raise a fuss. I'm not at all confident that calling tech support would get me to someone who even had a clue what IPv6 is.

Comcast has a decent ipv6 technology group (by necessity - they were an early adopter/innovator of carrier-grade v6 as they have more CPE to address than can be fit into 10/8). If you ever become interested in resolving this you may want to dig through http://www.comcast6.net and see if you can find a direct contact to work with.

I don't have any contacts myself, I'm just a customer and interested observer.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#114

Post by droidist2 »

syncsynchalt wrote: post #63
takeda wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that's just human nature, we are doing similar with IPv6 right now. The smallest allocation for IPv6 is /64 that's 1.84467440737096E19 addresses.

Only similar if you ignore that there are 2^64 available /64s. We're never going to be in danger of running out, so the use of /64s allows potentially interesting application of the host part of the address (uses so far include stateless autoconfiguration and privacy addresses).

> We're never going to be in danger of running out.

Just wait until every cell in your body has its own IP.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#115

Post by syncsynchalt »

droidist2 wrote: post #114
syncsynchalt wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only similar if you ignore that there are 2^64 available /64s. We're never going to be in danger of running out, so the use of /64s allows potentially interesting application of the host part of the address (uses so far include stateless autoconfiguration and privacy addresses).

> We're never going to be in danger of running out. Just wait until every cell in your body has its own IP.

My body is v6-ready.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#116

Post by apostacy »

dangero wrote: post #22
apostacy wrote: post #14

That's too bad. I think universities should make these resources that they've been granted available to students and researchers. Last time I was at the MIT media lab for a conference, I was able to get an unfirewalled external ip address from their wireless network. It was amazing. I briefly streamed live audio of a talk via shoutcast, but of course, nobody uses that stuff anymore. It really makes you ponder what a…

IPV6 solves this, plus even without you don't need anything close to this amount of IPs to do what you're describing. It's a fairly niche case to need that many public IPs and it seems a little crazy to hold that many just in case some researcher might want to use them. Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind…

> Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind a NAT since most people are behind one these days.

If I tried streaming a conference on youtube, facebook, or periscope, my stream could be muted or stopped because someone plays copyrighted music or something.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#117

Post by zkms »

apostacy wrote: post #80
dangero wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPV6 solves this, plus even without you don't need anything close to this amount of IPs to do what you're describing. It's a fairly niche case to need that many public IPs and it seems a little crazy to hold that many just in case some researcher might want to use them. Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind…

IPV6 is all well and good, but I am not optimistic about it. Why should a university deploy it, and introduce all sorts of new problems? Mine hasn't. And I don't blame them. No, I think that our future is isolated carrier-grade NAT, connecting to cloud services exclusively. And that makes me sad. I had to disable ipv6 on my Linode, because Clouldflare, Google, and Facebook do not seem to trust any ipv6 traffic coming…

> Why should a university deploy it, and introduce all sorts of new problems? Mine hasn't. And I don't blame them.

If your university doesn't have a lot more demand for IP addresses then yeah -- it makes sense that they'd just hold on to their network space, continue to NAT their DHCP pools and keep doing what they're doing. That's not an indictment of IPv6, it just means that the work to deploy IPv6 doesn't provide any benefits to them. However, newcomers and networks that foresee expansion can't just "stay the course" -- there just isn't enough IPv4 for them -- and do need to bite the IPv6 bullet.

Deploying IPv6 does indeed require work in terms of management (all tools that assume the length/format of an IP address need to be updated, netadmins need to learn and deploy RA guard and friends) and your network silicon needs to do IPv6 in the fastpath -- but even with all these pain points, carrier-grade NAT'ing IPv4 is nevertheless more painful, expensive, and slow.

Forward-thinking network operators have been taking advantage of the LTE and DOCSIS 3 transitions to enable native IPv6 everywhere, and Facebook is moving to IPv6-only infrastructure -- and it's paid off! About 80% of network traffic (to Akamai) from T-Mobile and Verizon is IPv6 (from Comcast it's lower -- around 50%): https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/our-thinking/state-of-the-inter...

The future is IPv6 -- it's just not quite equally distributed yet.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#119

Post by ghaff »

apostacy wrote: post #80
dangero wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPV6 solves this, plus even without you don't need anything close to this amount of IPs to do what you're describing. It's a fairly niche case to need that many public IPs and it seems a little crazy to hold that many just in case some researcher might want to use them. Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind…

IPV6 is all well and good, but I am not optimistic about it. Why should a university deploy it, and introduce all sorts of new problems? Mine hasn't. And I don't blame them. No, I think that our future is isolated carrier-grade NAT, connecting to cloud services exclusively. And that makes me sad. I had to disable ipv6 on my Linode, because Clouldflare, Google, and Facebook do not seem to trust any ipv6 traffic coming…

>If they don't have a use for them, they should make them available for someone who does. Not just sell them to be used for some corporation's infrastructure.

Isn't selling them off to someone who will pay money for them pretty much the definition of making them available for someone who has a use for them?

It's not like you can't buy an IPv4 address if you want one because Amazon and Google own them all.

We just have this situation where a few universities, the US DoD, and a handful of corporations own a disproportionate number of IP addresses because they were early to the game. They all got cheap IPv4 addresses. So HP owns two /8 addresses while Google does not.

I'm not seeing a situation where donating millions of IPv4 addresses to someone is going to improve society relative to Amazon forking over a bunch of dollars to a university.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#120

Post by lamontcg »

apostacy wrote: post #102
lamontcg wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really need to just pick a date and turn off ipv4 because its the only way to make this guy change.

It's not me that's fixated on ipv4. I would love ipv6. But why aren't ISPs providing it? Why aren't universities and other large organizations switching to it by default? ISPs don't care. They would rather everyone just use carrier-grade NAT.

Because someone works at those universities or ISPs who is making the same argument you're making. If enough of you all throw your hands in the air and say 'not enough people are doing it' then there will never be enough people doing it. At some point someone needs to point a (metaphorical) gun at your heads and make you all do it or else.

In the meantime, you should feel bad every time you make this argument because you're helping to make the world worse and enabling everyone else to just kick the can down the road.

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