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A brief history of IPv4 address space exhaustion

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Re: A brief history of IPv4 address space exhaustion

#81

Post by [deleted] »

jcranmer wrote: post #46
gens wrote: post #30

IANA sold the blocks. There are still a lot of unused IPv4 addresses. IANA sold the blocks. PS IPv6 sucks.

The IANA blocks were exhausted in January 2011. All of the RIRs save AFRINIC exhausted their internal allocation pools since then: APNIC in April 2011, RIPE September 2012, LACNIC June 2014, and ARIN September 2015 (although note that the definition of "exhaustion" differs from RIR to RIR--ARIN in particularly relied on a truly-bone-dry definition whereas APNIC claimed exhaustion when they had less then a full /8 in…

[deleted]

Re: A brief history of IPv4 address space exhaustion

#83

Post by bArray »

dogecoinbase wrote: post #13
bArray wrote: post #6

Would have been awfully nice to have a reserved bit in hindsight. 7 bit ASCII was an amazing accident. (Maybe it wasn't, time to brush up on my history...)

We do/did! Class E space (240.0.0.0/4) exists and is entirely unused. There was a proposal in 2008-ish to try and convert it to regular IP space for allocation, but the agreement was that it would be too much work (many stacks default drop class E packets) and we should focus on transitioning to IPv6.

Thanks, I wasn't really aware of this. Class E wouldn't add too much to the IP address space if I understand this correctly?

I was thinking more along the lines of a bit being flipped would mean the next 8 bytes are an IP and not four, for example.

From my limited understanding, I don't think they reserved a bit in the address space?

Re: A brief history of IPv4 address space exhaustion

#84

Post by bArray »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #8
bArray wrote: post #6

Would have been awfully nice to have a reserved bit in hindsight. 7 bit ASCII was an amazing accident. (Maybe it wasn't, time to brush up on my history...)

If you're advocating for the introduction of variable-length IP addresses then it would have been a nightmare - packet-switching is often done in hardware and that level of complexity would have only added trouble.

Any harder than implementing IPv6 in hardware? I'm talking about an adjustment that would keep older machines talking to older addresses, whilst newer machines could implement extended IPv4, for example. From my potential ignorance, I'm not sure how that would be more difficult?

I think it's theoretical of course, I don't believe there is a reserved bit in the IPv4 range.

Re: A brief history of IPv4 address space exhaustion

#85

Post by keeperofdakeys »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #43
cesarb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I never understood in these proposals: how would two computers, one with only an extended address and the other with only an IPv4 address, talk to each other? Or two computers with extended addresses, but with a single router in the middle of their path which doesn't understand extended addresses? All these proposals I've seen appear to assume that extended addresses start being distributed only after every…

There are two issues in migration: updating software and updating configuration. The former can be completely trivial if you are just pulling down updates from someone else. The latter requires effort on your part. If the IPv6 address space had been an extension, then you wouldn't have to do any configuration to support IPv6 clients while you maintain your existing 32-bit address, valid for both stacks. At least that…

For a new transport layer protocol like QUIC, this can work. However when you start talking about IP, you need to update/replace basically every device on the internet. If a device in the path doesn't know about the extended address space, that packet probably can't reach it's destination.

Re: A brief history of IPv4 address space exhaustion

#86

Post by stouset »

zkms wrote: post #68
stouset wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it really matters what percent of clients are IPv6-capable. Nobody is incentivized to actually deploy servers to IPv6 while there exist zero IPv6-only clients.

> Nobody is incentivized to actually deploy servers to IPv6 while there exist zero IPv6-only clients. Facebook is a counterexample. > Over the past few years, Facebook has been transitioning its data center infrastructure from IPv4 to IPv6. We began by dual-stacking our internal network — adding IPv6 to all IPv4 infrastructure — and decided that all new data center clusters would be brought online as IPv6-only. We th…

They might have actually done it, but my point is that the incentives for companies to do so generally aren't there. And as long as there exist some large sites that believe the costs to adopting IPv6 exceed the benefits, ISPs will continue to give IPv4 addresses to their clients.

Re: A brief history of IPv4 address space exhaustion

#87

Post by FullyFunctional »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #85
FullyFunctional wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two issues in migration: updating software and updating configuration. The former can be completely trivial if you are just pulling down updates from someone else. The latter requires effort on your part. If the IPv6 address space had been an extension, then you wouldn't have to do any configuration to support IPv6 clients while you maintain your existing 32-bit address, valid for both stacks. At least that…

For a new transport layer protocol like QUIC, this can work. However when you start talking about IP, you need to update/replace basically every device on the internet. If a device in the path doesn't know about the extended address space, that packet probably can't reach it's destination.

? You have to upgrade the software on all devices to move to a larger address space. That's understood. What we are discussing here is the added complexity of the configuration. Updating the software is easy by comparison.

Re: A brief history of IPv4 address space exhaustion

#88

Post by Symbiote »

stouset wrote: post #86
zkms wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody is incentivized to actually deploy servers to IPv6 while there exist zero IPv6-only clients. Facebook is a counterexample. > Over the past few years, Facebook has been transitioning its data center infrastructure from IPv4 to IPv6. We began by dual-stacking our internal network — adding IPv6 to all IPv4 infrastructure — and decided that all new data center clusters would be brought online as IPv6-only. We th…

They might have actually done it, but my point is that the incentives for companies to do so generally aren't there. And as long as there exist some large sites that believe the costs to adopting IPv6 exceed the benefits, ISPs will continue to give IPv4 addresses to their clients.

My phone's IP is in the private 10 range. A request to Facebook must go through the provider's expensive NAT router.

If they assigned my phone an IPV6 address in addition, that traffic could go directly to Facebook through cheaper switches, which is faster for me, and cheaper for them.

Re: A brief history of IPv4 address space exhaustion

#89

Post by Symbiote »

Spivak wrote: post #67
sparewalking wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought an IPv6 router 3-4 years ago.

You're also on Hacker News. They have been available for a long time, but they're firmly a techie/early adopter product.

In many countries the ISP supplies the router. I've had IPv6 capable routers for years and years in Britain, but it's only in the last 2 years or so that the IPv6 address has been assigned by the ISP.
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