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How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

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Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#11

Post by sulam »

dijit wrote: post #6
craig1f wrote: post #4

I feel like AWS and the Cloud in general have to be helping with this issue, because people no longer need to lock down individual IPs or ranges of IPs to get work done. Without the need to lock down an IP that you may or may not need to use, and with load-balancers that are able to expose boxes on a private subnet, the demand for IPv4 should be going down.

I actually disagree on this point. The rapid deployment and horizontal scaling that cloud recommends implicitly (failure domains, microservices as small isolated single purpose units et al.) also promote the consumption of IPv4 address space. The other thing is Docker and Kubernetes are not supporting IPv6 today so that definitely locks a lot of the more modern cloud deployments to IPv4, even if it's S2S communicatio…

You just get given some 10.x space anyway. It only really bites you on the ass when you need to exchange traffic between hosting providers and that can generally be done although you may have to find a middle man in some cases.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#12

Post by XorNot »

kuon wrote: post #7

My ISP doesn't support IPv6 and it's been complicated to get IPv6 running properly at my hosting providers too. My hosting provider uses DHCP to propagate routing information, and I had a lot of issue with it going down, thus losing IPv6 connectivity. In the end I just disabled IPv6 on all the node I manage, it has no benefit except increased complexity. The problem is the lack of insensitive to do the conversion.

This sounds more like poor DHCP configuration on your side? DHCP going down doesn't remove anything unless your client decides to time out it's current address configuration - of which there's no incentive to do on a server.

Moreover if routing was being propagated by DHCP, why was that not the case for IPv4 as well which would presumably be using it ?

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#13

Post by dijit »

kuon wrote: post #7

My ISP doesn't support IPv6 and it's been complicated to get IPv6 running properly at my hosting providers too. My hosting provider uses DHCP to propagate routing information, and I had a lot of issue with it going down, thus losing IPv6 connectivity. In the end I just disabled IPv6 on all the node I manage, it has no benefit except increased complexity. The problem is the lack of insensitive to do the conversion.

incentive* and yes, I agree.

I actually tell my ISP when they call me to upgrade that I will not upgrade to a higher package unless that package has IPv6 enabled. I am probably the only person who does this.

What I did instead was set up a HE.net tunnel so I can actually have IPv6 (albeit with a smaller MTU, but you're unlikely to notice). What I gain is the ability to run my own little services at home again, no NAT punching! no complicated rules.. I have a salt master that connects to my IPV6 enabled VPS' (which is all of them, thankfully), I have all my mail listening on VPS's with IPv4 and IPv6 which take in my mail and deliver it to a harddisk at my house essentially. Anything S2S can happen directly.. and it's nicer even on IPv6 enabled networks that I happen to be on when travelling (Mobile operators are increasingly IPv6)..

But it's unreliable to be IPv6 only, I can only access my home from other wifi networks at a ratio of about 1:20..

But I long for the day where it's ubiquitous and I can shit on wifi operators for not supporting it.. that day will come.

I mean last year IPv6 adoption more than doubled and is sitting at around 22%~ of all traffic.. so that's something.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#14

Post by micheldlebeau »

nottorp wrote: post #5

I don't see an answer to 'how bad' in the article. I thought I'll get some recent numbers but instead i got... some generic text that was valid even 3 years ago?

This seems to answer the question: https://ipv4.potaroo.net/ The first diagram shows that IPv4 will be quite tight around 2020.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#15

Post by lolc »

nik736 wrote: post #2

I am actually not really sure if those people really believe that IPv6 will EVER replace IPv4, which in my opinion will never happen.

It's already happening. It's not completed, and it will take time for publicly available services.

At some point having IP4 on your public gateways will be seen like FAX in your office. You can't turn it off because a small minority is still using it. The importance is dwindling and at some point you will turn it off and nobody will notice.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#16

Post by dorfsmay »

Nothing is going to change unless there is a real issue by not having ip v6 which will force users to jump to the ISPs which do support it and abandon the ones who don't.

My understanding is that there is a real cost for ISPs to make IP v6 available, but zero need to (upgrade of thousands of pieces of hardware equipment - is that still true?). There is no consequences for not doing so.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#17

Post by [deleted] »

dijit wrote: post #13
kuon wrote: post #7

My ISP doesn't support IPv6 and it's been complicated to get IPv6 running properly at my hosting providers too. My hosting provider uses DHCP to propagate routing information, and I had a lot of issue with it going down, thus losing IPv6 connectivity. In the end I just disabled IPv6 on all the node I manage, it has no benefit except increased complexity. The problem is the lack of insensitive to do the conversion.

incentive* and yes, I agree. I actually tell my ISP when they call me to upgrade that I will not upgrade to a higher package unless that package has IPv6 enabled. I am probably the only person who does this. What I did instead was set up a HE.net tunnel so I can actually have IPv6 (albeit with a smaller MTU, but you're unlikely to notice). What I gain is the ability to run my own little services at home again, no NAT…

[deleted]

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#18

Post by fosco »

h1d wrote: post #8
craig1f wrote: post #4

I feel like AWS and the Cloud in general have to be helping with this issue, because people no longer need to lock down individual IPs or ranges of IPs to get work done. Without the need to lock down an IP that you may or may not need to use, and with load-balancers that are able to expose boxes on a private subnet, the demand for IPv4 should be going down.

Going down? That is if the number of Internet users don't grow and since it is so easy to spin up an instance even for just $5 a month these days, many people are rather willing to spin up more than they would have physically to use more IPv4 addresses. But seeing how attaching an extra IP to an instance is so cheap everywhere, it seems there's no immediate threat to lack of address spaces but I'd like to know about…

new techniques such as SNI [0] enable more websites to be hosted behind the same IP. I do not know what it means for security or if there are any major trade offs, but I am acutely aware that it is widely used.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#19

Post by ranger207 »

Google was incorporated in September 1998. RFC 2640 was published in December 1998. Google's IPv6 tracker [1] has ~20% of their traffic coming in as IPv6. In the time that it's taken for Google to become one of the largest companies in the world, IPv6 is still uncommon.

[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#20

Post by geofft »

XorNot wrote: post #12
kuon wrote: post #7

My ISP doesn't support IPv6 and it's been complicated to get IPv6 running properly at my hosting providers too. My hosting provider uses DHCP to propagate routing information, and I had a lot of issue with it going down, thus losing IPv6 connectivity. In the end I just disabled IPv6 on all the node I manage, it has no benefit except increased complexity. The problem is the lack of insensitive to do the conversion.

This sounds more like poor DHCP configuration on your side? DHCP going down doesn't remove anything unless your client decides to time out it's current address configuration - of which there's no incentive to do on a server. Moreover if routing was being propagated by DHCP, why was that not the case for IPv4 as well which would presumably be using it ?

DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 are different (they even run on different ports) and probably they have more experience with monitoring and operating DHCPv4.

Honestly I think the fundamental mistake of IPv6 was trying to fix everything else along the way. Certainly there are things that can be fixed in DHCPv4. But there isn't a way to put off that operational work until you're ready to get good at it; there is no way to just get more addresses and not also sign up to run a new version of DHCP, to decide if you even want DHCPv6 or you want RAs and SLAAC, to give up ARP, etc. It's a big lesson in the second system effect.

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