How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion? • Hacker News Board

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#21

Post by Arnt » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 2:23 PM UTC

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.

Can you elaborate?

IPv6's share of traffic has been increasing at about 0.5% per month for the past year. If IPv4 has 80% and IPv6 20% this month, next month it'll be 79.5 vs 20.5. So in your opinion... what? The change will stop? When? Why?

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#22

Post by seeekr » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 2:27 PM UTC

Hypothesis: Mass adoption of IPv6 is blocked by the ugliness/inconvenience of the IPv6 address format, hence "end-users" (developers) don't like adopting IPv6. As long as this UX issue does not get solved, IPv6 adoption is only going to happen on an individual level when any given business' significant income stream is at immediate risk of being disrupted. Depending on how many of these individually affected businesses represent major infrastructure providers (such as public clouds), the individual moves to IPv6 might together bring about a globally noticeable effect.

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Who here actually feels any sort of pain, as an internet technologist, or as business owner, from "still" being on IPv4? I know that I do not.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#23

Post by exikyut » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 2:28 PM UTC

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?

Offtopic tangential forum rant:

There has been an answer to your question in this thread for 14 minutes. However only users with showdead on can see it, because Arc has erroneously flagged it as evil. Screenshot/proof of what I currently see: https://i.imgur.com/Y7iM30E.png

HN does get spam, but the text and links don't look like the currently-buried comment does. I can't see it being /that/ hard to train an RNN, what with this being a comp-sci discussion forum...

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Oh, about the bar being brown/black in my screenshot - I set the bar color to that of the upvote/karma text, as I don't care to see that information (I start commenting for points, not to contribute meaningfully - it's true). Unfortunately Arc doesn't realize it should make the color of the links lighter so I can see them, so I've had to work hard to learn where the "threads" link is sitting so I can access comment replies.

Bit inconsistent letting me change the background color but not the text color. I can understand it, but still. Getting to the root cause, it would be nice to have an option to completely disable karma score display.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#24

Post by chatmasta » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 2:28 PM UTC

bullen wrote: post #10

We should add another 4 bytes to IPv4 which is the internal IP, then AWS f.ex. would only have one public IP per region and the rest would be internal IPs. IPv6 is too big and incompatible!

If I understand what you're suggesting, this is basically how NAT64 [0] works to provide backwards compatibility to IPv6 (tunneling IPv4 over IPv6). It uses the first 32 bytes of the IPv6 address to store the IPv4 value.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT64

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#25

Post by gwbas1c » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

> The ultimate solution to IPv4 exhaustion is, of course, the complete transition of the Internet to IPv6, however, this will take time and until then there will be (by definition) networks and sites which only support IPv4. This requires other networks and sites, even if they support IPv6, to maintain IPv4 connectivity, which in turn requires some number of IPv4 addresses. For that reason, IPv4 exhaustion certainly is an issue to be understood and dealt with, especially by those who are building new networks and services.

That's what I heard in college in 1999.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#26

Post by enzanki_ars » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 2:32 PM UTC

exikyut wrote: post #23

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?

Offtopic tangential forum rant: There has been an answer to your question in this thread for 14 minutes. However only users with showdead on can see it, because Arc has erroneously flagged it as evil. Screenshot/proof of what I currently see: https://i.imgur.com/Y7iM30E.png HN does get spam, but the text and links don't look like the currently-buried comment does. I can't see it being /that/ hard to train an RNN, wha…

Depends on the karma you have, but if you click on the time stamp, there is a vouch link there. I just did, and it does not show as dead any more on my end, so hopefully people can see it now.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#27

Post by apeace » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 2:32 PM UTC

seeekr wrote: post #22

Hypothesis: Mass adoption of IPv6 is blocked by the ugliness/inconvenience of the IPv6 address format, hence "end-users" (developers) don't like adopting IPv6. As long as this UX issue does not get solved, IPv6 adoption is only going to happen on an individual level when any given business' significant income stream is at immediate risk of being disrupted. Depending on how many of these individually affected business…

I work for an ISP so I have some perspective on this issue. We do offer static IPv6 addresses to our customers, but only upon request (by default they get one static IPv4).

If we had demand for it, I'm pretty sure we'd start including an IPv6 subnet by default. It doesn't cost us much, it's just more bookkeeping really. If anything, it could be a turn-off to our customers who might not be used to configuring their router with an IPv6 subnet (the 'ugliness' problem you're talking about, but also just unfamiliarity).

I think IPv6 adoption will happen when cloud providers start running out of IPv4 space. If AWS has to drastically raise its prices for IPs, or simply announces they're running out, then AWS customers will have to start evangelizing IPv6 to their own customer bases.

Eventually an IT guy in an office says, "I heard Slack is only going to support IPv6 soon, we need it!". So the ISPs start doing it.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#28

Post by gwbas1c » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 2:32 PM UTC

seeekr wrote: post #22

Hypothesis: Mass adoption of IPv6 is blocked by the ugliness/inconvenience of the IPv6 address format, hence "end-users" (developers) don't like adopting IPv6. As long as this UX issue does not get solved, IPv6 adoption is only going to happen on an individual level when any given business' significant income stream is at immediate risk of being disrupted. Depending on how many of these individually affected business…

When I work with HTTP APIs, IPv6 appears rather transparent. I just stick in a URL and it works.

But, you're right about IPv6 being extremely complicated. Back when I first heard about IPv6, I suspected it was going to fail in the marketplace.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#29

Post by notyourday » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

Nothing but the external entry points in a cloud need to be publicly accessible IPv4.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#30

Post by bkor » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 2:34 PM UTC

exikyut wrote: post #23

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?

Offtopic tangential forum rant: There has been an answer to your question in this thread for 14 minutes. However only users with showdead on can see it, because Arc has erroneously flagged it as evil. Screenshot/proof of what I currently see: https://i.imgur.com/Y7iM30E.png HN does get spam, but the text and links don't look like the currently-buried comment does. I can't see it being /that/ hard to train an RNN, wha…

Don't you have enough karma to vouch/favorite that comment? I just did. Usually there's a reason why the comment is automatically flagged so don't agree with your assessment.