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How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

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Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#41

Post by nik736 »

Arnt wrote: post #21
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?

Sure, I am a RIPE member and am leasing out IPv4 (and IPv6) address space, ASN registrations, etc.

Everyone is able to sign up with RIPE and get a /22, thats around 1000 IP addresses. For years the RIRs want to tell us that IP addresses run out but I am still able, today, to pay some bucks and get IPv4 addresses without issues. The issue was that exactly those RIRs handed out IPv4 addresses years ago like there is no tomorrow and now they want us to switch to a broken protocol because they made a huge mistake. I won't deny that we are months (around 2 years) away from the RIPE actually running out of IPs.

Part of my job leasing out IPv4 space is also monitoring different sources, like Spamhaus, if my client or client of clients send spam with my IPs. What I can tell you is that with IPv4 already this is messy but if I think about IPv6 this is impossible to track or control and a complete nightmare. Also, for example if you operate a mail server that only runs IPv6 and send emails to gmail they will outright block you or just send it to the spam folder. Please note that this is only one of many examples.

Apart from that, if I look at the implementation of cloud providers like DO, Linode, OVH, Scaleway, etc. this is all a big joke. Also, IPv6 routes from some tier 1 upstream to others are down for days without anyone noticing it, because most people want IPv6, but no one is actually using it. It's like having a todo list and IPv6 is done but how it's been implemented doesn't matter at all.

You should also be careful with statistics, as a lot of scammers switched to IPv6 so I would not be surprised if a lot of the "IPv6 market share" is from scammers.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#42

Post by cesarb »

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!

Every time there's a discussion about IPv6, a suggestion like that appears, without fail. Paraphrasing the classic spamsolutions.txt, "Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work."

"Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once": every single system which wanted to talk to an AWS host would have to implement that IPv4 extension.

"Many server administrators cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential clients": for anyone with a non-upgraded system, the server would be unreachable.

Specifically, your plan fails to account for:

- Lack of centrally controlling authority for networking

- Huge existing software investment in IPv4

- Popularity of NAT and other middleboxes

- Users who don't update their operating system ever

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

- Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

- It will work for a while and then we'll get stuck with it

- It's an ugly hack

"Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work."

(I apologize for choosing your comment for this, but this idea of applying the spamsolutions.txt format to the inevitable "extended IPv4" proposals has been in my head for a long time. Someone with more networking experience should be able to present an even more complete list of "extended IPv4 objections".)

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#43

Post by gruez »

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…

>: 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.

it's a 128 bit number. no matter how you encode it, the ux is going to suck.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#44

Post by yAnonymous »

overcast wrote: post #33
FooBarWidget wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. IPv6 is ugly, yeah, but not any more ugly than other long random strings that we just copy-paste all the time, like API keys. For me, not adopting IPv6 has these reasons: * My home and small business Internet provider does not support IPv6, despite them talking about deploying it for about 10 years now. Actually here in the Netherlands I have never encountered a mainstream consumer ISP that supports IPv…

You go ahead, and try relaying an IPv6 address over the phone from one of your end users.

"Sir, please type this into your browser to get to the router web interface: 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334. I repeat 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334."

"Server IP address could not be found."

5 minutes later...

"Now could you please tell me the IPs of all connected devices?"

Customer hangs up and cancels his subscription.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#45

Post by seeekr »

d3ckard wrote: post #35

I agree with people blaming whole situation on ugly format of IPv6. I also believe that increase to 128bit address was unnecessary and harmful. We could have just added another two segments, have 48 bits total and it would probably be enough. It would also be much easier for people to switch from 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.127.0.0.1 than to ::1.

We've done so much learning about good UX, backwards compatibility and smooth upgrade paths in the years since IPv6 was first thought of and specified that I suggest there is a group of people out there (or on here) who can sensibly come up with an "IPv4.1" draft that can represent a smooth upgrade path from where we are right now, towards an extensible internet addressing format/protocol. It would have at least the following properties:

- IPv4-formatted addresses would continue to work as today - address space can be extended by adding bits to the existing IPv4 format, and 0 bits do not need to be typed out etc (in mathematical notation there's also no need to write 0001.200 if we just mean 1.2)

(It feels like there should be a couple more fundamental properties to be stated here, but I can't think of any more right now.)

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#46

Post by krylon »

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…

At home, I get IPv6, but I get assigned a different network every 24 hours, so it not that useful to, say, access my home server remotely. It works smoothly, though.

At work, we had some problems with Windows' Network Location Awareness where a domain controller thought it was on a public/non-trusted network unless IPv6 was turned off in the network settings. So we actually had at least a little pressure not to enable v6. :-|

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#47

Post by moduspol »

dorfsmay wrote: post #16

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.

I had read that cellular carriers were pushing to be able to just use IPv6. I know Apple has really emphasized IPv6 compatibility with App Store apps for at least a few years now.

That's one of the things I've been watching. Theoretically, the easiest switchover should be consumer iPhones on cellular data networks, because any app released in the last few years should work on them.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#48

Post by djrogers »

chatmasta wrote: post #24
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

Pedantic comment here, but NAT64 doesn’t involve any tunneling - it’s pure address translation handled by an edge box, whereas tunneling involves encapsulation.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#49

Post by cesarb »

chrisper wrote: post #37
ReverseCold wrote: post #31

I had IPv6 setup at one point, but a lot of things using it are broken. Some sites/services/software repos will just refuse to connect- and after a few minutes of debugging I realize it's probably v6. Turning off IPv6 usually fixes the problem. I'd like to use IPv6, but since turning it on by default breaks a lot of things- I'm leaving it off for now.

When I set up IPv6 I learned that you have to let some things through your firewall, like ICMP, because the IPv6 protocol relies on it. When I blocked everything like I did with ipv4, it eventually stopped working.

If you block everything with IPv4, things stop working too: you have to allow at least some ICMP (for "packet too big" path MTU discovery), otherwise you will have hard-to-diagnose issues.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#50

Post by mgkimsal »

gwbas1c wrote: post #28
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.

the 'dotted quad' format was 'good enough' from a UI perspective (and... fitting in peoples' brains for short term). had we added one or two more spaces - and default all existing addresses to 0.0.x.x.x.x, we'd have had 65000 more blocks of 4 gig spaces. That should have been enough for most countries to have allocated enough space, while making the transition and UI upgrades pretty painless. If there's only a x.x.x.x address, assume leading zeros, and so on.

it's "failing" for a number of reasons - the UI and mental map model is certainly a stumbling block, but it's also something which requires coordinated effort between multiple parties to happen more or less at the same time. If it doesn't (and it didn't), it'll take years more for all players to get in sync, which is what we're seeing.

Residential ISP companies didn't have much incentive to upgrade when everyone's OS didn't include IPv6 stack. Not much push to try to upgrade your OS when your modem and ISP don't support it. Not much use to try to support it on your websites and email servers when no one is using it or asking for it.... and so on.

As all the pieces fall in to place - hardware, ISP, OS, web/mail/services - it'll still be a gradual move, unless some major players announce IPv6 only service. If Office365 was "IPv6 only in 2020", that might motivate a lot of orgs to push their IT/ISP to upgrade and migrate.

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