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How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

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Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#81

Post by exikyut »

enzanki_ars wrote: post #26
exikyut wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I clicked vouch immediately. It stayed dead!!, which is what prompted the rant.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#82

Post by Corrado »

One problem to moving to IPv6 is that most of the firewalls I've looked at either don't support it at all or the support is very weak. I know that IPFire doesn't support it and I couldn't find any information on Smoothwall IPv6 support. I think that pfSense supports it but I don't know how well.

Come on people, it's 2018 and your building a network application. I'm thinking a top priority would be IPv6 capabilities. Apparently, I'm wrong.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#83

Post by adrianmonk »

gruez wrote: post #43
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…

I don't think the UX necessarily has to suck. Three observations:

1. Just because we have 128 bits doesn't mean we have to use them all right now.

2. As anyone who's familiar with data compression knows, there are ways to represent some values in convenient forms and other values in less convenient forms.

3. There is a trade-off between ease of allocation and ease of use. Maybe we shift the focus toward ease of use if we want wide adoption.

With the benefit of hindsight, one way the IPv6 rollout could have been done differently is to have initially restricted ourselves to 40 bits of the address space. Thus we'd have started with addresses that look like (say) A.B.C.D.E instead of the current A.B.C.D.

Such a (hypothetical) system would be easy for an end user to handle, and most importantly that could be enough to get us over the hump to IPv6 adoption. Longer addresses would be valid, but they just wouldn't be assigned until later.

Of course, this is not quite how IPv6 works. But they do have a syntax that allows omitting zero values, and if addresses were assigned so that more of them were zero, it would make the UX better.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#84

Post by closeparen »

jsjohnst wrote: post #62
AckermanMD wrote: post #60

Could IPv4 address exhaustion be staved by opening some of the currently unused /8 blocks? For instance, Apple has the entire 17.0.0.0/8 block. If IPv4 addresses are really becoming scarce and demand is going up, seems like Apple could dole out /24 or /16 bit blocks to RIRs and make some money - which they obviously like to do. So why aren't they doing it? Maybe someone more familiar with the economics of IP has an i…

There’s dozens of cases of this besides just Apple. Frustratingly, if you scan the legacy allocation /8 blocks (not done personally, but know someone who has), most of the ranges have no open ports on a majority of the range. So they literally are serving no justifiable (in my opinion) purpose.

I did IT support at a car dealership where some ancient line-of-business software needed a public IP for every Windows desktop it ran on to function properly.

No justifiable purpose, sure, but I can only imagine the tons and tons of legacy line-of-business crap out there with assumptions like this.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#85

Post by YouKnowBetter »

AstralStorm wrote: post #70
YouKnowBetter wrote: post #57

From a corporate perspective: we are just scared shitless to implement v6 internally. Keeping (private) v4 working is hard enough. Even drafting a project budget for v6 makes management go balistic. - firewall & IDS upgrades - firewalls rules - accountablity - dynamic DNS - employee education - toolchain updates - upgrades of software - functionality tests Not all companies employ NY or Google level engineers who "ju…

Come on. Firewall rules is one sed call. IDS are dinosaurs and junk that are generally worthless (feel free to show me otherwise). Since all major OS support ipv6 there's nothing to educate about other than perhaps new IP address form. Software upgrades? Like what software, OS to support NAT64? Which every major OS supports? (Including Windows 7. The holdouts are ancient telephones and tiny embedded trash.) Toolchain…

> Firewall rules is one sed call

Not so fast. With over 60.000 clients (yes with all known OSes and versions known to man), 10.000 servers (yes with all known OSes and versions known to man), 50 network firewalls, firewall on nearly all hosts (clients & servers), it might be just a little more then a sed call.

> IDS are dinosaurs and junk that are generally worthless.

They're part of the infrastructure, partly "just a compliancy thingy" but also part of the layered security model. Hell, there is even antivirus software for that exact same reason.

> [...] there's nothing to educate about other than perhaps new IP address form.

That is a joke right? I am sure you know a little bit more about v6 then "it's just a longer address"

> Like what software

Like software that touches IP addresses. DHCP (if that's your choice for v6), monitoring tools (yes there is loads of that which does not support v6 (mainly home made crapola) etc.

You might live in a greenfield environment, homogene and clean. Loads of older organisations run everything ever invented within the last 20 years.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#86

Post by jsjohnst »

closeparen wrote: post #84
jsjohnst wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s dozens of cases of this besides just Apple. Frustratingly, if you scan the legacy allocation /8 blocks (not done personally, but know someone who has), most of the ranges have no open ports on a majority of the range. So they literally are serving no justifiable (in my opinion) purpose.

I did IT support at a car dealership where some ancient line-of-business software needed a public IP for every Windows desktop it ran on to function properly. No justifiable purpose, sure, but I can only imagine the tons and tons of legacy line-of-business crap out there with assumptions like this.

You nailed why I threw in the word justified intentionally. There’s plenty of reasons a public IP could be needed, but not justifiably (to me, your example perfectly illustrates that).

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#87

Post by krylon »

AstralStorm wrote: post #72
krylon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enabl…

Funny, this is ISP complicating your and their life only so they can price gouge you.

Well, that is not exactly news. The forced disconnect every 24 hours has been around as long as DSL (in Germany at least), so you would need to pay extra for a static line.

From a principal point of view, it is very annoying, practically it has not been sufficiently annoying for me to do anything about it.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#88

Post by SlowBro »

An embarrassing admission, but one that is potentially useful for this conversation: I have a Cisco CCNA cert that I got in 2009 but never used. (Got a job that didn’t put most of the knowledge to use, and the cert collected dust.) IPv6 was on the exam. I’ve forgotten all about how to use it.

For me it is just not as intuitive. Maybe others think the same, slowing adoption? I didn’t find it intuitive when studying for the exam, but I got it enough to pass.

Basic networking knowledge I still have. I can tell you how to set up a DHCP and DNS server, and how NAT works on your router. I can tell you about ARP tables, VPNs, VLANs, firewalls, and subnets. I can’t begin to tell you about the equivalents on v6.

Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe it would come to me once I started using it again. Or maybe it’s just not as intuitive.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#89

Post by philg_jr »

tzs wrote: post #61
gwbas1c wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It doesn't even need to be that drastic. Apple, Google, and Microsoft could just check for IPv6 when connecting to a network. If it's missin…

> Constantly showing that nag will put a lot of pressure on major ISPs like Comcast Comcast is making good progress: http://www.worldipv6launch.org/apps/ipv6week/measurement/ima... For others, see: http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/

Yes, Comcast has made, relatively speaking, amazing progress on deploying IPv6 across their network. It works very well (well, except if you have one of their business "routers" required if you need a static IPv4 address). This is a stark contrast of, say, Verizon Fios, who has yet to deploy ANY IPv6 across their network.

Re: How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?

#90

Post by citrin_ru »

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…

Long address in not the only problem of IPv6. Mass adoption is also slowed by complexity of IPv6. There is rationale for this complexity (more features, more flexibility), but in most networks this complexity comes with little or no practical benefits.
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