IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011

In reality, having an IP address does not put you on an equal footing --- in a service model sense --- with other servers or companies that have paid massive amounts of money for peering. BigCo IP addresses are already "super-addresses", because they're BGP-advertiseable, and yours aren't.

So long as "full membership in the Internet" means "publicly routable IP address", you're going to get what your ISP is willing to give you and nothing more. This is true even in an IPv6 world! I'm not comfortable with this and you shouldn't be either. IP addresses are what network operators are giving greybeards to geek out over while they continue gobbling up the Internet.

What we need to do is accept an IPv4/NAT IP layer, define a minimum acceptable service model for ISPs to offer over it ("access to the web" being a good starting point), and then build application-layer overlay networks that provide the real services applications want, like broadcasting, peer-to-peer, location, presence, automatic configuration, and multihoming.

This isn't my crazy pie-in-the-sky idea (though the first startup I personally cofounded got this idea funded for several million dollars during the bubble). Is also the MIT PDOS RON idea, which Paul Graham's friend Robert Morris helped oversee.

It is also, for what it's worth, the logical conclusion of Saltzer and Reed's "End to End Argument In Systems Design". When you meet a challenge with a lower-level protocol, the answer tends to be to dumb it down to a point where you can build multiple variants of "something smarter" on top of it. We're at a point now where IP is simultaneously getting less relevant (organically, as more intelligence moves into HTTP-driven protocols) and more important (as we run out of addresses). The answer is not investing more effort in IP.

From a pragmatic perspective, the nice thing about this strategy is that it requires nothing from normal people. They'll use whatever IP their ISP gives them (NAT'd or otherwise), and it won't matter; it'll work just fine for the web today, and it'll work just fine for the TCP/SCTP/whatever-driven overlay networks we come up with tomorrow, where all the real action will be anyways. It's also nice to sit back and not worry about the IPv4acolypse and concentrate on building stuff instead.

Ok, I often find I need to check myself before calling someone out on hacker news... several times I've found myself arguing with someone who was way more qualified than I was on the subject at hand.

but this is the exact opposite of what I understand "peering" to mean. From what I understand, settlement free peering is just that... it's free. Each party pays for half the cost of maintaining the line between them and packets bound from the customers of one peer to the other and vis-a-vis can traverse that link for free.

Generally speaking, when you pay for transit, it's called transit rather than peering.

(Now, my understanding is that there are cases where you would pay for peering... in this case, say you want to shave miliseconds off your ping time to some stock exchange... you can essentially buy transit that is limited to just the customers of your peer. In this case, there is "settlement" based on the number of packets going one way or the other. But, my understanding is that this isn't how it's usually done. Normally you look people up on peeringDB, and if you are exchanging enough traffic for it to make sense and you are on the same exchange, you set up a settlement-free peering agreement. Of course, all this shit is covered by NDA, so all we really have is hearsay)

Also, uh, all IPs are BGP advertisable. If you are small, your ISP does the BGP advertising (and the peering) I mean, if I buy my connectivity from above.net, they peer with everyone, right? so that's pretty close to me peering with everyone. Now, if you buy connectivity from a poorly connected ISP, sure, your network is going to be slightly slower... but it's still certainly BGP-advertiseable - it's just that you've outsourced the management of that BGP advertisement to your ISP.

Right now I'm working on moving the BGP router into my control, so I'm getting first hand experience with things I've watched people do in the past. And really, unless your primary business is infrastructure (and, well, mine is) it often doesn't make sense for you to run your own BGP router. I mean, it's one of those easy to screw up things. Most places I've worked that did their own BGP had more outages due to the new guy jacking with the router than due to upstream outages (which controlling your own BGP router, assuming you have multiple transit providers, can protect you from.)

Yes, my home IP addresses are not portable... but IP portability doesn't matter until you have a large number of IP addresses. Ok, so I have to renumber the 8 servers I have in the garage, big deal. Now, if I have to renumber the 1000+ virtuals I've got in the data center, that is a big deal. But my understanding is that everyone filters what's smaller than a /24, and some people filter below a /22... but at a bit over 1000, you are pushing a /22, so by the time that renumbering becomes a really impossible task, nobody filters you any longer.

Now, if you are multihoming for reliability rather than ease of switching ISPs, yeah, you have a good point. DSL has been neutered in that regard, which is really fucking irritating... but I understand why they did it. You know as well as I do that every route eats up a few bytes of ram in everyone else's BGP router, and TCAM is fucking expensive, so having a grand a month barrier before you can start adding your data to every bgp router in the world seems reasonable to me.

On the other hand, the barrier to getting some data center space and a multihomed /24 is pretty trivial by bay area sysadmin salary standards. Over the next week, that's one of my projects. One of my customer has an old /24 of swamp space he wants me to announce. It sounds like a good deal all around just 'cause my BGP foo was never good and what experience I have is old, so I get to practice on something I can break, and he gets to play in his swamp. It's going to cost the guy nothing 'cause I want to play around... It'd probably cost him something around a grand a month if he was going with someone more professional than I am and/or if he didn't already have the swamp space.

But my point was that if you pay for an ISP with good connectivity, you get all the benefits of their peering efforts. You are outsourcing your BGP management to your ISP, which for most people is going to result in better service than doing it themselves.

I think you can get 90% of the benefits of running your own BGP with a lot less hassle out of a $200/month co-lo plan. (just to be clear, that won't get you BGP you control or portable addresses, but if you've only got a few addresses, and the isp you chose is competent, well, that doesn't matter all that much for at least 90% of use cases.)

Edit: I know little of the bittorrent protocol... but my understanding, and this may be incorrect, was that bittorrent from one computer behind a nat (without upnp or the like) to another computer behind another nat (again without upnp or a port forward or the like) did not work well or at all... if you were behind a nat without a port forward (or upnp) you could only talk to peers that were on a public IP or had a port forward.

By the way, you can also give IPv4 addresses directly as one big number. E.g. `ping 1249729897' pings 74.125.93.105 (which is google.co.uk for me).

You can also go to http://74.125.93.105/ with your browser. (Though it depends on your browser, if it can parse this format. Chrome does.)