Live data from Hacker News

Posters of the IPv4 and IPv6 internet as of Jan 1, 2023

vad.solutions

11–20 of 104 posts

Re: Posters of the IPv4 and IPv6 internet as of Jan 1, 2023

#11

Why does Ford still have an entire /8 (and even worse, completely unused)?

Short answer: because they got there first.

Longer answer: it doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things. I saw where someone did the math of recovering all the corporate /8s (assuming that there was a justifiable reason for repossessing address space that they requested and were allocated fair and square). It would extend the IPv4 timeline by like a month and a half.

IPv4 is used up, and it’d be exceptionally difficult and expensive to claw back subnets.

Re: Posters of the IPv4 and IPv6 internet as of Jan 1, 2023

#13

In considering the rollout of IPv6, end users often get marginalized. This is frustrating to me. When we try to highlight ISPs who refuse to deploy IPv6, mobile services get highlighted - as if homes and businesses could just use them instead of wireline. If that doesn't end the discussion then IPv6 acolytes will go on about transit traffic or anything else until IPv4-only users go away and stop ruining their optimis…

Rollout isn’t a problem for anyone it’s when services start to become unaccessible to IPv4 but accessible on IPv6 end users can get marginalized. We’re still many years from that though which greatly amplifies how much an issue it’ll actually still be when that time comes.

Re: Posters of the IPv4 and IPv6 internet as of Jan 1, 2023

#14
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy how RA handles address assignment. I like how the address space feels huge and uncrowded (almost private), like how internet v1 once did. I like it when the lightbulbs go off the first time I get a service working. I like feeling like a member of the club.

> I like how the address space feels huge and uncrowded… ^^ in case anyone is wondering why IPv6 is where it’s at after a decade… Sigh.

I don't see anything wrong with this being a pro.

At a previous company I worked at, this was literally the impetus for going IPv6. We were in a regional business and were growing by acquiring companies in other regions. Every new company we acquired, we had the major pain of making the networks talk. Almost everyone is using 192.168.0.0/16 or 10.0.0.0/8. IP conflicts were a given, and re-address networks was a big painful operation. NATs were an option, but came with their own permanent complications. IPv6 made it go away. If the new site already had IPv6, collisions were still a non-issue, and if they didn't, well getting them IPv6 ready was easier than re-address everything. Once they were IPv6 ready we could go ahead and establish VPNs, and with most traffic now going over IPv6 we could re-address IPv4 without causing significant outages.

IPv6 has other advantages, better multicast, better routing, flow labeling, automatic link-local addressing, but the large IP space is definitely the elephant in the room.

Re: Posters of the IPv4 and IPv6 internet as of Jan 1, 2023

#16
post #2

Serious question: why would I want to purchase this as a poster? Asking as a nerd, but maybe not a very specific data oriented nerd.

I agree, it would be much cooler to 3D print it, using the image as a heightmap. Maybe even make 4 separate pieces to increase scale. Preferably in a FOSS 3D printer using home-made plastic, with the models uploaded from a PDP-11 only using the shell.

Re: Posters of the IPv4 and IPv6 internet as of Jan 1, 2023

#18

In considering the rollout of IPv6, end users often get marginalized. This is frustrating to me. When we try to highlight ISPs who refuse to deploy IPv6, mobile services get highlighted - as if homes and businesses could just use them instead of wireline. If that doesn't end the discussion then IPv6 acolytes will go on about transit traffic or anything else until IPv4-only users go away and stop ruining their optimis…

I find it interesting how in some countries IPv6 on mobile is more common than wired. Here in New Zealand not one of our mobile carriers offer IPv6. All have no plans to do so stating that there is no demand for it. This also extends to wireless broadband. This is in contrast to fibre/DSL type connections where customers have a choice of several ISPs offering IPv6. Fascinating to see the different market dynamics in different countries.

Re: Posters of the IPv4 and IPv6 internet as of Jan 1, 2023

#19

Why does Ford still have an entire /8 (and even worse, completely unused)?

Ford was in early enough that RFC 1918 wasn't a thing, and those address were used internally, using something else would have be rouge. If I recall Ford also had 20/0.0.0 at one point in time as a dev/staging network. Source: working at ford in 96 and they had been on IP networking long before I arrived.

Same with General Electric and the 3.x. It was sold it to AWS a few years back, introducing the burden of internal re-addressing.

Before cloud providers/FANG behemoths, these were some of the largest networks around.

Re: Posters of the IPv4 and IPv6 internet as of Jan 1, 2023

#20
Really surprised no one has yet posted the software that’s almost certainly used to create these images, the Measurement Factory’s ipv4-heatmap package, on GitHub here: https://github.com/measurement-factory/ipv4-heatmap

And, yes, it was absolutely inspired by Randall Munroe’s xkcd Map of the Internet, which someone has already linked.

There’s a fork that uses ColorBrewer palettes, which may be what they actually used: https://github.com/hrbrmstr/ipv4-heatmap

(I used to work at Akamai and used this to produce monthly versions with each /24 colored based upon how many addresses within it had connected to the company’s network.)

Post reply on HN