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We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing

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Re: We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing

#61

Post by belorn »

ars wrote: post #4

There are a ton of /8 still assigned to companies that don't need them. Ford, GE, IBM, AT&T (x2), Xerox, HP (x2), Apple, MIT, CSC, Eli Lilly, Nortel, Prudential Insurance, DuPont, Cap Debis, Merck, SITA. All of those can return their /8. That's 18 /8 potentially available. And does the DoD really need 12 /8's? I get that they want to network every person, gun, ship, tank, truck and plane. But none of those need to be…

In the global market, returning those addresses won't help at all.

Currently, the only reason the American registry still has any IP addresses left, is because their pool was separated from the emerging markets in Asia. As such, if IANA would start extracting IP address as suggested, the global market would eat it up faster than IANA could collect them. It would only "work" if IANA gave all the addresses exclusively to the American pool, working towards a local Internet rather than global.

Re: We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing

#62

Post by belorn »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #41

Bah. All this IPV4 "exhaustion" stuff can be simply solved. Almost overnight. Right now, most of the space is underused and simply being hoarded. Want to free up 90% of the IPs? Easily? Then charge for them!!! If MIT had to pay $1/mo for each IP address ($16 million per month), it would immediately give most of them back. If MIT had to pay $1/year for each IP address ($16 million per year), it would immediately give…

Such policy would lead to an explosion of fragmented patterns in routing, expanding the global routing table. That mean latency and costs would go up while throughput would go down.

If I remember right, there doesn't exist hardware for backbone networks that can handle a fully fragmented global routing table at the required speed of today. They are thus unlikely to also handle the increased speed of tomorrow without quantum computers.

Re: We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing

#63

Post by nknighthb »

pyre wrote: post #56
rdtsc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had enough time. This is not a new thing. Some ISPs were more proactive, some were not. Those invested man hours and hopefully they will reap the benefits while their competitors struggle. Same with OS and software support. In the end some will profit from this (even the lazy ones -- "quick, pay us for a new version that enables IPv6 support) and some will lose (they'll find competitors did a better job at IPv6…

I'm mostly thinking about end-user applications that may just never get updated, though I can't come up with any off the top of my head.

Dual-stack, proxies, and (if absolutely necessary) actual tunnels can compensate for critical IPv4 apps. You can layer whatever you need to on top of IPv6.

Non-critical applications where people aren't willing to jump through any hoops... Well, it's not exactly news that sometimes old apps get left behind in technology transitions.

Re: We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing

#64

Post by davidw »

masklinn wrote: post #53
swixmix wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could be a fortunate investment that will make them lots of money. Give it back? I doubt it. Sell it back? Profit.

> This could be a fortunate investment that will make them lots of money. Apple has ~$150b in cash reserves. Selling a /8 would amount to nothing on their balance sheets, whereas owning a /8 can have invaluable uses.

Apple is probably a bad example.

Presumably, as the good in question becomes scarcer, its value will increase to the point where it makes sense to sell it, or use alternative solutions.

Re: We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing

#65

Post by nknighthb »

p1mrx wrote: post #17

And news.ycombinator.com is still IPv4-only.

The main argument for migrating existing websites to IPv6 in the near-term is merely to aid the policy goal by showing "Hey! IPv6 is in actual use!".

On the technical side, there are various transition mechanisms that can ensure even "IPv6-only" clients will be able to communicate with most legacy IPv4 services for years to come. HN is not holding up progress.

Re: We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing

#66

Post by teddyh »

ars wrote: post #4

There are a ton of /8 still assigned to companies that don't need them. Ford, GE, IBM, AT&T (x2), Xerox, HP (x2), Apple, MIT, CSC, Eli Lilly, Nortel, Prudential Insurance, DuPont, Cap Debis, Merck, SITA. All of those can return their /8. That's 18 /8 potentially available. And does the DoD really need 12 /8's? I get that they want to network every person, gun, ship, tank, truck and plane. But none of those need to be…

See, you'd like to think so. You'd like to think that there's an easy solution not involving you, because it would mean you don't have to do anything or learn anything new.

However, as pointed out in many other comments in this thread, this (and many other knee-jerk reaction "solutions") won't actually work, or would be significantly more expensive than implementing IPv6.

It's been on the horizon for nearly 20 years. It's coming soon now. The IPv4 end is nigh. Repent!

Re: We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing

#67

Post by bigiain »

kiallmacinnes wrote: post #51
bigiain wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Five (or ten) years ago, NAT was "the solution" – which helped and worked for longer than the doomsayers predicted. Today, I suspect SNI will be the important stop-gap measure. There's a whole bunch of websites out there on shared hosting with dedicated IP(v4) addresses for their vhost just so they can use SSL certs for https connections. If we can ignore Windows XP users and IE6 users, SNI allows SSL certs on shared…

> I can think of a few dozen "unnecessary" IP addresses this little web development firm consumes, I suspect big hosting companies could probably find thousands or tens of thousands of similarly used IP addresses. That's the problem. A few million addresses would stretch things out by a couple of months.. But the cost of getting a few million websites onto SNI would far exceed any benefit.

Perhaps. As well as "returning" a few million addresses, it'd also plug one of the drivers behind demand for new addresses (I've got no idea if it's just my blinkered little web-dev worldview talking here - anyone actually know what the big consumers of new ipv4 addresses are doing with them? Is SSL certs for websites a significant consumer?)

If my view is even vaguely supportable - I see things happening that give me some optimism - WHM/cPanel, a fairly significant webhosting management system, rolled out SNI support earlier this year (a few months behind schedule, but it's out now and it works). I assume Plesk and other webhosting management packages are doing the same thing. Perhaps this'll stave off the ipv4 apocolypse by longer than expected? (Or perhaps I've got no idea about what's really going on out there…)

Re: We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing

#68

Post by michaelt »

teddyh wrote: post #47
Dylan16807 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason they would have to return the entire thing. Some /16s would be fine.

It would also be completely useless, as implementing the reassignment would dwarf the cost of moving to IPv6.

Reassigning some ipv4 IPs on a handful of corporations' internal networks would dwarf the cost of upgrading the entire internet infrastructure to ipv6?

I get assigned a new ipv4 IP by DHCP every time I reboot my computer. And you should hear the infrastructure people at my ISP and workplace and university squeal when you ask them about ipv6 - far too much work, they say, no plans on the horizon.

Re: We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing

#69

Post by teddyh »

nknighthb wrote: post #65
p1mrx wrote: post #17

And news.ycombinator.com is still IPv4-only.

The main argument for migrating existing websites to IPv6 in the near-term is merely to aid the policy goal by showing "Hey! IPv6 is in actual use!". On the technical side, there are various transition mechanisms that can ensure even "IPv6-only" clients will be able to communicate with most legacy IPv4 services for years to come. HN is not holding up progress.

No, such a thing does not exist. At least not automatically. There are stories[1] about large corporations getting complaints from end customers in Asia about not being reachable - and it turns out the customers only have IPv6. IPv4 FAIL.

(Note: APNIC ran out of IPv4 addresses more than two years ago[2], and has had rapid internet expansion in the mean time. Asians are heavy IPv6 adopters.)

Such a thing you imagine could conceivably be implemented, but it would be an extra thing for the IPv6-only ISPs to implement, and they do not have the incentive to do so. The current companies with servers do have an incentive to be reachable by IPv6-only customers, and are the only parties who can reasonably solve the situation, by implementing IPv6.

1) https://www.iis.se/blogg/ipv6-nar-sent-inforande-kostar-peng... (Swedish)

2) https://www.apnic.net/publications/news/2011/final-8

Re: We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing

#70

Post by teddyh »

michaelt wrote: post #68
teddyh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also be completely useless, as implementing the reassignment would dwarf the cost of moving to IPv6.

Reassigning some ipv4 IPs on a handful of corporations' internal networks would dwarf the cost of upgrading the entire internet infrastructure to ipv6? I get assigned a new ipv4 IP by DHCP every time I reboot my computer. And you should hear the infrastructure people at my ISP and workplace and university squeal when you ask them about ipv6 - far too much work, they say, no plans on the horizon.

The entire internet infrastructure (backbone routers, etc.) is already using IPv6, so the cost of implementing IPv6 is, by now, entirely on the end-site side.

You should also include a number of additional cost of reassignment, including growth of routing table size.

I'm sorry to inform you that apparently your ISP, your workplace and your university are all either lazy, lying, or both. Implementing IPv6 takes, maybe, a few weeks if you have many servers and a large internal network. If all you have is a webserver which you want to be reachable by IPv6-only customers, an interim solution (tunnel) can be implemented in a few minutes.

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