We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by kalleboo » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 9:14 AM UTC

casca wrote: post #23

There's always been a vocal group who maintains that the IP addresses that are not visible on the internet should be returned. There are a number of problems with this argument. Firstly, there are legitimate business reasons for having assigned, non-RFC1918 addresses that are only used internally. Interconnecting private networks belonging to different organizations that have overlapping 10.x addresses is a painful p…

> Interconnecting private networks belonging to different organizations that have overlapping 10.x addresses is a painful process

They could just use IPv6 for that

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

#72

Post by tjgq » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 9:14 AM UTC

cbhl wrote: post #40

kazagistar wrote: post #34

Its not really so bad. Its not like end users need IP addresses. All you need is addresses for all the major servers, and then like a couple dozen for each ISP, right?

Carrier NAT has lots of bad consequences. It means that NAT-punching may stop working (because there may be two or three levels of it). It makes fraud detection harder. Plus, it's error prone -- once in a while, you'll get data that happens to look like your IP address, and you'll find that you can't send that precise sequence of bits in a packet ever because it'll get mangled by the NAT.

> once in a while, you'll get data that happens to look like your IP address, and you'll find that you can't send that precise sequence of bits in a packet ever because it'll get mangled by the NAT

How so? Those bits should only matter to the NAT logic if they are found in their expected position in the IP header, not in the payload portion of the datagram.

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

#73

Post by perlgeek » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 9:25 AM UTC

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.

I have a very real other reason: One of the hosting companies I use doesn't account IPv6 traffic, so all IPv6 traffic going to some of my websites is essentially free for me.

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

#74

Post by devcpp » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 9:35 AM UTC

belorn wrote: post #62

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…

Awesome, that will push IPv6 adoption.

And big companies that need this sort of routing for millions of addresses can surely afford paying for these addresses anyway.

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

#75

Post by devcpp » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 9:42 AM UTC

rjsw wrote: post #60

nwh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I realise, I just have a hard time believing that Ford even has a tiny portion of their block allocated to anything.

Ford has multiple design centres in different countries plus a lot of subcontractors who may need to connect to stuff from outside. I can believe that they are using a large part of an /8.

And normal people and smaller companies need their addresses even more.

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

#76

Post by valisystem » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 9:50 AM UTC

belorn wrote: post #62

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…

Making ipv4 a second class citizen working like an low performance compatibility layer for legacy seems like a great migration plan to me. Especially if performance would go down progressively.

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

#77

Post by lmm » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 9:55 AM UTC

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.

>I get assigned a new ipv4 IP by DHCP every time I reboot my computer.

Sure - from your router's subnet. The route to that address still goes to that router. There's no BGP update to propagate, no routing table entry to add to every router on the internet.

I mean, why not assign every IP address individually? That way we'd be fine for up to 2^32 internet-connected devices. Every router would just have to store all 2^32 routes in memory and send out a BGP message whenever anyone rebooted. Can't see any problem with that.

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

#78

Post by lmm » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 9:59 AM UTC

Negitivefrags wrote: post #12

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…

Can those companies sell their IPs on the open market when the normal pool has run out? Is that allowed?

Legally it's an allocation, not ownership. The registry could simply revoke your allocations if it caught you selling them (though whether it would is another question).

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

#79

Post by nknighthb » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 10:12 AM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #69

nknighthb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IPv6 doesn't exist automatically, either. If an ISP is going to move their customers to it without setting up the requisite transition mechanisms, I don't see how that's any different than failing to meet the myriad requirements for provisioning a functional IPv4-only network in the modern age. Whom do you blame when an ISP forgets to configure BGP on their routers?

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

#80

Post by noselasd » Wed, Jul 31, 2013, 10:12 AM UTC

mfincham wrote: post #20

pyre wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would end-user software deal with an IPv6 address though? Surely some of it is IPv6 capable already, but I would imagine that a lot of it makes assumptions about IPv4. If the OS were operating on a IPv6 network, would that software function correctly as long as the addresses were IPv4-compatible (i.e. within the IPv4 range, and not in IPv6 notation)?

"It depends", is unfortunately the answer. For very old software where it's not possible to patch it for IPv6 support (this is rarer than you might think!) then some kind of IPv4 NAT or a DNS64 style "application layer gateway" is required. You could also potentially add a specific wrapper for your application e.g. wrapping MySQL connections inside of stunnel allows them to run over IPv6 in version of MySQL built wit…

>Almost no software you're likely to be running is incompatible with IPv6, though. Software support for IPv6 is way ahead of actual network implementation.

How sure are you of this ?

Now, ofcourse all the major widely deployed software, be it browsers, web servers, mail servers and clients, remote file systems and similar are already IPv6 ready. What about all the many many millions of custom built systems and applications ? The kinds you will never see, that's hidden behind a corporate wall in use by 10-100 people.

Or all the devices that people have bought - all the wifi routers, IP cameras, network printers, DSL modems and so on ? It doesn't matter how much anyone says that these should have had time to support IPv6. If they arn't, it'll cost someone money to replace them - not all are willing to do that.