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Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

networkworld.com

31–40 of 149 posts

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#31

This article is focused on the US, a country which was never really going to feel the brunt of the IPv4 crunch. For an example of a real victim, look at Qatar, a country which only has a single IP address for the entire country (everyone sits behind a NAT): https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Qatari_proxy_IP_address_tempora... [0] Whenever someone from Qatar decides to vandalize Wikipedia, Wikipedia is forced (temporarily)…

What is the IP address, then?

I got lots of different answers while googling. Is it still a range (they rotate through their allocated space), or do my googling skills just stink?

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#32
post #27
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use something else to ban users in this case? For example the user agent, browser window resolution, installed fonts, etc.

Those can all be changed. A determined spammer could make a bot that automatically changes them.

Whereas an IP can't be trivially masked?

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#34

This article is focused on the US, a country which was never really going to feel the brunt of the IPv4 crunch. For an example of a real victim, look at Qatar, a country which only has a single IP address for the entire country (everyone sits behind a NAT): https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Qatari_proxy_IP_address_tempora... [0] Whenever someone from Qatar decides to vandalize Wikipedia, Wikipedia is forced (temporarily)…

You act like Wikipedia has no agency in this matter and is simply forced to block Qatar's IP address from editing. Wikipedia has choices, and it's choosing something well within its rights to prevent abuse of its property, but they could choose to do something different.

I think you're getting distracted by property for no real reason.

Given the type of website Wikipedia aims to be, it's hard for them to give Qataris the service they want to deliver.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#35

Doesn't the US defence department hold a ridiculous amount of the address space? What would it take for them to give some of that up?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addres...

Looks like they've got more than one /8. ARIN has been trying to get the holders of legacy space to sign new SLAs and to get them to give over some of the space, but considering the IP address market, why not just sell the space instead?

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#36

Doesn't the US defence department hold a ridiculous amount of the address space? What would it take for them to give some of that up?

The growth in internet-connected devices is exponential. By the time the last blocks were issued they were going out at 1 class A (i.e. 1/256 of the entire IPv4 address space) every month. So it's not worth the effort to recover existing addresses.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#37
More than likely the people in charge will not act pre-emptively by upgrading to IPv6 during the normal upgrade/replacement cycle of their network hardware. Instead, they will wait until there's a real crisis so they can ask the government to fund their next hardware upgrade.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#38
post #7

Not a comment on the article, but IPv6 adoption relies on significant upgrades of existing hardware. Think of the size of the lookup table that a new bit of hardware has to be able to look up against and store compared to IPv4. Significantly more processing power is required, particularly if the hardware is a device that does inspection of some sort, even if basic! It isn't just a case of switching end machines to us…

IPv6 makes the global routing table much smaller (because there's enough space for the subnets to be logical parts of the network, rather than squeezing as many addresses in as possible), so the core routers for the IPv6 internet ought to need less hardware than the IPv4 ones.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#39
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother? The switch needs to be made eventually, so why kick the can down the road?

Because places like Qatar are suffering as a result of the US and others dragging their feet.

As pointed out in another comment, the situation in Qatar is a political one, not one of a situation where they could only get one IPv4 address.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#40
post #38
post #7

Not a comment on the article, but IPv6 adoption relies on significant upgrades of existing hardware. Think of the size of the lookup table that a new bit of hardware has to be able to look up against and store compared to IPv4. Significantly more processing power is required, particularly if the hardware is a device that does inspection of some sort, even if basic! It isn't just a case of switching end machines to us…

IPv6 makes the global routing table much smaller (because there's enough space for the subnets to be logical parts of the network, rather than squeezing as many addresses in as possible), so the core routers for the IPv6 internet ought to need less hardware than the IPv4 ones.

Ah thanks! Does this mean that the end routers can be simpler too, or do they still need significant processing power?
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