Live data from Hacker News

Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

networkworld.com

41–50 of 149 posts

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#41
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.

Qatar suffers as a result of Qatar's policies and laws.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#42
post #5

A peak into the future of peak-oil. Let's see how this plays out and learn from it.

If only the available IPv4 address space were growing as rapidly as the available oil...

1960s: Peak oil 1995 @12.5 billion barrels/year.

Today: Peak oil 2035, current production is over 2.5X the previously predicted peak.

There's also an increasing expectation that rather than "peak oil" being a supply-side constraint, it will be a demand-side constraint as more efficient use and alternative energy sources become available - that is, we will never "run out".

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130710114436.ht...

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#43
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what they do. But this still prevents everyone in Qatar (who does not have an IP ban exception) from editing.

How many of Qatar's 2 million people use the internet, and how many of them pay for a VPN service? ( https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/6715/5-best-vpns-for-qatar/ indicates there are a lot of internet cafes whose owners are using VPNs and passing on the access to customers.) It sounds to me like a person from Qatar wouldn't have a problem editing wiki if they wanted to, nor a vandal from vandalizing if they wanted to...

"I can bypass it" is not a solution; it's just avoiding the problem, which remains intact.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#44
post #33

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html (circa 2003)

Thanks, very interesting read. While reading his argument about all the extensions that need to be done everywhere, I thought about this: since many protocols/etc have to be reworked, will that lead to consolidations (since some protocols will be left behind)? Can we say that currently the IPv6 Internet is a place (almost) free of legacy stuff?

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#45
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article also ignores the fact that running dual-stack (like Comcast) requires just as many IPv4 addresses as before. Even after ISPs get IPv6 working flawlessly, their customers still need to access IPv4 websites, and that means CGNAT or some messy kind of tunneling will still be necessary.

Then don't run dual stack. Run native IPv6 and NAT64/DNS64. Or in DO's case make IPv4 access optional for smaller droplets and charge $1/month extra for it. In reality things like DB servers or backend app servers don't need public IPv4 addresses, and this would speed up IPv6 adoption considerably.

Customer applications which require IPv4 and haven't been upgraded to support IPv6 still need a v4 address, and customers probably have to support their own clients that only use v4. You still have to ship the customer both L3 protocols. So the carrier would at least need to ship a NAT'd v4 address; v6-only would basically frustrate/anger/alienate a whole lot of customers, which is dumb from a making-money-with-my-company perspective.

In reality you can't just decide for your customers that they do or don't need something - you have to ask them what they need (if you want to continue having customers). Nobody's going to re-engineer all their shit to support your wonky network if they can just go to another company that provides them what they need.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#46
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.

I assume a browser fingerprint of the right granularity is hard to change for someone who would vandalize Wikipedia without a proxy.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#47
post #33

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html (circa 2003)

That was always a question I had in the back of my mind. We have this huge address space. Why not reserve a single prefix that means "look at the lower 32-bits of this address and use it as an IPv4 address"?

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#48
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Depends what they're doing; a typical home router isn't usually CPU-bound AFAIK. IPv6 packets can be larger, but conversely that means fewer packets for the same amount of data. Organizations that embrace IPv6 can probably simplify their networking by using globally-routable addresses for all devices (coupled with appropriate security measures - NAT qua NAT was never a security feature but it did give you an obvious single point at which to place a firewall). But I fear many companies will simply reproduce the complexities of their existing IPv4 networks in IPv6, at least initially.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#49
post #33

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html (circa 2003)

That was always a question I had in the back of my mind. We have this huge address space. Why not reserve a single prefix that means "look at the lower 32-bits of this address and use it as an IPv4 address"?

There are, there's a prefix that maps to IPv4 addresses.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#50

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 am curious. Which other criterion than IP address could they use to prevent anonymous users from Qatar from vandalizing?

(I guess one method could be to force everyone from this IP address to create an account, but that goes against their openness/ease-of-editing-for-new-or-casual-users principle.)

Post reply on HN