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Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

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Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#121

Post by marios »

IgorPartola wrote: post #19
sp332 wrote: 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.

Or you can run IPv6 only core-network, perform NAT64 on one side and NAT46 on the customer side. There is an implementation for this on android [1], which is trivial to run on Linux (I've ported it, there's nothing difficult as it doesn't use anything android specific.) By the way, this technique is called XLAT464. There has been a nice presentation about it at the IETF, and you find the slides online[2]. I believe T-Mobile USA is currently deploying this on production level and it works quite well.

I think it's very close to dual-stack, and this technique has the advantage of being extremely easy to deploy. Especially if you already have NAT64 gateways setup in your network, then you have done more that half of the work :-).

[1] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/android-c... [2] http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/84/slides/slides-84-sunset4-...

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#122

Post by MichaelGG »

einhverfr wrote: post #107
jokoon wrote: post #25

still wonder how much of the internet is not IPV6 compatible.

Quite a bit actually. Our experience at Efficito may be interesting. We previously had backups located in Denver and production servers located in Europe, both through the same hosting provider (FDC). We never could get IPv6 working flawlessly (high packet loss, etc) intercontinentally and the problems weren't on our side. We moved to Hetzner and have our systems spread throughout their datacenters (backups, and some…

Were they using HE as an ISP? I ask because HE makes a big deal of IPv6, and we regularly get packet loss between LA and Denver on IPv4. Way overloaded. FDC says they use Cogent -- Cogent used to be not-so-great (they're better nowadays).

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#123

Post by mikeash »

btilly wrote: post #120
trout wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a flame - your perspective is very typical for people that don't have a lot of experience with networking past the host or server level. (Very little experience with networking in the core, provider, or putting together network services architecture). 1. In theory the routing table with IPv6 can be smaller. The address design should be hierarchical, which means you should be able to have much fewer routes. It's t…

I only care about one point. That NAT is not a security feature. The original reason that I began using NAT was so that my ISP couldn't charge me per device. You just plugged in a NAT enabled router, and ran everything behind it. That became so ubiquitous that ISPs gave up on trying. My concern about IPv6 is that ISPs will want to go back to charging per device. I didn't like that then, and I don't want it now.

It's not like NAT stops working with IPv6, it just becomes much less necessary. If your ISP starts being stupid like that, just keep NATting.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#124

Post by jauer »

kordless wrote: post #105
jlgaddis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know of multiple providers who have gotten allocations in the last month (up to /19) and will be requesting another one myself in the near future. ARIN has plenty of IPs.

Right on. I'll keep looking then. I sorta gave up after two told me the same story. Probably need to talk to someone bigger.

Are you asking for more than you can immediately use? Elsewhere you mentioned having difficulty getting more than a /28. That's pretty much the largest block you can get without some paperwork to justify your immediate usage. If you haven't already, take a look at the ARIN requirements in https://www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html#four23 and make sure you have your ducks in a row before you go back at it.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#125

Post by adventured »

baq wrote: post #53
davidw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically how it should work. Prices rise until alternatives become worth thinking about.

that's the economic way of thinking. the engineering way would be to fix the artificial scarcity by implementing a technically superior solution.

There is always an endless line of other things to deal with in both the economic and engineering realms. Squeaky wheels tend to get the attention in both. When the IP situation causes enough discomfort, there will be an avalanche transition, and probably not a moment sooner.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#126

Post by warp »

computator wrote: post #117
chimeracoder wrote: post #6

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 make a case why IPv6 is good for traceability of users. On the other hand, IPv4 and NAT are a boon to privacy. We'd be exquisitely trackable if NAT didn't exist and every single device had a unique, unchangeable, life-long IP address. That's more-or-less how IP addresses were supposed to behave and IPv6 brings that back. We need to be thankful for NAT for the privacy it brought by accident.

IPv6 only brings that back if you want it too. By default Windows, OS X and iOS have privacy extensions enabled which will generate random IPv6 addresses which change every few minutes, which makes tracking a device more or less as difficult as with NATted IPv4.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#127

Post by jauer »

huxley wrote: post #14
72deluxe wrote: 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…

Is that really that significant a problem? Moore's Law should have dealt with memory and processing power issues severalfold in the time since IPv6 rollout was called for. It strikes me that it's more likely a lack of strategic investment in infrastructure.

Generally speaking even now you can't do route lookups fast enough to handle provider traffic volume with current general-purpose CPUs (although it seems to be on the edge of possible). Instead routes are loaded into special ASICs (TCAM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_memory) that seem to not follow Moore's Law, be it due to low volume or other limitations (perhaps not technical).

Routers using TCAM seem to max out between 1-2M routes (divided across v4, v6, MPLS, etc). More recent routers are using slightly more flexible processors so there's some hope but the router product cycle is fairly lethargic.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#128

Post by yeukhon »

kordless wrote: post #52
chimeracoder wrote: post #6

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)…

I can assure you the US is feeling the brunt of the IPv4 crunch. I'm building something that needs massive amounts of public address space and I simply can't get IPv4 addresses for it. I've asked multiple providers. You are LUCKY if you can get a /28 at this point. Hoarding. Rolling with IPv6 instead. I get you have an interest in the Qatar/Wikipedia situation, but it seems to be unlikely due to IP address resource m…

This is because, as you may have found out already, ARIN is out of fresh IPv4. https://www.arin.net/knowledge/v4-v6.html

You may have better luck with other continents. Try AfraNIC.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#129

Post by yardie »

jethro_tell wrote: post #98
bartwe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that limit only happens when 65k people try to use the same remote ip, otherwise the distinction can still be made for tcp streams.

Is there a minister of Port forwarding? What happens when I fire up chrome and Firefox with 80 pages each? Am I limited to a number out going connections? I assume the entire country is running off a Windows 95 box with two nics but that's just the way I imagine most cg-nat.

I've exhausted a SQL server for ports, for science. Yes you are limited to the number of outgoing to ~64000 outgoing ports. Chances are your network equipment (not enterprise grade) will run out of switching contexts before you run out of ports.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#130

Post by mSparks »

vklj wrote: post #83
FedRegister wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Every IPv4 packet needs a source address. If the client is IPv6, what is the IPv4 source address? You would want to assign an IPv4 address to the client transparently; and, since they're scarce, share it with several clients. That's what NAT64 does.

Why not just have the first 32 bits of ipv6 as equivelent to ipv4

so the ipv6 address of 66.249.73.108 is 66.249.73.108:0

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