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Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

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Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#141

Post by welterde »

MichaelGG wrote: post #119
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…

> 1. In theory.. IPv6...hierarchical. Is that even remotely close to being true in practise? Would we expect to see it be smaller than IPv4? Given the quadrupling of address sizes, wouldn't that mean there'd need to be 1/4th the number of routes? And peering destroys the hierarchy, does it not? I was under the impression that the hierarchical routing had an assumption that networks could renumber at will. So multiple…

> Is that even remotely close to being true in practise? Would we expect to see it be smaller than IPv4? Given the quadrupling of address sizes, wouldn't that mean there'd need to be 1/4th the number of routes? And peering destroys the hierarchy, does it not?

No.. the point is that each ISP will get only one very large prefix (/32 or bigger) instead of many small ones, which can't be aggregated like it is the case for IPv4.

Right now there are about 46k ASN's in the legacy internet announcing about 490k IPv4 routes. Best case with IPv6 you would end up with 46k routes.

In practise it looks like there are 8k ASNs in the internet announcing about 16k IPv6 routes. So while not perfect, it's still quite a lot better than for the legacy internet.

> Applications that break with NAT usually do so due to poor design

So how would you design a P2P application that has no poor design?

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#142

Post by baq »

adventured wrote: post #125
baq wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i agree completely, to my great distaste.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#143

Post by gonzo »

icedchai wrote: post #89
kordless wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Then there are guys like me. I have a /24 routed to my home (pre-ARIN legacy space registered in the early 90's!)

AKA swamp space. I've got one of those, too.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#144

Post by gonzo »

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.

NAT is not a privacy mechanism. For IP addresses to be lifelong (and therefore portable) the routing mechanism would need to change.

Now you have two problems.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#145

Post by sopooneo »

dasil003 wrote: post #79
walshemj wrote: post #60

The main problem the 20 years ago with the take off of the internet as a mass networking standard it was blindingly obvious that ipv6 was deeply flawed - IPv6 should have been taken out behind the woodshed back then and ipv7 or 8 done properly. When I looked at it 19 or the 20 involved in the RFC for ipv6 where from academia plus one guy from bell labs. Migration and Interpenetration should have been the highest prio…

Maybe. Or maybe we will suffer tremendous amount of pain for some period of years after which we will have a much brighter future as opposed to an ipv7 that made too many concessions and left us with a mess that would be politically impossible to ever fix.

What you say makes sense, but what about the new thing that will have to change when we finally have our ideal IP version in place? There will always be a new hardware standard, a new language version, a new this or that, which can be done now or can be done well.

It is a balancing act, but at some point we have to cash in our chips and make things usable in the short term.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#146

Post by MichaelGG »

welterde wrote: post #141
MichaelGG wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. In theory.. IPv6...hierarchical. Is that even remotely close to being true in practise? Would we expect to see it be smaller than IPv4? Given the quadrupling of address sizes, wouldn't that mean there'd need to be 1/4th the number of routes? And peering destroys the hierarchy, does it not? I was under the impression that the hierarchical routing had an assumption that networks could renumber at will. So multiple…

> Is that even remotely close to being true in practise? Would we expect to see it be smaller than IPv4? Given the quadrupling of address sizes, wouldn't that mean there'd need to be 1/4th the number of routes? And peering destroys the hierarchy, does it not? No.. the point is that each ISP will get only one very large prefix (/32 or bigger) instead of many small ones, which can't be aggregated like it is the case fo…

Might the current IPv6 numbers just reflect that a lot of people aren't peering or anything? I was under the impression that a lot of announcements were driven by the need for not relying on a single provider.

>So how would you design a P2P application that has no poor design?

SIP and FTP break even in non-P2P scenarios, so my comment was mainly directed at them. For P2P apps, NAT doesn't pose a whole lot more of a problem than a firewall with the same configuration. So you'd use UPnP or whatever protocol to get around it. At that point, it doesn't really matter, does it? The app talks to local gateway and ask for the IP and port forwarding either way.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#147

Post by welterde »

MichaelGG wrote: post #146
welterde wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that even remotely close to being true in practise? Would we expect to see it be smaller than IPv4? Given the quadrupling of address sizes, wouldn't that mean there'd need to be 1/4th the number of routes? And peering destroys the hierarchy, does it not? No.. the point is that each ISP will get only one very large prefix (/32 or bigger) instead of many small ones, which can't be aggregated like it is the case fo…

Might the current IPv6 numbers just reflect that a lot of people aren't peering or anything? I was under the impression that a lot of announcements were driven by the need for not relying on a single provider. >So how would you design a P2P application that has no poor design? SIP and FTP break even in non-P2P scenarios, so my comment was mainly directed at them. For P2P apps, NAT doesn't pose a whole lot more of a p…

> Might the current IPv6 numbers just reflect that a lot of people aren't peering or anything?

Peering doesn't require you to announce more routes per se, although some networks do it for traffic engineering purposes. From an BGP [1] perspective there is not that much difference between peering and transit.

> I was under the impression that a lot of announcements were driven by the need for not relying on a single provider.

Multihoming is another issue. And you can explain the difference in the number of AS [2] as networks not having deployed IPv6 yet. But the number of announced routes per network will be lower for IPv6 than it is for IPv4 (which hasn't even reached the worst case yet).

> For P2P apps, NAT doesn't pose a whole lot more of a problem than a firewall with the same configuration. So you'd use UPnP or whatever protocol to get around it. At that point, it doesn't really matter, does it? The app talks to local gateway and ask for the IP and port forwarding either way.

But that way you are still pushing more logic into the applications (namely that they have to implement UPnP). Which actually might end up requiring more code than your actual application (SAFT [3] for instance..). Now in the firewall you could just allow known-good inbound ports and be done with it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_System_%28Internet%2... [3] http://fex.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/saft/sendfile.html

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#148

Post by einhverfr »

MichaelGG wrote: post #122
einhverfr wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

We didn't look into it too closely. mtr would have told us but we didn't go into it. They did tell us that if we upgraded our servers and switched data centers, we would get better peering. But we opted at that point to move off and go with Hetzner instead because we weren't at a point at the time when their higher end servers would have made sense.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#149

Post by walshemj »

amaranth wrote: post #139
walshemj wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mm yes or maybe know when to let a flawed standard die when it is over taken by events. Even 20 years ago the Internet was obviously not going to be able go on as before where you could make major changes over a long weekend during the summer at the few core university's that where the the internet. That is why ipv6 should have been replaced.

Replaced with what? IPv6 has problems, sure, but the main problem is that IPv4 and IPv6 aren't compatible with each other. You're going to have that problem with any other replacement for IPv4 as well.

Because they designed ipv6 as a alternative to the IPv4 address space, rather than an extension to the IPv4 address space.
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