Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

networkworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 149 posts

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#111

Post by smsm42 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #75
smsm42 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't help. If they charge $4+$1, it would not be seen as "they just changed the price structure". It would be seen as "they are charging for something that used to be free". Especially as marketing folks won't miss the chance of advertising "our package is now $4 " small print "( additional charges apply)". And most customers will be royally pissed at that, both by the fact that they got advertised $4 but have to…

It's already happening. Most providers charge $1-2/month for every additional IPv4 address AND you have to justify why you need it. EC2's Elastic IP's also don't get added to EC2 instances automatically; you have to add them manually and newly opened accounts are limited to I believe 10 IPv4 addresses for all EC2 instances. That's what IPv4 exhaustion looks like today. This has nothing to do with net neutrality. It's…

That's additional IPs. But one IP has been given for free (well, not in all setups, but in common packages). Unlike IPX. This may be progress for you, but for those who still need their IP setups working it's nothing but trouble. That's why it doesn't change - because people hate to change already working setups.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#113

Post by mandeepj »

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 am surprised to see a comment which got everything wrong to be top voted.

Is this the state of HN now?

Waiting for down votes for myself now.......

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#114

Post by trout »

exabrial wrote: post #109

Truth is NAT works just fine for the vast majority of cases, and makes a layered (IE not-eggs-all-in-one-basket) approach to security much simpler. The real problem is routing table size with BGP. As we continue to divide the internet into smaller routable blocks, this is requiring an exponential amount of memory in BGP routers. Currently, the global BGP table requires around 256mb of RAM. IPv6 makes this problem 4 t…

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 too early to tell if this is actually true or not, but the addresses themselves are 4x larger - which isn't going to be the determining factor in routing table size.

2. Not everything needs to be publically routable, true. IPv6 has the idea of link local and autonomous system local addressing which IPv4 doesn't have. The RFC 1918 block was used instead. But think for a second - there's only 4 billion addresses (less when you count bogons and multicast ranges), and it's only a matter of time until those are taken up. So we can choose to do it now, 2 years from now, or 5 years from now, but devices are growing faster than ever and it's only a function of time.

3. NAT is not a security feature, is not good for the internet, and the sunk costs spent building an ALG for every protocol to work around it is a significant development sinkhole. It's a workaround often masqueraded as security, and does cause many application problems. It's just not normally the application developers that have to fix those problems - it's the network and security teams.

4. IPv6 was created in the late 90's. People have been waiting for brilliance to supercede IPv6 for a while. I'll admit it's not the easiest, but there are a certain set of problems you have when you expand the address space.

5. I'm familiar with all the IPv4 headers, and nearly all of them are used. ID is used for packet identification, particularly through network services, DSCP is used heavily, DF and other flags are used - they're just obscure. If you look at IPv6 those same headers are basically recreated, though with slightly different names. The ones that aren't included are addressable through the extension headers.

So, yeah. That's another perspective that may help you understand why IPv6 is a bit of a quagmire. The faster people understand this, the sooner we get to a place where the chicken-egg problem fades away.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#115

Post by IgorPartola »

smsm42 wrote: post #111
IgorPartola wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already happening. Most providers charge $1-2/month for every additional IPv4 address AND you have to justify why you need it. EC2's Elastic IP's also don't get added to EC2 instances automatically; you have to add them manually and newly opened accounts are limited to I believe 10 IPv4 addresses for all EC2 instances. That's what IPv4 exhaustion looks like today. This has nothing to do with net neutrality. It's…

That's additional IPs. But one IP has been given for free (well, not in all setups, but in common packages). Unlike IPX. This may be progress for you, but for those who still need their IP setups working it's nothing but trouble. That's why it doesn't change - because people hate to change already working setups.

How much more common than EC2 can you get?

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#117

Post by computator »

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.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#118

Post by notatoad »

IgorPartola wrote: post #75
smsm42 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't help. If they charge $4+$1, it would not be seen as "they just changed the price structure". It would be seen as "they are charging for something that used to be free". Especially as marketing folks won't miss the chance of advertising "our package is now $4 " small print "( additional charges apply)". And most customers will be royally pissed at that, both by the fact that they got advertised $4 but have to…

It's already happening. Most providers charge $1-2/month for every additional IPv4 address AND you have to justify why you need it. EC2's Elastic IP's also don't get added to EC2 instances automatically; you have to add them manually and newly opened accounts are limited to I believe 10 IPv4 addresses for all EC2 instances. That's what IPv4 exhaustion looks like today. This has nothing to do with net neutrality. It's…

Ec2 instances not in a VPC get assigned a public IPv4 address when you create them. Elastic IPs are the re-assignable ones, and you only pay for them when they are unassigned. You don't pay for assigned ips on amazon

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#119

Post by MichaelGG »

trout wrote: post #114
exabrial wrote: post #109

Truth is NAT works just fine for the vast majority of cases, and makes a layered (IE not-eggs-all-in-one-basket) approach to security much simpler. The real problem is routing table size with BGP. As we continue to divide the internet into smaller routable blocks, this is requiring an exponential amount of memory in BGP routers. Currently, the global BGP table requires around 256mb of RAM. IPv6 makes this problem 4 t…

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 subnets might map to the same host or something to that effect. Is that incorrect?

>3. NAT is not a security feature

Except it turns out that proper NAT is equivalent to a firewall with inbound deny, outbound allow. Which is a pretty good start for security.

>ALG for every protocol

Applications that break with NAT usually do so due to poor design (hey SIP and FTP). With a firewall with default inbound deny, programs can't just accept inbound connections without doing work anyways (UPnP or whatnot). Although sure, it makes known-two-way datagram applications easier since you start transmitting and get a flow opened. Wouldn't help TCP based applications, for instance.

Re: Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

#120

Post by btilly »

trout wrote: post #114
exabrial wrote: post #109

Truth is NAT works just fine for the vast majority of cases, and makes a layered (IE not-eggs-all-in-one-basket) approach to security much simpler. The real problem is routing table size with BGP. As we continue to divide the internet into smaller routable blocks, this is requiring an exponential amount of memory in BGP routers. Currently, the global BGP table requires around 256mb of RAM. IPv6 makes this problem 4 t…

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.

Post reply on HN