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AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

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Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#181
post #135
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But only network engineers pick the protocols used. You’re making life harder for the very people who should be your primary audience. PS: As a developer, I often read logs and go ”oh yeah, that’s just our satellite office IP”. 192.168.1.110 is the network printer, etc. There’s no hope of recognizing IPv6 addresses at a glance the same way.

No, 192.168.1.110 is MY network printer, you must have gotten confused somewhere!

Whoa buddy how did you get into my home network???

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to go back further in time and hit the designers of IPv4 on the head for not making it forward compatible. IPv6 is as backward compatible as is possible within this constraint. You can embed IPv4 space within IPv6, there is NAT64, tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 and many other transition technologies. It's not possible to design a protocol that is any more backwards-compatible.

NAT64? No what we needed was NAT66, and it took over a decade after IPv4 to deliver this. Because the IPv6 advocates were too opinionated on exactly how IPv6 should work. And since when has the world even agreed to anything even remotely complicated without trying to change things up?

No, NAT needs to be shot into the sun. It's absolutely not needed under IPv6.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#183
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These arguments always boil down to these two: "Please just try to fit more than 4 billion numbers into 4 bytes" -- this is mathematically impossible. "Just extend the address size" -- this is an entirely new protocol by the definition of IPv4, which uses fixed-size addresses. The reason for the slow IPv6 adoption is that there was no financial or business pressure. While IPv4 is ubiquitous, nobody individually feels…

Fitting more than 4B numbers into 4 bytes is mathematically impossible, but building a backwards compatible and easier to integrate standard may not be. Take USB for example. The capabilities of USB 3.1, 3.0, 2.0 is impossible to achieve for USB 1.0. So is high-speed charging. However, the end-user experience is generally pleasant, nitpicks around some of USB-IF's specific choices aside.

IPv6 is backwards compatible. In multiple ways:

Option 1: "6to4" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4

Option 2: "nat64" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT64 + DNS64

Option 2b: "nat46" (which makes a few ipv6 hosts available over ipv4 if yo ulike)

Option 3: "Teredo" (also known as "6in4" "tunnel broker" "6over4" "tunneling" ...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teredo_tunneling

Option 4: 6rd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_rapid_deployment

Option 5: ffff/96 (yes I get it, only works if host has both ipv4 and ipv6, on the plus side: no need for the network to support it. Mostly for applications)

Option 6: DS-lite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanism#Dual...

And then there's the weird ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanism

The issue is most of these require ISPs to deploy new hardware, or deploy new network services. The problem is that network hardware is single-purpose, because only single purpose hardware can sustain the speeds we demand of internet networks. This means a lot of hardware needs to be replaced in order to make the global IPv6 transition and, short of redesigning IPv4, which is 43 years old now, there's no other way to make the transition. All these solutions require either work by your ISP, or work by you yourself on all your hosts.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#184
post #24
post #17

Some noob questions here. How does one buy a block of IPv4 as an individual? (If that's allowed) After you purchase it, how does it come into your possession? How do you utilize them?

You'll need to become a member of one of the regional Internet route registries, like RIPE or ARIN. Then you can buy, say a /24, and transfer it into your RIPE/ARIN account. Now you have your own IPv4 range. And you can start for example start to use it for your own servers. To do so you need to "announce" this new /24 to the internet, using a protocol known as BGP. You can do that yourself, using a router, assuming…

> To do so you need to "announce" this new /24 to the internet, using a protocol known as BGP. You can do that yourself, using a router, assuming you have an Autonomous system number (AS).

Is this how BGP hijacking is done?

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vint Cerf has called the decision of it being 32 bits as silly and arbitrary, like having a car odometer with 40 digits. If he had pushed for more, he thought nobody would have taken him seriously. The idea of 32 becoming scarce was laughable. Also the complaint about ipv6 isn't a technical one, it's a usability one. Extending it to 48 bits would have been easy enough for people - like international calling. Those 16…

If one has to go through the pain of changing everything why not make sure one doesn't have to do it again any time soon? Also having 64-bit for the network address (and 64-bit for the device) does have certain benefits that make it easier to use than shorter addresses in practice for a single entity, since one can hierarchically model the network and do things like : : . So even in absence of DNS one doesn't quite h…

But ever since privacy extensions, that's not how IPv6 is allocated, right? Each individual system is supposed to get a /64. Your household should actually have a /56 or something crazy like that, which few ISPs actually do. SLAAC doesn't even work if it doesn't have it's own /64 per host, I believe.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These arguments always boil down to these two: "Please just try to fit more than 4 billion numbers into 4 bytes" -- this is mathematically impossible. "Just extend the address size" -- this is an entirely new protocol by the definition of IPv4, which uses fixed-size addresses. The reason for the slow IPv6 adoption is that there was no financial or business pressure. While IPv4 is ubiquitous, nobody individually feels…

"Just extend the address size" was certainly one of the options. Sure, it's still a change, but the point is: After this change, both protocols could have worked side-by-side. Devices that only supported IPv4, no problem, they send 32-bits. Devices that supported IPv6-as-it-could-have been would simply have zero-padded those 32-bits to match the new protocol. Talking to old devices, the zero-padding gets dropped. Tha…

No it wouldn't. Think about how that would work for a minute. It would've created nondeterministic routing loops that would be a nightmare to debug.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#187

Can we go back in time and hit the designers of IPv6 upside the head? The decision not to make IPv6 backwards compatible, the belief that a beautiful new standard could magically replace something already so widespread... "Naive" is an inadequate word. We are still futzing with the transition 3 decades later, with no end in sight. Grrr, grumble...

These arguments always boil down to these two: "Please just try to fit more than 4 billion numbers into 4 bytes" -- this is mathematically impossible. "Just extend the address size" -- this is an entirely new protocol by the definition of IPv4, which uses fixed-size addresses. The reason for the slow IPv6 adoption is that there was no financial or business pressure. While IPv4 is ubiquitous, nobody individually feels…

At this stage it shouldn't require much money to integrate ipv6. Your network equipment needs to be really old to not support v6 natively.

Though granted, there is support and support. I use hyperoptic in the UK as an ISP. I replaced the native router and I still can't figure out a way to get an IPv6 address.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NAT64? No what we needed was NAT66, and it took over a decade after IPv4 to deliver this. Because the IPv6 advocates were too opinionated on exactly how IPv6 should work. And since when has the world even agreed to anything even remotely complicated without trying to change things up?

No, NAT needs to be shot into the sun. It's absolutely not needed under IPv6.

I some ideal IPv6-only world, perhaps. But when running a mixed stack like the entire world is right now, it's actually crucial.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to go back further in time and hit the designers of IPv4 on the head for not making it forward compatible. IPv6 is as backward compatible as is possible within this constraint. You can embed IPv4 space within IPv6, there is NAT64, tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 and many other transition technologies. It's not possible to design a protocol that is any more backwards-compatible.

> IPv6 is as backward compatible as is possible within this constraint. Yikes, couldn't disagree with that more. There are a ton of things that ipv6 designers could have done to make the transition much easier. This is a (now quite old) blog post that is my "go to" that explains a lot of the problems with ipv6: https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html FWIW I couldn't find the link to that post until finding it on one of…

> Yikes, couldn't disagree with that more. There are a ton of things that ipv6 designers could have done to make the transition much easier. This is a (now quite old) blog post that is my "go to" that explains a lot of the problems with ipv6: https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

It's a dumb post, to the point I think it must be a deliberate troll. The parts that are possible don't solve any relevant problems ("my new protocol would allow computers that already have public IPv4 addresses to talk to each other" is not a point in favour of your new protocol), and the parts that solve relevant problems aren't possible.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that chart, the IPv6 rollout will be basically complete by 2030. I suspect it will speed up near the end though as the first few services start to go V6 only.

I mean, that's nice to think about, but are you going to spin up a service that's v6 only? I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the canary in that coalmine...

I already do for hobby projects that are only for me and maybe a few friends. Why pay the extra for a v4 address?
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