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AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

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Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#201

Post by bauruine »

dannyw wrote: post #168
jiggawatts wrote: post #167

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.

What's your problem with the IPv6 end-user experience? Hundreds of millions of end-users are using it without even knowing what an IP is.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#202

Post by weeeeelp »

epolanski wrote: post #158

ELI5, why are IPv4 addresses so precious?

There is a finite amount of them - 2^32, some 4.3 billion - the limitation stems from using 32-bit values to express them. We cannot have more added, as the "capacity" of the 32-bit IP address value to provide different numbers has been exhausted by "assigning" these blocks of IP space - back in the old days of the Internet, large blocks of IP space were given to large organizations (such as Xerox mentioned in the article), now cloud hyperscalers are buying them back at a premium so their customers can use it to host things.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#203

Post by RockRobotRock »

22c wrote: post #164
anonymous344 wrote: post #154

can I buy one ipv4 for myself somehow. not lease or rent, buy ?

Last I checked, the smallest blocks for sale are class C. I also don't think there are many places willing to announce your ultra specific route because it's not great for routing tables.

I think a colo would be happy to announce your /24, wouldn't they?

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#205

Post by welterde »

dataflow wrote: post #178
welterde wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That document has been going around for ages and is based on the same fundamental misunderstanding that one somehow can extend IPv4 in a way somehow, but remain compatible with IPv4-only clients. This is just not possible. Most of the other criticism is not relevant anymore, since we now have a lot of transition technologies that allow IPv6 clients to interoperate with IPv4 servers (this way around is possible since…

> That document has been going around for ages and is based on the same fundamental misunderstanding that one somehow can extend IPv4 in a way somehow, but remain compatible with IPv4-only clients. Let me summarize my understanding of what he's saying, because I don't quite see why/how you disagree. I think you (or I) might be misunderstanding his claim. Imagine this topology: C (client, IPv4-only) R (intermediate ro…

The issue is not how can we enable IPv4 C talk to IPv4 S, since that already works. The problem is how would C (ipv4-only) send a packet to S (ipv6-only) in the first place? It doesn't know how to deal with non-ipv4 packets, since it's ipv4-only. Thus if the server does not have a IPv4-address how does a IPv4-client send packets to it?

The inverse situation (IPv6-only client but IPv4-only server) is not really an issue, since for that situation NAT64 works, since you can embed IPv4 addresses into IPv6.

The only way C (ipv4-only) could communicate with S (ipv6-only) is by either allocating a dedicated ipv4-address to S (doesn't have to be directly connected to S - it can be sent to some translation box that does SIIT) or by upgrading C to support ipv6 and tunneling it (6to4, 6rd, teredo, etc.).

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#206

Post by growse »

rini17 wrote: post #177
growse wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a host that thinks there are only 4 billion addresses send a packet to a host with an address that falls outside of the 32 bit v4 space? This is a fundamental problem. Backwards compatibility (without introducing translation schemes and middleboxes) is literally impossible .

Extending address is fully possible, and if we drop requirement that the extended part be individually routable, even simple. But no, someone said we must redo whole stack and we need every piece of sand to have public routable address..so now we are stuck between rock (old fossilized IPv4) and hard place (completely incompatible IPv6).

You're inventing a new addressing scheme, and proposing that we put a bunch of middleboxen in to mediate connecting the old world to hosts on this new addressing scheme.

You're re-inventing IPv6.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#207

Post by growse »

speedgoose wrote: post #194
growse wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the most hilarious "I don't understand anything about the problem, therefore I don't understand how it's hard" comment I've seen this week. > perhaps we could look at the 240.0.0.0/4 reserved for future use block What's the current rate of v4 address space consumption? How long will this block last? > and add more address bytes in the payload or something. This is, by definition, not backward compatible.

I may not have been clear enough in my suggestion. The idea would be to use this unused block as a special block. Not to fill it up with normal IPv4 allocations. See my suggestion as some kind of NAT-PT at scale. With a better marketing name and user experience. The problem is indeed hard because no one manage to find a solution at scale since 3 decades.

> The problem is indeed hard because no one manage to find a solution at scale since 3 decades.

The problem is hard because despite everyone's wishes, it's got nothing to do with technology. All migrations are about economics and incentives, IPv6's qualities as a design (it's a long, long way from perfect, but I'd argue that it's good enough) are irrelevant.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#208

Post by jiggawatts »

viraptor wrote: post #94
malikNF wrote: post #65

Question for the networking folk here. How can the rest of us help move things over to ipv6?

If your ISP provides the ipv6 option but doesn't turn it on by default, turn in on. If they don't call them periodically and ask for IPv6 support. If you run only online service, enable ipv6 on it. Basically, help move the needle on the chicken and egg issue of adoption. Move more traffic to v6 as much as you have control over.

To add to this:

Most content distribution networks (CDNs) support IPv6 even if the back-end is IPv4. For most web sites, a CDN is a good idea in general, so just use one.

For developers: don't hard-code IPv4 as an assumption. E.g.: don't validate network addresses with an IPv4-only regex, and don't store addresses into a 32-bit unsigned integer. Most SDKs and APIs have supported IPv4/IPv6 dual-mode addresses for like... two decades by default. Just don't... undo... all that effort!

Generally: Use DNS instead of IP addresses. Do it properly by respecting TTLs and using multiple upstream DNS servers in a fast failover configuration. This is not the default in many systems, especially Linux distros used in servers. Many admins "prefer" raw IP addresses because they think "DNS is unreliable". It isn't, it's just the default config that's poor.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#209

Post by danhor »

dannyw wrote: post #168
jiggawatts wrote: post #167

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.

USB 3 the protocol isn't backwards compatible with USB 2, USB 3 ports just include both USB 2 and USB 3 pins (what one might call dual stack). You can easily connect two differnt devices one to the USB 2 pins and one to the USB 3 pins. If you only want to connect USB 3 devices, there is no need for USB 2 Pins, as done on the PS4.

There is also no specified way to convert USB 3 to USB 2, but some have tried, with mixed results.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#210

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

lmm wrote: post #189
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ne…

> It's a dumb post, to the point I think it must be a deliberate troll.

Lol, I'd like to send this to DJ Bernstein, let him know that random Internet commenter thinks that one of his most well-known essays "must be a deliberate troll." Glad HN doesn't support emojis, not enough facepalms it the world for this one.

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