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AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

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Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#271

Post by rewmie »

jiggawatts wrote: post #167
bradley13 wrote: post #93

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…

> The IPv6 transition will be like a bankruptcy: very slowly, slowly, then all of a sudden.

I don't think that's true.

Some services on the internet are already made available through IPv6. Doesn't that mean their migration to IPv6 is done?

There are however some ISPs that seem to be dragging their feet. I recall I tried to deprecate IPv4 access to a personal project of mine and it was no longer reachable when I tried to access it from my home. Lookups from other points of the world could resolve the IP but not my little home network. I felt forced to continue paying the 2€ I paid for a IPv4 address just because of that.

Edit: to make it abundantly clear, I'm looking at you, Vodafone. You suck.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#272

Post by rewmie »

cornholio wrote: post #255
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…

There was a third option: make the existing IPv4 space a hierarchically routed island of the new IPv4.1 space, with backwards compatible packet format, then upgrade just the endpoints in the first phase. So every owner of a ipv4 would get, say, an entire 32 bit space that routes over existing IPv4 infrastructure . So, if the endpoints are upgraded, you have guaranteed end-to-end deliverability without silly hacks suc…

> There was a third option: make the existing IPv4 space a hierarchically routed island of the new IPv4.1 space, with backwards compatible packet format, then upgrade just the endpoints in the first phase.

Do you mean applying some kind of network address translation?

> So every owner of a ipv4 would get, say, an entire 32 bit space that routes over existing IPv4 infrastructure. So, if the endpoints are upgraded, you have guaranteed end-to-end deliverability without silly hacks such as NAT or STUN.

Ahem.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#273

Post by unsignednoop »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #257
vaylian wrote: post #211

GitHub.com still doesn't support IPv6. I know that there is some work going on to support it, but this shows that it is far from trivial.

It's usually not a tehnical problem, but either a management or a budget problem.

[dead]

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#274

Post by welterde »

OJFord wrote: post #227
welterde wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to read any IPv6 alternative that can theoretically work or is not just IPv6 in disguise (or something that is implemented in IPv6 in a slightly similar fashion). It may sound like a great plan as long as one doesn't look too closely at the details. IPv4 has fixed 32-bit addresses and one cannot cram more than 32-bit of information into a fixed 32-bit field. But one would need to do that for it to be forwa…

I don't feel strongly about it, but my reading of the complaint is that the implication is it should've been something like an address in 240.0.0.0/4 plus more bits. Then to IPv4 it looks like a reserved for future use address (and we declare we're done with IPv4 now, there will be no (other) future use) but to (this hypothetical variant of) IPv6 it's a longer address. I think what annoys people is everything else th…

It's not clear to me how 240/4 would have helped anything. Or how it would have even be different from a tunneling approach on a high level.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#275

Post by rewmie »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #260
ta1243 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't ipv6 (even with the tons of extra features that ipv6 forces upon you). One major problem is dual stack. It doubles the workload for very limited benefit. You have all the downsides of making ipv4 work in the first place. You've then got all sorts of messes like NAT66 (ipv6 was supposed to get rid of NAT), a lack of clarity on which patch to use (NPTv6 and NAT66 are two different options for the same…

> The problem isn't ipv6 (even with the tons of extra features that ipv6 forces upon you) The year is 2023, The chromium engine is full blown operating system, it has notifications, background task management, GPU acceleration for general compute, it's larger than Windows XP, and can in fact run windows XP in the browser. Teams consumes 500 mb of ram to do the same job ICQ did in 2002 with 5 mb of ram. Cars have 4G,…

> But Ipv6 features take a few extra bytes and are a problem.

Some people pay for each extra byte they have to send through a network, and design whole systems around the goal of minimizing the amount of data they ship around.

No one pays for the extra free gigabyte that Chrome takes over.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#276

Post by code_runner »

jeroenhd wrote: post #263
vaylian wrote: post #211

GitHub.com still doesn't support IPv6. I know that there is some work going on to support it, but this shows that it is far from trivial.

This is one of the reasons why I'm trying to avoid Github these days. If they can't get something as simple as IPv6 to work, I don't have much faith in the test of their backend either.

Sort of a weird take. I doubt if the people responsible for testing their backend have ever even met the people who would migrate to ipv6

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#277

Post by cornholio »

gabereiser wrote: post #266
cornholio wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a third option: make the existing IPv4 space a hierarchically routed island of the new IPv4.1 space, with backwards compatible packet format, then upgrade just the endpoints in the first phase. So every owner of a ipv4 would get, say, an entire 32 bit space that routes over existing IPv4 infrastructure . So, if the endpoints are upgraded, you have guaranteed end-to-end deliverability without silly hacks suc…

>”So every owner of a ipv4 would get, say, an entire 32 bit space that routes over existing IPv4 infrastructure.” So… NAT.

No. There would be no NAT box holding IP-port mappings in its internal memory, with the related timeouts, flakiness, port clobbering etc. and no packet re-writing. All routing decisions would be static, based on information in the IP header: the legacy outside routers would just examine the legacy part of the IP address and packet, while the internal IPv4.1 would use the extended bits. So just like any packet routing and without translation.

Critically, this solves the cold start and connectability problem of NAT: if you get a packet addressed to your outside IP, to a port that has no memorized mapping, to what internal IP do you send it to? Lacking a static or UPnP port assignment, it can only be dropped. The extended packet format would provide this information for every packet, the upgraded outside host would tell you what upgraded internal host it wants to talk to.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#278

Post by superluserdo »

commandersaki wrote: post #261
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…

Everyone is always quick to complain that we're going through N number of NAT gateways or N number of proxies, but this is virtually never a problem for most of the Internet. Even despite this rats maze of proxies and NAT gateways we're still supporting virtually all the applications that consumers use and love such as VoIP, WebRTC, HTTP(S), DNS, Gaming, Streaming Video, Mobile Apps, etc. NAT seems to always get a ba…

>Even despite this rats maze of proxies and NAT gateways we're still supporting virtually all the applications that consumers use

That's a tautology: "Despite the limitations of IPv4, we're still supporting all the applications that can work within the limitations of IPv4".

Lots of potential P2P applications (that might solve a lot of problems with have with the current centralised model of the internet) either don't make it past the drawing board because of NAT, or have to be encumbered with complex, expensive-to-develop, best-effort NAT-punching behaviour that burdens everyone involved (and can stop an application from being truly P2P by having to run things like STUN servers).

>NAT seems to always get a bad rep because it inconveniences the very few that want to have an end to end experience

I think there would be many more that wanted this if it were trivially easy to do

>but there has to be some sacrifice to keep the Internet running for the billions of users.

What's the sacrifice in using IPv6?

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#279

Post by dtech »

gabereiser wrote: post #266
cornholio wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a third option: make the existing IPv4 space a hierarchically routed island of the new IPv4.1 space, with backwards compatible packet format, then upgrade just the endpoints in the first phase. So every owner of a ipv4 would get, say, an entire 32 bit space that routes over existing IPv4 infrastructure . So, if the endpoints are upgraded, you have guaranteed end-to-end deliverability without silly hacks suc…

>”So every owner of a ipv4 would get, say, an entire 32 bit space that routes over existing IPv4 infrastructure.” So… NAT.

Not really, since in this proposal you'd still have the end-to-end routability that NAT prevents

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#280

Post by welterde »

cornholio wrote: post #255
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…

There was a third option: make the existing IPv4 space a hierarchically routed island of the new IPv4.1 space, with backwards compatible packet format, then upgrade just the endpoints in the first phase. So every owner of a ipv4 would get, say, an entire 32 bit space that routes over existing IPv4 infrastructure . So, if the endpoints are upgraded, you have guaranteed end-to-end deliverability without silly hacks suc…

You can tunnel IPv6 over IPv4 (which is how the very first deployments worked). And I think 6to4/6rd worked pretty to close to what you suggest: Each IPv4 gets assigned a block of IPv6 space which gets tunneled over IPv4.
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