AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses

#281

Post by Dagger2 » Wed, Aug 18, 2021, 8:13 AM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #271

Dagger2 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sticking with periods was impossible, because many of the resulting addresses would also be valid DNS hostnames.

DNS names already conflict with v4 addresses, and we deal with that ambiguity just fine. For an actual conflict, someone would need to be using hostnames that had at least 16 segments, none of which were longer than 4 characters. Putting the burden on someone who wants to use extremely deep hostnames that look like bare IP addresses to type a trailing . on their hostname seems plenty reasonable to me. And if they wan…

We deal with it by requiring v4 addresses to be entirely numeric, which... well, it's possible for v6 but would make it even more annoying to type v6 addresses out.

Re: AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses

#282

Post by mindslight » Wed, Aug 18, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

Dagger2 wrote: post #281

mindslight wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNS names already conflict with v4 addresses, and we deal with that ambiguity just fine. For an actual conflict, someone would need to be using hostnames that had at least 16 segments, none of which were longer than 4 characters. Putting the burden on someone who wants to use extremely deep hostnames that look like bare IP addresses to type a trailing . on their hostname seems plenty reasonable to me. And if they wan…

We deal with it by requiring v4 addresses to be entirely numeric, which... well, it's possible for v6 but would make it even more annoying to type v6 addresses out.

No, that is not how it is dealt with. A DNS hostname can be entirely numeric as well. For example, add 'search in-addr.arpa' to your resolv.conf.

We deal with the ambiguity by making it clear that if you expect to use DNS names that look like IPv4 addresses, you're going to experience the pain of unexpected behavior. I see no reason this general expectation couldn't also have been set for 16-segment hostnames that look like hexadecimal IP addresses.

Alternatively, a full IPv6 address without any '..' abbreviation could have been defined to start with a period. Then there would be no ambiguity.

Re: AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses

#283

Post by JakeBrander » Wed, Aug 18, 2021, 7:18 PM UTC

wu_187 wrote: post #110

korethr wrote: post #2

low whistle I imagine they paid a pretty penny for those /12s. A thought comes to me: If IPv6 adoption continues to drag along, and AWS/Azure/GCP continue to expand their IP blocks like this, how quickly are we in danger of the cloud providers effectively being the Internet?

I've worked in the cloud hosting industry for a decade and a half. The entire time, we were warned about the IPv4 shortage and how we needed to switch to IPv6 soon(tm). Well, things haven't changed. Everyone is dragging their feet on IPv6 adoption from hosting providers, ISPs, hardware manufacturers, and software developers. I predicted this years ago and always said that it would require a government mandate to move…

Highly unlikely we will ever see the day IPv4 is not used at all. There are too many legacy systems in place, so dual stack will always be required. The value of IPv4 may drop as it related to the price people pay, however, it will play a key role for decades to come.

As for the government mandate, also not possible. It would take our major ISPs over a decade to make this work, and the lobbyist would never allow it.

With that said, the DOD did make an interesting decision to move 175 Million IPs recently in routing tables.

You can read a short blog post here: https://brandergroup.net/2021/06/175-million-ipv4-addresses-...