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AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

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Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#331

Post by commandersaki »

kristopolous wrote: post #99
welterde wrote: post #95

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.

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…

I don't know why Vint Cerf should or want to take the blame for IP address exhaustion. We knew about the problem for 30+ years, we had a committee in charge of selecting IPng to mitigate such a disaster, we selected IPv6 as IPng, and then we ran out of IP address space. The only reason I could see why Vint Cerf is to have any blame is that he firmly agreed on a clean slate Internet protocol that didn't give any consideration towards a transition plan. Yes that's how the events unfolded, but that doesn't make him some martyr.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#332

Post by quaintdev »

sambazi wrote: post #145
mbgerring wrote: post #118

We should probably consider whether the rent-seeking enabled by the scarcity of IPV4 addresses is one of the things holding back IPV6 adoption.

you mean the fact that amazon has around 4.5B reasons to not support ipv6? interesting idea

Sooner or later any sort of monopoly leads to abuse of power and loss of foresight of greater good.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#333

Post by theamk »

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 reason for slow IP adoption is that they decided to break all backwards compatibility.

You need new protocol, sure. But do you _have_ to switch from "1 almost fixed address per interface" to "tons of addresses per interface and dynamically changing"? Did you have to present it as a separate protocol to apps? Did you have to use : in representation, breaking most ad-hoc text processing code? etc..

if they goal was "herr is a new verion of IPv4 with same semantics" then we'd just need to wait for new kernels and libraries to come out, and it would be all done years ago.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#334

Post by AtlasBarfed »

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…

Really, IPV6 has failed because of human reasons. I know because almost everyone demonstrably hates it, as evidenced by their behavior.

The big issue is that the router vendors hated it, the OS vendors hated it, the programming language people hated it, and the software writers hated it. How do I know? NOBODY WANTS TO ADOPT IT except by force, even now.

Worryingly, pro-IPV6 people are consistently arrogant and dismissive. Essentially their argument always boiled down to "ha, you'll be forced to use it eventually and then I'll be RIGHT!!!" which is why IPV6 people hate NATs with a vehement irrational passion, because it floated IPV4 for, what, two decades at least?

I'm guessing it is because IPV6 was a tossed-over-the-wall protocol that didn't get reference implementations from the biggest router vendors first. Here's a very very very very very very troubling link:

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/ciscoitatwork/networ...

That is Cisco bragging about it's IPV6 website on a pdf from 2011! 2011! Fifteen years after the birth of the protocol. If Cisco did not have an IPv6 site up until FIFTEEN YEARS after protocol definition ... oh god.

Comcast routers weren't IPV6 functional back in 2015, at least they weren't on my cable modem. If an ISP that makes bank on renting and turning over its consumer routing hardware can't roadmap ipv6 adoption within 22 years... ugh.

And my biggest complaint about ipv6 is that they didn't increase the number of ports. Really. We have to keep shoehorning apps into 64k ports rather than a sensible 4 billion, but maybe there's some OS mapping concern with that, doesn't matter, the ship sailed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol_version_4

Somewhere in IPV4 is an options header (up to 40 bytes). Why that didn't provide the necessary space for some degree of backwards compatibility somehow is beyond me.

What should have happened is that the big router vendors got together and agreed on a standard protocol. Then the major OS vendors and language standards bodies got together and made reference implementations for basic networking.

Once that was working / adopted by next gen hardware and software releases, then things might have gotten rolling.

I mean, how much work was that relative to the mind boggling amount of work done to implement NAT and firewall traversal/busting code in, say, Skype? Ever seen those whitepapers? Wow are they doozies. Holy crap are people willing to write code.

This is all screaming at the darkness.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#335

Post by speedgoose »

superluserdo wrote: post #296
speedgoose wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't NAT be an existing and well used solution to this problem?

NAT is the problem that IPv6 fixes. Think about the parent comment >if you are making more than 4B addresses routable then any existing IPv4 device will not be able to route some addresses, so you will have caused a split in the internet This has basically already happened. We've massively extended IPv4 by stuffing extra address bits into the router's port number, and it means that any two devices behind NATs can't d…

NAT has been more successful than IPv6 at fixing the same issue, the shortage of IPv4 adresses, but without breaking compatibility (well at the cost of crazy hacks for weird protocols such as FTP).

Not being able to route directly doesn’t seem to be a major issue to me. It for sure require more computing power in routers but also adds some safety and privacy by design.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#336

Post by greyface- »

commandersaki wrote: post #289
candiodari wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/IP…

RFC1726 Technical Criteria for Choosing IP The Next Generation (IPng) Section 5.5: CRITERION The protocol must have a straightforward transition plan from the current IPv4.

  Category: Informational

  Publication of this document does not imply acceptance by the IPng Area of any ideas expressed within.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#337

Post by welterde »

cameronh90 wrote: post #295
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…

We could presumably have done something like: use the IPv4 packet format, treat the 32 bit src/dst address in the header as the first 32 bits of the address and put the remaining 96 bits (+ checksums/etc.) as the first few bytes of the payload. Then create TCPv6, UDPv6, IGMPv6 etc. protocol identifiers for the protocol field to distinguish traffic that's encoding an IPv6 address in the first few bytes of the payload.…

You more or less just reinvented a more complicated variant of 6to4/6rd, which is one of the IPv6 transition technologies.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#338

Post by greyface- »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #105
welterde wrote: post #95

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…

> The original architects should have "the perfect is the enemy of the good" forcibly tattooed on their foreheads.

Who's rejecting the good enough in favor of the perfect, now? This thread is full of "IPv6 is not perfect, so we must reject it".

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#339

Post by speedgoose »

simiones wrote: post #311
speedgoose wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't NAT be an existing and well used solution to this problem?

Even if we accept that NAT is the right solution, it still is pretty limited in how far it has been able to extend the address space, since port numbers only give you two extra bytes of address space. And there are no further extra bytes to stuff somehwere else in a TCP or UDP packet header. Of course, we could extend the address space by further breaking the layering of routes, and baking in support for higher layer…

Yes I agree you would need to tunnel because the headers aren’t big enough.

If I had to guess the futur, the industry will most likely go towards something like few expensive IPv4 owned by major cloud and internet providers and crazy recursive NAT setups everywhere. Because that works without breaking stuff.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#340

Post by dumbfounder »

mschuster91 wrote: post #317
circuit10 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s their point, if there were more addresses we wouldn’t need to

Back when the Internet was conceived, as a network of militaries, universities and large corporations, it was in no way foreseeable just how much resources humanity would need - and it was thought that the system would adapt. However we got layers upon layers of closed-source middleboxes and everything ossified as a result.

But from the perspective of anyone that isn't a networking expert, there is no real problem, things just work and there are no real issues. Networking folks found ways to extend the runway and all other tech people see is the occasional article like this and then they forget about it again five minutes later. I don't even see the effects of the cost of an IP anywhere. I guess it's there, but I don't notice. No regular person even knows what ipv6 is.
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