IP Address Shortage
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed May 12, 1999 01:48 PM
from the stuff-to-think-about dept.
from the stuff-to-think-about dept.
webslacker wrote in
to send us a news.com story that talks about the upcoming
IP Address Shortage.
Talks about IPv6 and other related topics. Nothing
phenomonal, but its interesting... how many class C's do we
have left anyway?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
IP Address Shortage
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 222 comments
(Spill at 50!) | Index Only
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
There is no IP address shortage (Score:3)
This again? (Score:4)
This won't last us indefinately, if we get 250 real IP addresses per household we would run out. On the other hand, the only sane way to give every gadget, appliance, outlet and lightswitch in a house its own IP address is to use the 10.0.0.0/8 network, so it's not an issue for the rest of the world. IPv6 is still the best long term solution (just like it was 2-3 years ago). What's the hold up? It works, all decent OS's support it natively, when are the backbone providers going to start swithching, and encouraging their clients to switch?
I think you're missing the main problem... (Score:3)
The main problem is that with such a distribution of IP addresses, the routers are having to keep more routes in memory. We're not really near running out of numbers, but if we have to assign two (or more) numerically unrelated blocks of IP addresses to a location, we aren't using the addresses efficiently, and the routers are going to bog down more and more with many routes going to the same place.
To summarize: We have a sufficient quantity of IP addresses for the near future. The problem we are encountering is that routers operate more efficiently if the IP addresses are under-utilized.
That is why we need IPv6 and it's insane number of IP addresses. If we can assign IP's without regard to efficiency of quantity, we can more easily aggregate routes efficiently, reducing maybe 12 routes into one route to a honkin huge set of IP's (which still would be less than a fraction of a percent of the available set of IP's)
Re:Fire Insurance, Fire Detector, Firewall (Score:3)
And if it already speaks IP, why not let them communicate over the Internet as needed while we're at it?
10.x.x.x addresses seem like a good idea (my network at home uses this), but what if you wanted to check your answering machine messages from a neighbor's house? What if you wanted to record the game that comes on in 20 minutes? I'm probably only pointing out some of the lesser reasons why these devices might need a "real" IP, but IMO they're enough.
Re:The scarcity is still just "approaching" (Score:4)
The transition from IPv4 -> IPv6 should be totally transparent. Things like TCP and UDP should work under IP with no problems at all, since they don't themselves deal with things like IP addresses or quality-of-service.
IPv6 was designed from the drawing board to be an easy upgrade. IPv4-compatible address space was built-in, and the protocol itself is meant to allow hosts to inter-communicate between IPv4 and IPv6 hosts on mixed networks.
A "funky" (even if simple) multi-level proxy system as you say is simply a rather nasty band-aid. While something like this may work, it introduces a tremendous amount of complexity. You'd still need to have things like web servers, e-mail gateways, etc., on globally visible IP's, and there are useful reasons to have individual PC's visible as well. Behind NAT, you lose a lot of usefulness out of Internet hosts. If such usefulness isn't a factor (such as on networks where the machines are already firewalled into next-to-nothingness), this is probably fine, and using private addresses with NAT is acceptable (and even desirable).
EASY solution! (Score:3)
Result? For a competitor to get a product to work with AOL, it would HAVE to be IPv6 aware.
AOL's users would be utterly oblivious to the change - AOL's software would work the same and look the same, and they'd have access to exactly the same off-site systems, in the same way.
BUT, because it would be an IPv6 stack and an IPv6 service, any 3rd-party product would have to have IPv6 support. And, given the number of direct users of AOL, it would have to have IPv6 support by yesterday, or risk being squelched.
Classful naming (Score:5)
Please stop using classful naming. Class A, B, and C really don't have much meaning these days. Use CIDR - it's more specific and just all-around better.
$0.10 Tutorial:
Class A is a
Class B is a
Class C is a
Single IP is a
There you go. I'm sure you can figure out how other networks are specified. For instance, the network slashdot is on is a
206.170.14.0/23
Isn't that better than saying "two class C's"?
Re:Only 10% of the IP addresses are used? (Score:3)
Way back when, most companies would just grab a class B, thinking "gee, I'll probably have more than 256 machines, the class B will give me room to grow". Of course, they only have maybe 1024 machines, so most of their address space ends up empty.
This has GOT to be the case with Ford, Eli Lilly, Merck, Mercedes Benz, and Prudential. I say we revoke their class As!
Routing is a problem. (Score:3)
The problem isn't the amount of IP addresses, what it really comes down to is efficient routing. Lets say for example that IP 2.2.2.2 belongs to some dude in Norway. So route all packets that have 2.2.2.2 as destination to Norway. How about IP 2.2.2.3 then? Let's give it a university in Malaysia. Now routers have to know exatly where the holder of each IP lives. They have to scan every packet and compare its IP to a BIG database of locations. Needles to say, this would be very slow.
So how do 128bit-addresses help? Well, we can make a deal that the first 8 bits mark the country. Now the router needs to scan only the first 8 bits and compare it to small database to determine where to send the packet. When the packet reaches the right country, next 8 bits are checked. These 8 bits could mean the state/province/whatever. Then scan 16 bits to determine the correct city. This way you can narrow down the search step by step until the packet has been delivered. Simple and fast.
Re:And then.... (Score:3)
let's see; I can telnet to my masqueraded machine
like this:
redir --lport=97 --caddr=192.168.1.2 --cport=23 &
telnet mydomain 97 #forwards connections to port 97
#to the masq'd box's port 23
I can do the same with a web server or any other
kind of service. Set up right, you can open up
all sorts of holes to inbound services. I'm logged
into a masq'ed machine at home from work right now.
All IPs cannot be used (Score:4)
First, it is impossible for every IP address out there to be used. Routing is the evil here. Every little network has to have some contiguous IP block. For a small office it could be a /28 up to a /24. There will always be some IP addresses extra for future growth and because things come in powers of two. If you are very good, 50% coverage is possible. A group of offices becomes a corporation which needs a contiguous (if possible) block under which all of the offices live. Of course we need to have room for future addition of offices. Here, using 50% of our sub-blocks again would be good. Now we are to a total of 25% of the IP's used.
This process goes all the way up to the backbone providers.
We could get greater than a 50% coverage, but at the cost of a management nightmare and larger routing tables. You want to keep an office in the same IP block so that it is one router entry. The same with a corporation. Otherwise, by the time you get a few hops from the end-user toward the backbone you will have router tables too large to handle.
That being said. There are some /8's out there that I think could be broken up. Some of the major players in the Internet's early days got /8's (Class A's) because no one ever dreamed that whole world would be trying to get IP addresses.
Second, I think NAT is only a temporary and mostly an unsatisfactory solution. NAT uses one IP address for a bunch of IP devices. A proxy server has the one IP address and all traffic goes through it. I say it is unsatisfactory, because you cannot run servers multiple servers listening on the same port behind a proxy. You can get away with one mail or one web server by telling the proxy anything for port 25 goes to the mail server or for port 80 goes to the web server, but a second web server would have to run on another port. In short, only clients can go behind a NAT proxy. Eventually we will run out of IP addresses for servers also.
Third, yes your toaster will need to have an IP address. Any device in your house will want to communicate to other devices in your house. Your toaster could set off the fire alarm (which has its own IP) when toasting gets out of hand or blink an icon on your desktop when your toast is done. If a device communicates, it needs an address. If IP is the protocol used, it needs an IP address.
Finally, I'm not sure IPv6 is a good solution. It just gives us a new ceiling in the total number of IP addresses. Granted the ceiling is really damned high, but try telling an ARPAnet boy in the 70's that 32-bits is not enough. I would rather see a variable length address. Give my house a prefix (1.2.3.4.5) and let me assign after that. Everyone else just needs to know that something beginning with my house prefix comes to me. ISP would have their own prefix and their customers would be underneath that. This is a rough, but it might work.
Also, IPv6 is missing other features that I would like to see if we are going to upgrade the 'net. Realtime transmission is top on that list.