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The Internet

ARIN IPv6 Allocation Policy 121

Posted by michael from the grandma-went-to-Myrtle-Beach-and-all-I-got-was-this-lousy-/8 dept.
possible writes: "ARIN has announced the last call for public comments on its proposed IPv6 address allocation policy. This last call for public comments will expire on 23:59 EDT August 03, 2001."
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ARIN IPv6 Allocation Policy More

ARIN IPv6 Allocation Policy

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  • Have you tried a dynamic IP service? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I really don't understand your VPN situation but I get around the need for a static IP by using dyndns.org. Basically you sign up for the service (which is free) and give them a hostname such as cybrthng.dyndns.org and run a small perl script on your machine. Any time your IP address changes (such as rebooting) then it sends a notification to the DNS server at dyndns.org to change cybrthng.dyndns.org to point to your new IP address so your friends can still connect to your web server and you can log in to your home machine from work.

  • Um wow (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Easy does it! This comment has been submitted already, 276767 hours , 4 minutes ago. No need to try again.

  • Quoted... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "48 addresses ought to be enough for anybody" - IETF, 2001

  • Allocate by region based on population. Leave room (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 28, 2001 @01:04PM (#2186244)
    Use a logical GEOGRAPHIC based struct, 3 bits for the continent, 16 bits for the nation, 24 for the city, 48 for the company/individual, and 32 for each of the last cagegory to play with. As for the remaining 5. Let that designate the planet. Plan ahead. You've got 128 bits, right?
  • BBNPlanet also owns 8.x.x.x IIRC.

    --

  • Just run the whole solar system behind NAT, so the rest of the universe doesn't even have to see our IPv6 addresses.

    --

  • Not only that. If you have a /48, that gives you 80 variable bits (IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long), which gives you 2^80 IPs (1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176). That's more than enough to give every atom in your house an IP, let alone every appliance.
  • It made it sound to me like /48 was the most common way to allocate addresses. In mobiles it was /64 and if you've got huge network they'll double it to a /47.


    Pricing may get more complex since there is that distributed DHCP replacement. I'm suspecting that there might be service fees for resolving blocks or something.


    Any way you cut it though, you should be able to get enough IP's cheaply for a good number of the atoms that make up your posessions.

  • That's goofy. You've got a huge list of TLDs for earth (com, edu, net, org, and countries) and only one for everywhere else?

    Divide your namespace properly, man. Major space-borne bodies should have their own TLDs. Maybe group the asteroid belt all under one, the way the .us domain is chopped up now. Vehicles and space stations to be registered under their controlling entities...

  • Gee, I managed to talk to her with nothing more than analog voice modulated carrier.
  • There is absolutely no downside for the ISP in allocating /48 prefixes rather than /128 - no extra hardware or bandwidth. The hardware upgrades are due to IPv6, not to the address allocation policy.

    What's more interesting is to speculate when most ISPs will offer IPv6 - UMTS Release 5 (the future 3G mobile phone standard for GSM operators) specific IPv6 for all multimedia services, so if 3G takes off this could be a big driver for IPv6 adoption.

  • HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

    Someone PLEASE MOD THIS UP!
  • At last an end to the current mess of dynamic IP, NAT and such garbage.

    It's a pity that ipv6 routers are so rare, otherwise everyone would probably start using it tomorrow...

  • Permanent IPv6 addresses that can roam screw up the routing tables. Right now the big problem on the backbone isn't the IPv4 address space, it's the sheer number of routing entries needed. If they force everyone connecting through a given provider to use the provider's network number, they drasticaly simplify the routing. And with 16 bits for the provider to subnet, and 64 bits that the end user can play with and subnet if they want ( none of the policies preclude dividing the 'host' portion up into sections by the end user ), handling dynamic network numbers isnt' nearly the problem it is under IPv4.

  • Portable addresses are why the routing tables are so big. Compact routing tables require that everything down a given branch of the routing tree have the same address prefix. The larger the number of prefixes down a given branch, the larger the routing tables need to be. IPv6 tries to deal with this by a) insuring that there's enough room in the 'host' portion that customers can subnet their networks completely within it and b) the provider has a large enough address space to assign a single subnet to each customer. That's also why they've kept alive the idea of a subnet hierarchy within the rightmost 64 bits.

    And don't try invoking a different addressing method. All of them eventually boil down to the address being a string of bits, and while the terms for each field in that string change the basic problem of the routing tree doesn't.

  • Actually pppp.pppp.pppp wil be assigned to the provider, ssss will be assigned to the user, and hhhh.hhhh.hhhh.hhhh can be assigned however the user wants. The RFCs specify that the host part should be derived from the Ethernet MAC address on Ethernet-based networks, but they can't really write in dependence on anything but the host part being unique within the subnet ( think about PPP, which doesn't have anything like a MAC address ).

  • Apparently you failed to read RFC2462, which addresses this. Hosts do not configure the high 64 bits of their address, they are told what it is by their router(s) during configuration of the interface. A site's local address topology is completely independent of the 48-bit prefix assigned to them by their provider. Creative abuse of the relevant RFC lets you do this even if your provider gives you a /64.

  • #cp /bottomshelf/beer /middleshelf/beer; cp /middleshelf/beer /topshelf/beer

    Third generation beer, yuck!

  • What if we start designing things such that each program gets its own IP address?

    I doubt you will have that many programs running on your systems. Even at a company level.

    With each /64 subnet having a full 64bits for specific machine identification you could easily assign machine addresses randomly and not really worry about collisions. You're talking about a huge address space. So what you assign machines a few billion address so they can assign one to each program. Current process tables are only measured in the thousands. It's a non issue at this point. I can see a senario where it could be an issue, but then having more than 2^64 objects is rather unlikely.

  • IPv6 is fundamentally flawed. It has the same fundamental flaw that IPv4 has. That flaw is that it does not support universally portable IP space. Just like IPv4, IPv6 requires a massive routing table space to be able to route to different address spaces. The only advantage of IPv6 over IPv4 is more addresses. It is NOT going to provide you with your own portable address block.

    The Internet is going to end up splitting into a commercial version and a free (as in speech) version, anyway, so who cares. The latter will never need more than the IPv4 space, so IPv6 just isn't needed.

  • The problem of multi-homing in integrated in the design of both IPv4 and IPv6. The flaw is in the address concept itself. To fix this, you cannot just retrofit something on top of the existing IPv6. I do have an idea I call "layered addressing". It pretty much eliminates the core routing tables (it would most likely be way fewer than 1000 entries, perhaps just 200). But it also requires a whole new way to think about addresses. It has some similarities to "loose source routing", but works on the basis of autonomous secured zones. And that just isn't part of the IPv6 design. I highly doubt the multi6 working group has the authority to scrap the whole IPv6 addressing scheme and start over, so there would be no point in trying to do anything in that group.

    So do you know where to reach the IPv7 working group?

  • Not in IPv4 or IPv6. I believe that to handle truly portable addressing requires a whole new way to think about addressing that IPv6 simply didn't try to do.

  • You're still making some assumptions about this string of bits called the address. For one thing, you assume that the address has to remain constant throughout the travels. That's part of the flaw in the design. IPv6 spent too much time thinking about how to divvy up a constant address and didn't look at the big picture where the real requirements are the ability to configure a machine/network once, and be able to rapidly find the path to it wherever, and whenever, it moves. It's a convergence problem in time/space, and the addressing concept has to be a part of it. A constant (not static) addressing is just part of the problem.

  • I'm not going to write up an RFC unless there is some reason to believe people will take it seriously. There is one reason to believe they won't, and that is because the solution means to scrap the whole design of IPv6 and start over (call it IPv7 maybe). The requirement "where every device could get a one-time fixed address and then you could plug that device into any network jack in the world and have it instantly work" is not achieveable with IPv6 (I can't exactly prove it because there are ways to sort of make it kind of work). It would require a new design to replace IPv6 and its way of doing fixed addressing.

  • Writing up such a document would be very time consuming. This is simply not worth it for one person. This issue isn't about getting you to listen to me. I could care less if you listen to me. The issue is about whether IPv6 will be scrapped. First ask yourself if there was indeed a way to do multi-homing right, without massive routing table, that would only work on a new addressing scheme and not IPv6, would the powers that be be willing to scrap the last 8 years of design work to have this feature? If you think the answer is yes, then go ask the various IPv6 working groups the same question. Is having multi-home light routing worth all that? I highly suspect that such a feature is "way down" in priority and would not justify scrapping all the work they have done in IPv6 and delaying the rollout for a few more years.

  • That's only one layer.

  • Re:what? (Score:3)

    by sharkey ( 16670 ) on Sunday July 29, 2001 @03:48AM (#2186267)
    no one is interested it.

    Thank you for contributing this error. It will help maintain ./'s reputation as a hang-out for those who cannot spell, or figure out just exactly what the word "capitalization" means.

    --
  • I'm retarded. I meant to mention IDRP as a replacement for BGP under IPv6, and I didn't. *smack forehead*

  • IPv6 (Score:1)

    by No-op ( 19111 )
    I heard that Telstra in AU and MCI here in the US are providing some IPv6 services. maybe you could get that, and not only would you have a static IP, but you'd have one that was specific to your machine for life :) just don't change your NIC or it'll change on you. hehe :)

  • static addressing (Score:5)

    by No-op ( 19111 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @01:41PM (#2186270)
    well, one thing with IPv6 (kind of like IPX in this respect) is that the last 48 bits of your address are your MAC address. while this is ethernet (and compatible) addressing specific, that's most everything these days. so it's not even a matter of static or dynamic anymore, as everything just *IS* what it is, and that's about it. I don't know if you remember the IPX days, or even experienced them, but there wasn't much of an issue with addressing with it (at least in the same respect as we have with IP now.) I look forward to IP addressing being less of an issue.

    That being said, routing protocols will need to be furthered, and some of the new routing protocols as well as the IPv6 versions of old standbys (like BGP, OSPF, etc) are pretty slick. think about the amount of route summarization you'd need to do for BGP so you don't kill yourself! we're talking massive exponentional expansions in potential routes. ouch. I think that's why most of the IPv6 space is going to be kept close together to save us all the hassle of watching our older equipment die under the load. thinking of all those little ISP's loading up IPv6 BGP on a cisco 3640 or something equivalent just makes me want to cry :)

    Here's a good link on the routing issues moving to IPv6: http://www.t17.ds.pwr.wroc.pl/~misiek/ipv6/!Docume ntation/ip6routing.html [pwr.wroc.pl]
  • Just to be clear, this isn't ARIN's plan, this is a joint IAB/IESG recommendation. While it's likely that ARIN (and the other regional registries) will follow it, it's just a recommendation.
  • Basically this. Your service provider assigns you 11.11.11.11 when your dhcp is allocated. You use a "vpn" (for lack of any word) to connect to a remote server who assigns you 22.22.22.22 EVERYTIME YOU LOGIN so that you will always have that address. Normally in a vpn you route your traffic through your local provider and then up to the vpn server and through the network from there. Instead of routing all traffic like that the provider who assigns you 22.22.22.22 will set a bgp route for your host so that 11.11.11.11 will be the default route (by doing bgp weights or some other routing trickery) this way all the traffic is done locally and you have an ip address all to your lonesome.

    Sure you can do dynamic dns for vanity names and domains through any service now. I want to be my own dns, i want legal mail services, i want to do vanity domains or virtual hosts based on having a constant ip.

    just an idea.. dunno if it is even feasable

  • Ip allotment isn't sloppy. Everything having a static address means not everything is hiddent. Means that on a whole, there is a network for everything.

    Standardization is why we have area codes. You know that 281,713 and 409 are houston, you know that 610 is philadelphia, you know that 215 is a place you don't want to call.

    Cell phones are just mobile phones and believe it or not cell phone users have a home market. Much like the area codes, this helps identify and localize the user.

    Extensions suck. It is nice to have my own phone number at work, at home and on my cell phone. You want to try and remember extensions and numbers? You extension idea is simply adding incomprehensible and unplanned numbers BEHIND the normal 7 digit number adding only to the confusion. 10 didgit dialing is alot easier then 7+4 digit extensions that don't mean squat unless you work within the company. Most business use the suffix of the number as the extension anyway only adding to the EASE OF USE.

    Private networks wouldn't be needed and all the computing resources being utilized for managing private networks coould be a thing of the past if it wasn't necessary.

    Service levels will increase, productivity would increase and network management would increase.

  • Lets just hope Verizon follows through.. (Score:4)

    by cybrthng ( 22291 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @01:27PM (#2186274) Homepage Journal
    With IPv6 i may finally be able to get a static ip through verizon!!!

    But then again, i may be dreaming.

    On the otherhand, is it possible for someone to do virtual ip's in some fashion? Like a vpn connection that authenticates the client and then does shortest path routing? Something like provider x assigns me 222.222.222.222 through the vpn and then bgp's the routes to the dynamic ip address by weights (so that your traffic still goes through your local provider and doesn't need to be tunneled through the vpn).

    Just wondering. Too many big companies screwing over the lil guys and customers. "It is our policy to not assign static ip's". Thats like saying you sell me a 100% connect dedicated DSL circuit and say i need dynamic ip's because it saves your space on your ip subnets.. thats bs since the same customers are going to be on.. save yourself a dhcp server and assign ips. If your all about spam and email filtering with your new no smtp/pop outside of verizon email addy policy then why not implement static ip's so you can CATCH the people doing it instead of chasing them elsewhere and ruining services for people who don't do bad.

  • Oh great.. now somebody is gonna r00t my coffee maker and make it brew nothing but decaf...

  • Re:Quoted... (Score:3)

    by Restil ( 31903 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @03:44PM (#2186276) Homepage
    2^48 actually.

    Although this COULD become a problem when we get into nanotechnology and ever nanite needs its own IP address. A body full of these suckers COULD potentially run out of IP addresses.

    "No, but you don't understand. I need an extra block of addresses because it is vitally important that I can access nanite #38273749590627
    directly from a computer on the other side of the world. A double hop is simply NOT an option guys!"

    Enough for anyone. Humph!

    -Restil
  • What IETF hopes and what actually does occur are two different things. The ISPs will charge for each address and be very stingy with them, solely because they can.
  • If you want to address all those lovely items behind the NAT from the outside, you're screwed.

    Inside going out, NAT is fine. However outside coming in it is a mess. IPv6 will fix this.
    --
    Charles E. Hill
  • NAT and PF (port forwarding) forces everything to go through a SPF (single point of failure). Lost the NAT, and your entire network is offline.

    Yes, there are benefits from a security standpoint but I prefer my security solution to be more flexible. My coffee pot doesn't need the same protection that my home alarm system does. NAT with PF forces this to a good degree.

    It also causes problems with things like redundant links. Multiple connections to the 'net would be a good thing. A full-mesh config on your internal LAN with a couple of redundant egress points could help. Not to mention the possibility of different speed connections.

    Simple devices can be controlled/monitored with simple commands (SNMP-like) and slow/small-bandwidth links. Again, my coffee pot doesn't need a DS-3, but my porn-scouring spider would like one!

    Having to reconfig multiple similar devices (like clocks and/or TVs that naturally use the same ports) to use different ports will be a pain -- though I suppose some form of DHCP for port assignment could be created.

    IPv6 also has better support for QoS and a few other additions that make it desirable. No, it isn't perfect but it is a step in the right direction.
    --
    Charles E. Hill
  • This isn't going to fix the current problem (which is the router tables are too large to deal with properly) and all it does is push it away a bit and attempt to hide it.

    This and every other Ip address scheme is based on the concept that the end user is a leaf node and has one upstream and that is the root of the problem since the "Internet" is about having multi-homed hosts which have 1 or more upstream connections.

    The current mess with ip v4 could be fixed by telling every ISP that they will have to return 10% of their address space per year and then only allocate /22 (or larger) blocks to two ISPs at a time. This way every ISP will have a block that they must share with a different ISP and it allows small groups to dual home. Right now to properly dual home you have to pay thousands per year and you get a very wasteful /20.

  • Everyone can have huge networks (Score:5)

    by Que_Ball ( 44131 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @01:21PM (#2186281)
    They are basically saying that in IPv6 everyone will be given a /48 which means that as you connect to your ISP it will automatically give you a range of IP addresses large enough for you to have 2^16 or 65536 different subnets. Because IPv6 is a 64bit network with 64bit host system that means each subnet can have practically an unlimited number of devices in it. You can basically give every piece of dust floating around in your house an IP address and each room could be on it's own subnet!

    And still as they state, they can easily give up to 178 billion of these /48 network numbers away until address assignment starts to become an issue again which still leaves 85% of the address space unused.

    Now the real trick as the article alludes to but doesn't really address is the complexity of handling the routing for multihomed sites. Someone still has to figure out how to make multihomed routing easy, fast, and efficient.

  • Finally an IP addr for my Coffee Machine (Score:3)

    by alteridem ( 46954 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @01:10PM (#2186282) Homepage
    They are recommending,

    - Home network subscribers, connecting through on-demand or always-on connections should receive a /48.

    This means that every home will have enough IP addresses for about everything in the home. Finally I will be able to telnet into my coffee machine from downstairs and brew a new pot of joe! The possibilities for us caffeine soaked programmers are endless!!!

  • I can just see it... (Score:3)

    by alteridem ( 46954 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @01:22PM (#2186283) Homepage
    > telnet fridge.appliance.myhome.org

    Welcome to the FreezyFridge 2010
    Running Linux 2.4.15

    Login:root
    Password:******

    # mv /bottomshelf/beer /dev/null
    # exit
    > _

    Then no more beer!!!!

  • Re:Finally an IP addr for my Coffee Machine (Score:5)

    by alteridem ( 46954 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @01:18PM (#2186284) Homepage
    > telnet coffee.appliance.myhome.org

    Welcome to the BrewMatic 4000
    Running Linux 2.4.14

    Login:root
    Password:******

    # cd /dev
    # mv /dev/oldfilter /dev/null
    # cp /dev/newfilter /dev/filter
    # mv /var/spool/coffee /dev/filter
    # brew --cups 12
    # exit
    > _
  • So you intend to limit IPv6 to 32 interplanetary bodies?

    Where is your forward thinking? :)

    On the other hand, I do agree with you regarding the heirarchical designation, however it appears that ARIN want to give everyone a /48 address by default (that is 2^80 addresses per person). Only 1/8th of the IPv6 address space will be available (001 designation) by default, allowing 2^45 entities to have up to 2^80 addresses.

    The paper says that there will be 10billion people on the Earth by 2050. I bet IPv6 will last until 2100 at least though, and you shouldn't design upgrades into the system for something anyway, so assume that it will last forever...

    In 3000, the Interplanetary Confederation will have 10 trillion people under its finger, and 100 billion companies (imagine giving each of those a unique name to avoid .com naming problems!). 2^45 is more than the sum of these (2^35), so even then IPv6 will be fine. I assume that the average person will not have more than 2^80 IPv6 addressable elements on or within their body though. I think this is reasonable... !

  • You're 2/3 right.

    IPv6 is DOA. And we don't need more IP address space. BUT the telephone number issue is a lot more complex.

    IPv6 has been around, more or less, for about a decade. It was SIP and PIP merged; neither Steve nor Paul were terribly good protocol designers, and neither understood addressing. ISO CLNP was a far better protocol; it was almost adopted as the standard under the name TUBA (TCP and UDP with Bigger Addressing). But at the last minute, Vint Cerf (the Chauncey Gardner of the Internet) reneged on a deal with the TUBA advocates and changed his position. Thus we've had no progress for pretty much the entire life of the commercial (post-1993) Internet.

    And because IPv6 is such a botch, IPv4 workarounds like NAT will keep it going, and ARIN is sitting on heaps of spare v4 space, like all of the old Class As from 67 to 126! With CIDR, that'll last quite a lot, and indeed Disney does not need a full Class A. But they could use it more than many other Class A occupants!

    Telephone numbers are a different story. Every LEC (ILEC, CLEC) needs its own prefix code in every rate center it does business in. There are too many rate centers (in order to keep local calling areas small) and most CLECs don't need as many numbers as they have. But they got full prefix codes because that was the only choice. Now they get 1000 numbers at a time in most areas, or will soon, slowing down area code growth. That, and not PBX extensions or cell phones or even fax servers, is the main waste of phone numbers. And direct-inward-dialing PBX extensions (a feature bundled with Centrex but also used without it) is very beneficial; extension numbers are not a valid substitute.

    Still, there will be some need for new phone number space in North America one of these years, not too far out. This has been a recent discussion on comp.dcom.telecom (Telecom Digest) and shouldn't really be a tangent here. But yes, there is some analogy.

  • Yeah, YOU can ssh into your firewall and look! there's your network... But how the hell will your personal organizer connect DIRECTLY to your fridge to tell it to order groceries? Huh? Answer that one and then tell us that IPv6 is a waste.

    --

  • Exactly, very simple to do. I'm sure my mother would set it up in no time and that the coffee maker will be built in such a way as to find out it's "external" ip address so it can automatically broadcast that information to any "remote control" devices that need to know how to contact it. So, does that also mean that in order to buy an "internet ready coffe maker" I also need to buy a router as well?. Of course, that router will work with ALL devices automatically, right?

    We should just give up on IPv6 then, huh? Not needed? What about the built-in security (packet encryption and source authentication). What about policy route specification? What about combination of IPX and NSAP addresses into IP? What about priority routing for "real-time" or "critical" services? What about "local-use addresses that allow companies to not have to renumber their IP addresses if they start out not connected to the internet, but later connect and need to request an address prefix from the global internet address space?

    Anything else that is useless and a waste of time with IPv6?

    --

  • well... they did quadrupile the bitlength of addresses from ipv4 to ipv6, so i think theres a good chance of ipv6 not running out for a long amount of time, also i think ipv6 is more forward looking and will make it easier to transition to ipvx whenever it is necessary to do so... but *shrug*
  • "1) Privacy. Maybe I don't want people (read companies) to know what city I'm currently in.

    3) The last 64 bits of an IPv6 address are often used to store the MAC address of the sending host. This is going to make things like Mobile IP and automatic IP allocation (think DHCP) a breeze."

    Its not ok for anyone to know where I am, but its fine if they can identify me with a unique MAC address?
  • That's what DNS is for...
  • Having written a NAT, I know a little bit about what I'm talking about.

    Study up on IPsec/IKE, and you'll find that having live unique Ip addresses at each end is essential to the security model. NAT breaks this.

    As for the server stuff - yes it probably can be done, but how do you handle several web servers, all through a single IP address and the same public port 80. You have to choose another public port which then will start to break other things (e.g. routing filters), or decode the TCP data to attempt to work out where the stream is destined. You can probably do it by inspecting the data streams and directing traffic as appropriate, but this won't scale to large networks... too much CPU required.

    As for FTP or any other protocol that passes IP addresses in the TCP stream, the NAT box has to decode the data and modify it in a protocol dependent manner. Ok for a small NAT newwork, but prohibitive in a large network. But for similar reasons above won't scale.
  • I have been involved in the multihoming debate for a couple of years now. I haven't gotten into the multi6 group yet for reasons of time, but I have already submitted a novell idea at an interim IETF meeting on the issue, which was well received. The ideas need to be progressed towards an I-D, but again time contraints slow me down. My idea centred around a mechanism for hosts to dynamically change the IPv6 address for active TCP connections with only minor enhancements to the IPv6 and TCP layers. The same idea can be extended to other protocols and is also backward compatible with existing Ipv6 infrastructure.

    The whole point is that its impossible to route a very large network by meshing large numbers of nodes or networks in one location. Eventually the thing won't scale if you allow indiscriminate DFZ explosion. Even labeling (MPLS) will die when the network gets too big.

    Hierarchical table management is the way to deal with it. The Ipv6 solution to the multihoming problem is to assign multiple network addresses. Packet delivery for at least one of those networks can be guaranteed under that scenario so the network infrastructure is certainly doing its job. It's up to the higher layer protocol designers to figure out how they should deal with hosts having multiple addresses and then the problem is licked.

    If you consider that multihoming information is much longer lived than perhaps mobile IP, the solutions for dealing with the multiple addresses start to fall in place.

    Perhaps its time I got back into the multi 6 debate again and get the issue resolved - I have to admit its the bugbear of Ipv6 deployment at the moment.

  • Some real info. (Score:3)

    by PTrumpet ( 70245 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @10:38PM (#2186294) Homepage
    1. Ipv4 Address space is sufficient?

    wrong. There are large chunks of the world that can't get address space to do what they want. Especially Asia which is only now starting to get into the Internet. it is also estimated that giving every mobile phone over the next 10 years or so an IP address will also make us run out of addresses.

    2. NAT is the answer? No, for true secure internet you need end to end connectivity. This means live IP addresses, not hiding behind NAT. Also NAT can't pass everything through. e.g. try to pass ESP for several devices through NAT. Also try to run several independent servers of the same service type (e.g. web sites) behind a NAT. Gets very difficult.

    3. Routing for Ipv6 will fall apart because of the large routing tables?

    Wrong. The way strong aggregation is defined in Ipv6 results in the Default Free Zone (DFZ) of the core internet being very small (designed to be < 8000 or so entries). That same aggregation policy applies to for TLA (top level aggregate), NLA (next level aggregate) and SLA (Site level aggregate). If people adhere to the rules, there will be no routers blowing up any time soon. Router lookups will be faster than they have ever been because of the strict aggregation boundaries.

    As an aside, Ipv6 does not have a header checksum so routers will no longer need to checksum all headers as they pass through. This will also reduce router processing overhead.

    To qualify (3) I must add that multihoming is done differently in Ipv6. No site will ever "own" their address space so it can never be advertised into the DFZ. This is the mistake that we learnt from IPv4. To multihome you will be required to have an address space from each provider (SLA/NLA or TLA) that you are multihoming to. This means that nodes in a multihomed site will potentially have more than one visible address on the internet to maintain connectivity. The details of how to deal with the multiple address issue are in the process of being sorted out, but I can assure you there are several solutions to the issue of multihoming in Ipv6.

    4. Privacy is gone in Ipv6. (in case anyone wants to raise the point).

    This has been debated before about the issue of your NIC address being publicized. It is a simple matter to anonymize the address and an I-D has already been done to deal with this.

    So Ipv6 is not DOA as some would suggest. It's only a matter of time before people realize that it's absolutely required for the Internet to move forward.

    Do your research and you'll find that Ipv6 is needed and will make life on the internet much more saner. The availability of reasonable address space is the fundamental one, and I'm sure the IAB/IETF can bring enough pressure to bear on providers to make sure everyone gets a fair share of this address space. Don't also forget that it's a free market - giving adequate address space can be a selling point for a competitive ISP.

  • Well, the IETF hopes that that will only be the case before IPV6 is fully implemented. It's hoped that ISPs will realize that there isn't any cost in giving users more addresses and so more addresses shouldn't be charged for. You can already connect to the current IPV6 net via a tunnel and get a big address space (free).
  • Now my personal caffeine measure device (which obviously needs to be told which coffee machine to connect to) gets configured to connect to mydomain.com:10000. mydomain.com is the only static IP address I have, but when something comes in on port 10000, it knows it needs to send it to port 443 on coffee.mydomain.com.

    You're now limited to 65,535 possible things you can address through that firewall (TCP ports are a 16-bit field).

    So you've got 10/8 behind the firewall (2^24 devices) and you can only address 2/3 of them--assuming each one "only" needs one TCP port. Oops!

    Admittedly, you could as much as double the "address space" by using UDP for some things...but since most of your embedded gear is probably going to want to use HTTP, that won't work too well.

    If your control software is smart enough, I suppose you could use an HTTP proxy on the gateway...but does the Linksys box provide one? Didn't think so.

  • That is such a kludge.

    Haven't you ever heard of HTCPCP [faqs.org]?

  • Maybe someday we'll see RFCs in HTML - that way we there can be links instead of footnotes. Now that would be progress.
  • Actually, in the meantime, an additional draft has been released, see for example this copy [uni-stuttgart.de]. However, no technical changes have been made.
  • It isn't a matter of having enough. There will be more than enough for quite a while. The question is how do you organize the networks so I can get information from my house to my neighbor's without having to route through 2^32 different routers. Giving them out in an orderly fashion allows for easy routing mechanisims.
  • ok..

    3 bits for continent, that's good for 8 continents, fair enough.

    16 bits for nation, that's 256 nations per continent (we've already specified the continent) I'm not sure what continent has the most nations, but it's no where near 256.

    24 for city, that's 16 million cities per nation - not likely. If applied to China, that would imply an average city population of 60 people.

    48 bits for the individuals/companies?? I don't know how many that is, but it's about a billion billion billion times larger than the largest city. 27 bits would handle cities w/populations of 128 million, make it 30 and you've got enough for cities of a billion.
  • > actually thats 65536

    oops.. /me hides face in shame from high school math teacher and any collegues who also learned base 16 math 20 years ago when the rest of the school was playing football...
  • Even with IPv4 there are 4.2 x 10 ^6 IP addresses, there are only about 3(?) billion people on the planet, probably less than 1/4 of them have access to a computer, so there should be 5.6 IP numbers per person already.

    The FACT is that IP number are artificially scares, that is people "own" big chunks of them and see them as a source of power, so they wont let anyone else use them.

    Creating more IP addresses and giving the new IP address to people who already have them is useless as they will be stockpiled just like the current situation.

    We need to escape theses overloads who control us so.
  • You are making a few very untrue assumptions here.

    With respect to the very small default free zone, that was exactly the plan for IPv4. Entities like UUnet and Genuity get huge IPv4 blocks of address space. But if you look in the core routing table, you will see tons of more-specific routes that companies multi-homing are announcing both through the provider that allocated them the space as well as the other provider[s] they multi-home to.

    The problem has always been multi-homing. And guess what? Nobody has figured out (yet) how to do multi-homing with IPv6 in such a way that these problems will not re-surface again in the future.

    If you have suggestions on how to deal with the IPv6 multi-homing issue, I suggest you join up and participate in the multi6 working group. There are some real issues that need to be addressed before IPv6 can be deployed.

    Alec
  • I dated a girl in Highschool named Arin. She was a real bitch tho. Always telling me what I could and could not do. Touch this, don't touch that. Etc.
  • I don't understand why the powers-that-be chose this wierd hex system over either
    A) increading the subnet to 999.999.999.0 from 255.255.255.0 or
    B) adding on another decimal or two (ex. xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) or
    C) doing both

    While the actual mechanics of the protocol itself in terms of getting the data where it needs to go seem very good, the new hex addressing model is completely idiotic. When this goes into effect, we will be taking a giant step backwards, back into the 70s and 80s when no normal person could find their way around a network. And sure, there will be domain names still, but sometimes you need to use an IP. I'd much rather type a 11 or 12-digit number rather than a big huge alphanumeric hex number. And just think how beautifully slow DNS servers will be in the future.

    I'd like to end this posting with a question:
    Why did they decide on a big nasty hex setup, rather than expanding the current system, maintaining some form of compatability? And, if it moves forward, when can I expect the displeasure of seeing my IP change from 24.5.164.0/255 to something like 2001:200:800:6000::/56?
    ------------------------- ----------------
  • So they're requesting for comments before it gets publicized as a Request For Comments?

    I always thought that was strange myself, but eventually came to the conclusion that it must mean that at one time it had been submitted as a "request for comments" and then, once the comment period has ended it gets tagged with a number and then it's frozen. Once frozen it's only changed by the creation of a new RFC (i.e., no revision possible.) Once you have a copy of an RFC, you'll always have the latest version of it. You just need to keep an eye out for new RFCs that replace it.
  • everyone will be given a /48...

    Should make DNS pretty interesting. I sense a great need on the part of ISPs to provide an interface to let customers handle their own DNS.

  • Maybe someday we'll see RFCs in HTML - that way we there can be links instead of footnotes. Now that would be progress.

    I'm sure that it would be straightforward to write a filter program in a text processing language such as Ruby, Python, or Perl to translate the plain text format of RFCs into HTML markup. However, it would be a little tougher to resolve bibliographic references to a printed work into links to the book's BN Fatbrain [fatbrain.com] page.

  • You took up 2 precious minutes

    Every minute we waste is another minute we spend evolving (or not). It is predicted that by the year 802,701 [everything2.com], the human race will have evolved into something resembling Precious Moments figurines [everything2.com]. We only have 800,700 years to make sure that the carnivorous ant people [everything2.com] don't come down from space, enslave us, and eventually farm us for food.

  • What does /48 mean?

    /48 means that an ISP assigns a customer a 48 bit address prefix, letting the customer assign the other 80 bits however e wants. An IPv6 address, written in hexadecimal, looks like pppp.pppp.pppp.ssss.hhhh.hhhh.hhhh.hhhh where each letter represents four bits of address: p is the prefix (assigned by ISP), s is the subnet (assigned by user), and h is the host (assigned by user).

  • Your population estimate was off by about 3 billion. ;)
    -- Fester
  • > snort -dvi
    > telnet coffee.appliance.myhome.org

    Welcome to the BrewMatic 4000
    Running Linux 2.4.14

    Login:root
    Password:******

    # rm /dev/pot
    # rm /dev/filter
    # echo "Owned!" > /dev/display
    # exit

    > _
  • Do some lookups on whois.arin.net and you'll see tons of class A blocks which are just reserved. Start at 1.x.x.x and keep going. Looks like the only people really using them is bbnplanet who owns 4.x.x.x. I bet theres at least 10 class A blocks that are just used for squatting. Start assinging these.

  • Why do people need portable addresses (unless they are multihomed)? Are there routing protocols that could handle a Net where everyone used portable addresses?
  • Ah, some humor in an otherwise grim day =P
  • Uhm, why don't you learn some things about IP before saying how stupid things are. Why don't we use 0.0.0.0 all the time? Because the network 192.168.1.0 is different from the network 192.168.1.16. It logically follows the same for a broadcast: 192.168.1.15 is different from 192.168.1.31. Sure, 0.0.0.0 might be a network number... and 255.255.255.255 might be a broadcast, but they don't refer to anything specifically! Your comments are beginning to annoy me.
  • No---pigeons+rockets.

    Its a high latency design anyways.

  • > Use a logical GEOGRAPHIC based struct

    There are a number of reasons why this is a bad idea -

    1) Privacy. Maybe I don't want people (read companies) to know what city I'm currently in.

    2) Speed. Most IP traffic is routed between major network providers which do not operate within set geographic boundaries. Knowing that a packet at a major peering point needs to go to Cambridge, England is nowhere near as helpful as knowing the transit provider is PSInet.

    3) The last 64 bits of an IPv6 address are often used to store the MAC address of the sending host. This is going to make things like Mobile IP and automatic IP allocation (think DHCP) a breeze.

    All these reasons and more are why the (substantially more knowledgable than you and I) members of the IETF working group chose the current system 8-)

    Si

    ps. go visit www.6bone.net to learn more. Get yourself a free /48 from www.freenet6.net. Use and learn about the technology now because we're going to be building networks with this stuff real soon now.

  • actually in says quite explicitly that each entity will get a /48 address, and can can assign all the subnet ranges as it sees fit.

    The whole idea behind this is so that an ISP will not have to distinguish address assignment between an occaisional dialup user and a major multinational corporation- they both get as many routable addresses as they could ever use.

    The rfcrfc also makes a long argument about why this is desirable. Go read it ;)

  • And to think all this time I just had it next to my computer. Think of the possibilities - going downstairs for coffee... ... ... wow. I think I have a downstairs section of my house somewhere... ... ... (much searching for stairs) Nope, I guess I don't.

    Just think of all the other possibilities: we'll have enough IPs for our video game systems (gamecube, ps2, and *shudder* xbox), all of our other internet thingies (internet radios that nobody ever buys, networked mp3 players, and such), and other things that I can't remember right now.

  • #cp /bottomshelf/beer /middleshelf/beer; cp /middleshelf/beer /topshelf/beer

  • Re:Finally an IP addr for my Coffee Machine (Score:5)

    by andyh1978 ( 173377 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @01:25PM (#2186323) Homepage
    Welcome to the BrewMatic 4000
    Running Linux 2.4.14

    Login:root
    Password:******
    Brewing as root? With all the coffee buffer overflow exploits around?
  • Maybe someday we'll see RFCs in HTML

    Try FAQs.org. [faqs.org] Looks like they have everything HTMLized, much better than the plain text docs.


    Enigma

  • That's okay, his number of available IPv4 addresses was off by 3 orders of magnitude.

  • Hooray! No manufactured address shortage! (Score:3)

    by po8 ( 187055 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @01:34PM (#2186326)

    I've heard a lot of FUD lately about how ARIN was going to limit the amount of IPv6 space given out so that it could lease the addresses and make money. The proposed policy, if adopted, appears to mitigate that fear. As the document says:

    ...unwarranted conservatism acts as a disincentive in a marketplace already dampened by other factors.
    (Now let's get IPv6 fielded! I'm ready...)

  • what? (Score:5)

    by vectus ( 193351 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @01:03PM (#2186327)
    a link to an informative article.. no spelling errors.. no long rant about something no one is interested it..

    this can't be slashdot.. if it is.. i feel kind of betrayed..

  • So you intend to limit IPv6 to 32 interplanetary bodies?
    Where is your forward thinking? :)

    Until we discover a means of FTL communication, interplanetary networks will have to use something other than TCP/IP [slashdot.org].

  • As we are getting closer to IPv6, I am looking forward to get a IP for my fridge, doorbell, TV, ferrets and whatever.
    I remember the days where getting 100s of IPs was cheap and no problem what so ever. These days I still wonder why some companies that I visit, still have a full range of IPs when they only use one or two.
    I have been told that is is hard even to get a small range today, but I see many private people with their xDSL lines getting 8 IPs. hmm.
    Most people forget that they can host many servers on one IP using layer 4 switching. I just love to configure those Foundry boxes [foundrynetworks.com] :-)
    But I can't help to wonder that we might have missed something, I'll bet that real soon someone comes up with something that will make the amount of IPs available with IPv6 too small.
    Just like when you got that 4GB harddrive, "Now I will never need another drive", then came 37GB "now I will truly never need a bigger drive", deal if you know what I mean. :-)
    --------
    For sale: Rhesus-Monkey-Torture-Kit 40$
  • Why are all you people complaining about IPv6 not having global addresses that work everywhere? The whole point of router discovery is so that stateless autoconfiguration can make renumbering instantaneous and transparent. If you don't use stateless autoconfiguration, you're either using DHCP (in which case you have no problem), or static addresses (which is kind of stupid). Taking the idea of a unique global address to its extreme, every router in the world would have to know how to route data to every single device in the world. Plugging your device into a network jack somewhere else requires updating the routing table on every single backbone router on the Internet, which is infeasable.
  • In 3000, the Interplanetary Confederation will have 10 trillion people

    No worries, by that time we'll either be telepathic or we will have invented something that will probably be called 'NAT'

    Was it not Bill Gates who said "640Kb RAM should be enough for everyone"? :-)

  • I wonder if IP v6 will have an affect on all the script kiddies and black hats out there who need to sweep ip ranges to find targets. At present our class C in lodon gets sweeped about 5 times a day, and usually for a single port, having to scan a /48 for every company/ house would take a long time, and even then the marority would be for smaller busineses and such that would have a few devices. I believe this would discourage many as the chance of finding a target would be almost impossible. this added to the fact of once the intrusion system picks up a scan, there would be a lot of time to act on it.

    Now if only they would introduce 128 bit port numbers
  • Until we discover a means of FTL communication, interplanetary networks will have to use something other than TCP/IP.

    It's called a subspace channel. I've been trying to tunnel TCP/IP over one, but I keep getting problems with timeouts and dropped packets that are associated with non-causality paradoxes.

    I did manage to use my setup to chat with a hot black chick who seemed to be on some kind of space mission, though...

  • "The arguments for the fixed boundary are:

    - That only by having a provider-independent boundary can we guarantee that a change of ISP will not require a costly internal restructuring or consolidation of subnets."

    It is not in the larger ISP's (AOL, Baby Bells, etc.) to allow customers to easily change providers.

    "- To allow easy growth of the subscribers' networks without need to go back to ISPs for more space (except for that relatively small number of subscribers for which a /48 is not enough)."

    The more devices you have in your network, the more bandwidth the ISP will be exptected to provide. Bandwidth costs ISPs money, and many home broadband providers to home users don't like you using all your alloted bandwitdth for any period of time.

    "- To remove the burden from the ISPs and registries of judging sites' needs for address space, unless the site requests more space than a /48."

    If they maintain control over those decisions, they can keep a cap on the bandwidth they need to provide. Besides, everybody likes hanging on to power.

    "- To allow the site to maintain a single reverse-DNS zone covering all prefixes."

    Then how will the ISPs charge you for using their DNS servers?

    From where I sit, the big ISPs/telecoms stand to make more money in maintaining the current IPv4 structure of the internet than moving to this implementation of IPv6. I mean, come on: Charge $40/month for a /48 or for a /128? You do the math.

  • Let me get this straight... (Score:4)

    by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @01:36PM (#2186350)
    "This document is a draft position of the IAB and IESG. Comments should be directed to iab@isi.edu and iesg@ietf.org. This note will be removed upon publication as an RFC."

    So they're requesting for comments before it gets publicized as a Request For Comments? No wonder the internet is so fucked up!

  • Re:Everyone can have huge networks (Score:4)

    by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @01:40PM (#2186351)
    Not a chance. You missed this line:

    "and /128 when it is absolutely known that one and only one device is connecting."

    Unless they want to dish out huge amounts of money upgrading their hardware and increasing their bandwidth, your ISP is going to give you one and only one IP. For us home users, pricing and distribution won't be much different from IPv4.

  • Always wanted to be a toplevel registrar and dang I'd love to hand out moon.os, mars.os, satellite.os etc. There were never enough IP addresses for such forward looking vision ofcourse but in a few years the outerspace domains will be booming. Sealand is already planning their move to the Moon since they're being surrounded by tin-soldier DMCA laws.
    • Imagination is more important than knowledge.
  • *shrug* why is it that always 'somebodys mother' needs to be able to do something AND understand it? There's a saying 'you get what you expect'. If you expect stupid users who can't memorise that a coffeemachine is addressed like http://coffeepot.mydomain.com:10000, well then yeah, you'll get stupid users doing exactly that. I'm sure somebody made some nice law about the entropy of stupidity or something.

    Ofcourse, unfortunately, I would only be able to use 65535 or so portnumbers... Hums hums.. BUMMER! 'Mom, you cannot put more than 60k devices on our home network damnit! How many times do I have to repeat this, your hairdryer just CAN'T be controlled through the internet, you will REALLY have to control it through the local LAN.

    Ofcourse, as another poster suggested, a name based HTTP proxy on the 'router' would also be cool. So let the proxy server decide which IP address on the local LAN to forward requests for http://coffeepot.mydomain.com to! That'd kick ass, I bet Linksys could fairly easily put such functionality in their little box. Ofcourse when you have a Linux internet gateway that's trivial to set up anyway.

    However, wasting 'numbers' is not so harmfull as the more typical American waste, so why the hell not implement IPv6 and have a plethora of numbers available. Hmmm. Hey it would probably be good for the IT work opportunities in the future, all those routers that will have to be replaces 'n all, all those computers that'll need to be reconfigured. Hmm. I like it. Let's do it!

    • Imagination is more important than knowledge.
  • Out of curiosity, how is allocation such a major issue here? IPv6 will allow for enough IPs that every square foot of the earth's surface (including oceans and other uninhabitable places) is able to have it's own IP, with plenty of IPs leftover.
  • Two words: Dynamic DNS. Hosts in IPv6 world are auto-configured. Dynamic DNS is a necessity.

    --

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