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Asia Running Out Of IP Addresses
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"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a neccessity." - Oscar Wilde
2 solutions (Score:0, Interesting)
2) Actually allocate the addresses in a way that has some semblance of fairness to it.
Of the two, I'm not sure which is easier. Sad really, isn't it?
IPv6? (Score:1, Interesting)
Or perhaps the US could solve the problem by not being so damn greedy?
IP Everywhere... not just the US!
Is this... (Score:1, Interesting)
Non-routable addresses (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder why they don't use the non-routable address spaces and NAT.
Let's also remember (since I detected some trolling in the article) that Asia was a backwater for the Internet 20 years ago when address blocks started to be doled out, so naturally the U.S. and to a lesser extent Europe got the bulk of the blocks.
They could always NAT (Score:3, Interesting)
Asia is one of the primary adopters of IPv6 (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, I can tell you that in one of my many Unix classes when we were learning how to configure IPv6 the instructor mentioned that the reason why IPv6 had been added by default to our new versions of Unix was that we were getting a tremendous amount of pressure from our customers overseas, primarily in Asian markets, who were unable to get IPv4 address blocks from their ISPs, and were therefore deploying IPv6 exclusively.
I believe currently a lot of Asia is running IPv6 with IPv4 gateways at main NAPs.
-obdisclaimer, the opinions expressed are not those of my employer.
Re:Corporations are at fault? (Score:5, Interesting)
$ host 18.[231-238].0.1
Re:They could always NAT (Score:2, Interesting)
good, less spam (Score:2, Interesting)
NAT China (Score:4, Interesting)
Given that China has already firewalled the whole country, why don't they just NAT the whole country as well. Then, with a little cleverness, they can have the whole address space available to them alone.
30% of ipv4 space still unallocated (Score:5, Interesting)
Crazy size of the IPv6 address space... (Score:4, Interesting)
There are about six billion people on earth and each person's body consists of about 100 trillion cells. With 128 bit addressing each individual cell in every human being could have 100 trillion addresses. I believe that is on par with 1 address per molecule.
To put it another way we cannot, with current technology, use all of these addresses in any physical way. We can't even count them (literally). Suppose you have a machine that can do a trillion operations per second; then suppose that you have a billion such machines connected via the Internet and we ask each one to simply start counting through part of the address space. I believe it will take about 3 billion years for them to finish.
Pat Niemeyer
Author of Learning Java, O'Reilly & Associates and the BeanShell Java scripting language.
Re:Is this... (Score:5, Interesting)
The people who were in at the start all ended up with huge domains that they didn't expect to fill, but then they didn't expect that the address range would "ever" fill up. So why be picky.
Countries weren't really thought of during the first round of allocations. Or even companies. Or most government departments. Except for a few who were a part of the process. The second round, all those were assigned "fair" chunks. But they didn't think of ISPs, or such. That was the third round, which added in ISPs and a few involved techie users (who now wanted an address at home that didn't depend on where they worked).
I don't know which round of assignments we are now. Must be around the sixth or seventh. (A round comes to an end when people figure out that they are running out of addresses, so they revamp the rules of how they are allocated.) Somewhere in there DHCP and bootp started being used so that people didn't get "permanent" addresses anymore.
Will IPV6 really solve this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hell. The whole concept of the 'internet' by means of Tcp/IP is becoming quite dated. Why can't we combine the domain naming system with the IP system. What I would propose is to give each computer on a given domain an alphanumeric name (can contain any type of characters, and is decided by the owner of the domain - basically the same as todays concept of a 'hostname'. The domains, in turn, are managed by an independent organization in each country, followed by a country code. For example, a sample address would be
Joe Smith@Earthlink@USA (users within the USA can leave the @USA blank)
this eliminates the need for a domain naming system. takes a lot of power away from ICANN, would help to solve cybersquatting, and provides an infinite number of computer addresses (at no point should the 'name' need to be translated into a numeric address.
Computers behind a router should be able to have their own address as well (multiple servers on one address without the mess of port forwarding! With many home users now running their own web/music servers, this could be a godsend. For example:
MediaServer@JohnSmith@Earthlink@USA
Anybody should be able to get their domain, but those who do not have their own should simply share one with their ISP.
Unix geeks will probably balk at my radical ideas. but it needs to be done. the numbered IP system was concieved when the only computers on the 'net were run by the people who wrote the protocols,. Nowindays, computers are used by everybody (and their grandmothers!). and it made sense too, as bandwidth was very limited, and the programmers never intended for so many computers to be on the net, and cut corners to gain a small speed advantage (a few bits per packet - which was a lot back then. now, it's nothing). IPv6 simply continued to use (longer) archaic addresses - the problem still exists; we need another layer for domain names, and it's confusing as hell to non-geeky types)
I know my ideas seem radical, and will probably never be accepted... but I certainly would hope that we fix some of this. IPv6 isn't a solution - it's avoiding the problem.
(yes, this was somewhat inspired by Apple's rendevous, which addresses many of my concerns, but is by no means acceptable for a worldwide scale. On a side note, I believe that in order for rendevous to succeed, Apple needs to open it up, and allow M$ and Linux to interoperate with it.)
Re:Corporations are at fault? (Score:3, Interesting)
One company that I've worked with uses a routable
What's super annoying is that we have some permanent connectivity to them and they give out different IPs depending on the source of the DNS query. We're not fully integrated with them, so it makes for loads of fun trying to do resolution correctly.
I think it's a waste of addresses. Give back the public-facing
But even RFC1918 is a problem as everybody thinks that 10.0.0.0/8 is "theirs" and then you do NAT-NAT, which breaks most troubleshooting tools.
Re:2 solutions (Score:2, Interesting)
How many people there are in the USA? Well, I'll make an generous guess and say 300 million. That's about 5% of the global population. Let's be generous and give USA 7 times as many IP-addresses as there are people in the US. That would mean that US would have 5% x 7 = 35% of the available IP-addresses. Seems fair to me. So why do they need 70% of the addresses? It seems that Europe has ALOT less IP-adds than USA does (15%? are the shares of different regions available anywhere?), even though there are more people here and were are equal in technology (in fact, more advanced in mobile tech)
IPv6 + NATPT (Score:5, Interesting)
I did this a while ago at my house. My network actually had no IPv4 on it at all for a few weeks. I stopped because a couple of applications didn't support IPv6 and because the KAME NATPT I grafted into my FreeBSD source tree broke. I did it sort of as a proof of concept, and it succeeded sufficiently for me to propose that IPv6-only ISPs could easily use the technique.
You first set up a DNS proxy. totd (Trick or Treat Daemon) is a good one. Its job is to turn requests for AAAA records into requests for AAAA or A records, and to translate A record replies into AAAA records with a special prefix tacked on to the high bits. This will make it look as though the whole IPv4 Internet is hidden inside of a special /96 prefix.
Coincidently, you route that /96 prefix into a NATPT. IPv6 packets go in, IPv4 packets come out and are sent to the IPv4 Internet as if they had gone through a NAT.
Having done this, all of the ISPs customers would see a complete IPv6-only Inernet, but they could still interact with legacy (IPv4) sites as if they were IPv6. As more and more ISPs convert over, the IPv4 network will simply shrink slowly until it's gone, but in the meantime remain as accessable as it currently is.
With such a transition plan in place, the more people who move to IPv6, the emptier the IPv4 Internet experience becomes (however, folks trapped with IPv4 only providers could use techniques like 6to4 to escape the legacy network), which in turn becomes the driving force for transition.
So, Enough stories are turning up... When is /. going to support IPv6?
Perhaps NAT is a solution (Score:3, Interesting)
True it sucks to be stuck behind firewalls but its better then nothing..
Re:Corporations are at fault? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:ISPs to lose source of revenue with IPv6 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Crazy size of the IPv6 address space... (Score:5, Interesting)
A necessary number: number of IPV6 addresses is 2**128 = 3.4E38.
Hmmm...lessee now, 6E9 people, 1E14 cells per person, that makes 6E23 cells. That's about 5E14 IPV6 addresses (five hundred trillion) per cell.
Per molecule? Let's assume an average person's mass is 60 kg, and that the average molecular weight of the human body is 25 (we are mostly water). That makes (60 * 1000) / 25 * 6.02E23 = 1.4E27 molecules per person. Total Earth population is then 6E9 * 1.4E27 = 8.4E36 molecules. Actually about 40 addresses per molecule.
My other favourite number is how many IPV6 addresses each square micron of the Earth's surface could have:
Earth's surface area in square microns = 4 pi (6378 * 1000 * 1000000) ** 2 = 5.1E26
3.4E38 / 5.1E26 = 6.6E11
A big number!
...laura
Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering the scale of this issue, it seems more like a homo erectus saying "No one need fire. Too hot and not portable, like Linux." Well, except for the Linux thing.
But seriously, I think the planet itself would be long gone before that many IP addresses was even close to being used. Until, of course, nanobots start self-replicating and join the Internet Continuum & start taking IPs (those dirty bastards).
Re:IPv6? (Score:4, Interesting)
mail.nths.nvusd.k12.ca.us request on port 80 go to 10.10.10.3:80
mail.nths.nvusd.k12.ca.us request on 25 goes to 10.10.10.3:25
nths.nvusd.k12.ca.us request on port 80 goes to 10.10.10.2
It was probably loads of fun to manually set this up, but it works
In other words, shortsighted... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Are you sure? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hum... till ppl start assigning one ip address per fridge, cooker, toaster, air cond., etc...
Umm... no.
2^128 addresses means that every one of the 7 billion people on the planet can have 48,611,766,702,991,209,066,196,372,490 addresses of their very own.
That's a lot of appliances.
IPv6 is fundamentally broken ... wait for IPv7 (Score:5, Interesting)
IPv6 is fundamentally broken. The routing system for it does not scale to the same level the address space does. There are enough addresses for everyone to have their own portable /64 assignment (if not larger), but IPv6 can't handle the routing. The routing technology was not improved to scale up, even though it could have been done (although I don't know if it can be done with the way IPv6 was designed). But that's not a valid excuse for not having scalable routing as the IP layer structure could have been designed to allow for it. Wedging another layer in below IP for IPv6 might also work, but I think we would be better off waiting for a clean re-design, perhaps to be called IPv7 (and pushing them to hurry up with it).
If you don't believe me, just post a call for portable address assignments in IPv6 for everyone. You're get plenty of responses saying that the routing can't handle it. And that is the problem.
Re:As I see it... (Score:3, Interesting)
And before you turn that one back on me: I am already dual-stack with NAT'd IPv4 and real IPv6 addresses for the hosts. So I am not holding things back. I love autoconfiguration by the way. No configuration on the hosts at all. IPv6 is so simple and easy compared to IPv4.
Re:Get with the times (Score:2, Interesting)
The legacy class A assignments just became /8 assignments. Not all of them have been chopped up (other than inside the companies with those assignments). Maybe those companies should be the first to go with IPv6.
International as early as 1973 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Corporations are at fault? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Corporations are at fault? (Score:1, Interesting)
strict requirements (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a tough question - should early adopters with huge blocks of space be required to renumber (a very painful process) even though they're generally the ones that got the whole thing moving in the first place? Those early class A blocks don't even require annual payments. Go to an ARIN meeting sometime to hear some lively debate on that subject.
IPv6 is going to have to be pushed outside the U.S. None of the big backbones are rolling out anything substantial anytime soon. Nobody in the U.S. is feeling enough pain from IPv4 to need to do it. Besides, we'd really need some v6-optimized hardware too to get it going natively everywhere.
All of Pakistan was under ONE IP address (Score:4, Interesting)
Some time ago, PakNet was the biggest ISP in Pakistan serving hundereds of thousands under ONE ip address... interestingly using Linux kernel version 1.3.x. I also remember every user had a shell account from which we could cat the
And on this side, here in Toronto, Bell assigns a subnet of 8 IPs to every customer, including ones who need just one. 3 of those IPs are gateway, broadcast and 00 host, which leaves 5 IPs. two of them are assigned to the on-site router and off-site routers which are connected via DSL. Its one of the best examples of IP address waste, while the Chinese crave a personal, their very own IP address!
Theoretically all of the more than 4 billon IP addresses can be used, and it is VERY unlikely that the whole worlds population would be online. But the imbalance remains with the US holdin on to all the Oil and IP addresses. At least we can do something about one of them.
Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
By my limited understanding of IPv6, this statement is rather false and misleading. Is the address space 128 bits? Yes, somewhat. But does that give a good account of the number of addresses available, NO. IPv6 has several different types of addresses, and the total number of actual addresses is far smaller that 2^128 would indicate.
Re:Oh shut it with the PC nonsense (Score:3, Interesting)
Try not to say "nonsense" and "inescapable logic" right before you start guessing.
This article [news.com.au] states that PC sales exceeded 10.1 million units in 2002 alone. Assuming that people keep their PCs for 3 years (which is not unreasonable for a poorer country where a PC is a major investment), we should be talking about a population of over 20 million PCs. Even that conservative estimate is already twice your guess. In fact, if you believe this article [bbc.co.uk], China overtook Japan as the second biggest PC market in the world last year.
Prove it. I think you mis-googled.
The CIA World Factbook China page [cia.gov], under "Communications", says "Internet Users: 45.8 million (2002)".
In any event though, even if they have 50m internet users, it doesn't mean there is a problem.
The trouble with Slashdot, and in particular with folks of "inescapable logic", is that you don't actually read. Where did I ever say there was a problem? I was answering somebody's question as to how many people in China can read or write, or have ever seen a computer, relative to the US. Later, I was correcting your apparent mental block with the low percentages of users from China.
Re:Crazy size of the IPv6 address space... (Score:1, Interesting)
You don't have 2^32 addresses with IPv4. And you don't have 2^128 with IPv6.
Re:Oh shut it with the PC nonsense (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure. This [planetanalog.com] quotes the IDC as expecting "China's PC sales to nearly double in a few years, from 11.3 million in 2002 to 21.1 million in 2006." Note that IDC's estimates are even higher than Xinhua's.
Furthermore, do not confuse current market share of NEW computers with the installed base of PCs as a whole.
Who's showing signs of confusion? I estimated conservatively (assuming people keep computers for 3 years), that there are 20 million PCs in use in China, based on sales figures in 2002. I further quoted that China now has the second largest PC market, which is not the same as installed base.
It is quite possible for China to have much millions more NEW sales than Japan because of their economic growth and still have fewer installed computers at the end of the year or even 5 years.
That's actually less likely. Poor countries are likely to hang on to PCs longer than rich countries. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a good number of 5-year old computers in use in China.
When, at last count, less than 1% of households have PCs and few people are likely to be able to afford or use multiple computers; it's basic math and a tiny amount of extropolation.
Your 1% figure is simply inaccurate. The 10.1 or 11.3 million PCs sold in 2002 already account for the 1%, and that's assuming nobody in this third world country throw away their computer after one year.
However, your meaning came across quite clearly on my end because of your insistance that the apparent disparity needs to be justified somehow.
Try to understand that some people don't give a damn one way or the other, except that people are arguing the right topics (in this case, actual users versus percentage of population), and are using the right numbers to back up their arguments.
Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem? (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, if you put a Dyson sphere around every sun in the galaxy, then you'll get down to a few thousand IP addresses per square meter. *Then* we need to think about going to IPv8.