The Internet is Running Out of Space

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agnickolov

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Due to the structure of the IPv6 address space, fewer than 2^128 IPv6 addresses can be defined. The total potential number of global unicast IPv6 addresses is 2^125 (they all start with binary prefix 001), but for now only 2^117 are allowed (8 of the bits must be zeroes - reserved for future expansion). 2^117 is still way more than trillions as the author claims though - it's 1.66 * 10^35. Of note, 1 trillion is 10^12, so this is closer to trillion of trillion of trillion (10^36). This doesn't include multicast addresses.

In reality, there are fewer than 2^32 unicast addresses in IPv4 too. Only three quarters of the full IPv4 address space is available for unicast addresses and a few ranges in there are reserved for private addresses (192.168.0.0/16 being the most well known to home users with Internet routers).
 

JOSHSKORN

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Well, the movie 2012 was kinda right. The whole world runs on the internet, now. By 2012, the world will run out of internet addresses, so the whole world might just stop. OMG we'll all die without the Internet!!! Great Scott! ...oh wait, that's right, McFly already made it to 2015...so 2012 is NOT the end of the world.
 

theroguex

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[citation][nom]zachary k[/nom]i feel ya, i am about to finish my CCNA i am taking in HS.[/citation]

In High School? HIGH SCHOOL? What the hell! I have to pay out the nose to get a CCNA, and here you get to take it IN HIGH SCHOOL?
 

falchard

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OMG someone made a time machine that brought use back to 2007. Wow, hurry someone tell everyone about the upcoming sub-prime mortgage crysis and sell all your gold to me.

For the US this is seriously old news. The only ISPs dragging their feet are DSL and Dial-up Providers. My ISP has an IPv6 infrastructure years in the making.
 

abbadon_34

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oh no, you mean all the www.porno.microsft.org and //xxx.apple.k-12.pedo.edu are all taken? the first few million are excusable, but after one billion you need to be a bit choosy.
 

waar

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What is to stop you from using IPv4 DHCP even if your router/modem was issued an IPv6 address? That seems like the best solution logically.
 

marsax73

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How about we clean up the useless garbage on the net now and maybe save the IP's for something useful? Ratemypoo.com would be the first place to start.
 

hixbot

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NAT lets IPv4 live longer than people think. All we need is more NAT at the ISP level.
Ofcourse, IPv6 is an even better solution, but it is now 12 years since it was introduced, yet still barely used.
 

Mike00

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LOL this article makes me laugh.

Only thing that no one has mentioned is, you don't need a pure address for a website, how many websites have the same ip and contain many different websites, it's all about DNS and port numbers. LOL If you search there are more websites than there are ip addresses leased.

Any who, lots has been said already about IPv6 and IPv4, and all I can say is, I don't mind the private IPs that were used, since they can be recycled on every network, the only waste of space that some person with bright idea had was to take the entire 127.0.0.1 block for loop back, what a waste of IPs. And yes I also agree there is a huge issue with privacy concerns with IPv6, the IP will be able to provide info all the way down to your door step, if you search IPv4 it finds the city where you live, if you were able to search for an IPv6, it would find not only your house, but if you were connected with a hub using different IPs it would also tell you which computer you are on. Yeah so that is why it has been out for a while but still not on main stream, maybe good for big brother to keep an eye on you but it's also available to crackers as well.
 

vxd128

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I'm not the most experinced when it comes to ip addressing, but what I've seen is that there is both public and private IPv6 addresses. What I've read was that was one of the causes for the delay. You should be able to assign a public IPv6 address to your router and then the router should be able to assign a private IPv6 address to the rest of the devices.
 

nebun

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trust me it will happen in time, no need to worry. do we really all these companies? there are so many junk websites out there. how about cleaning out the closet?
 

PlutoDelic

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Every institution nowadays uses internet connection with IPv6, at least e.x the education instituations are all connected via IPv6, and the latest routing protocols all support it, so it is quite a good choice for internet routing and external connection, IPv4 has reamined alive (and it always will) due to private addressing, as soon as your home wireless router gets addressed with IPv6 there is no need for you to have internal addressing in IPv6.

DNS has been changed to support IPv6: http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_DNSChangesToSupportIPVersion6.htm but a lot of websites still are primary under IPv4 cause redirecting to IPv6 is easy...

 

PlutoDelic

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Every institution nowadays uses internet connection with IPv6, at least e.x the education instituations are all connected via IPv6, and the latest routing protocols all support it, so it is quite a good choice for internet routing and external connection, IPv4 has reamined alive (and it always will) due to private addressing, as soon as your home wireless router gets addressed with IPv6 there is no need for you to have internal addressing in IPv6.

DNS has been changed to support IPv6: http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_DNSChangesToSupportIPVersion6.htm but a lot of websites still are primary under IPv4 cause redirecting to IPv6 is easy...

 

dhvd79a

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@ithurtswhenipee:

"Do you remember Y2K? That was where the first programmers only allocated for a two digit year instead of a four digit year. They did this because they didn't think that these new-fangled computers would be around to see the year 2000 so why make it possible to display a date past '99?"

So misinformed. The real reason was to save disk space. When you are dealing with computers that at most have a few MB of disk storage you do what you can to save space. I worked at a shop that had a grand total of 14mb disk storage between two drives. We had an inventory system that had about 100k records. If I could save 4 bytes per record that would be 400K bytes, a significant percentage of the total disk storage I had available to me. The computer, an IBM mainframe, had a whopping 16kb main memory which we eventually upgraded to 64kb.
 

hoofhearted

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[citation][nom]palladin9479[/nom]The is a big reason people are not comfortable using IPv6. A large part of your address is your PC's MAC address, every connection is uniquely identifiable down to a specific PC. The internet currently is more or less anonymous because the closest you can trace someone's unique identifier (IP) is to their ISP, which most are resistance to handing over their lists. With IPv6 you can track down to the PC, even identify the NIC being used.Also NAT is nearly impossible to do with IPv6, no in fact it ~is~ impossible to do with a pure IPv6 system. The engineers that designed the specs for IPv6 got all snotty and swore NAT should never be used without taking a look at the 2nd biggest reason to use it. NAT can hide an entire range of private IP's behind a single public IP. This makes your private network invisible to anyone outside of it and forces all external traffic through a security device that filters and translates the requests. This in effect makes every single NAT router a firewall device by default, and a very effective one at that. When you combine a state full packet inspection software with NAT you get a secure router / FW that is nearly impervious to hacking. The only way through is to find an open port (port mapping) and hope you can do a buffer overflow on whatever is on the other side of the port-mapping. But a hacker can't see whats on the other side, so its blind hacking at best.I've built my own Linux based router by using CentOS 5 + Via Epia platform with 4x GB Ethernet interfaces. Using shorewall + snort and watching the logs I get hack attempts every 3 seconds or so. Usually by what appears to be someone sending packets to an entire range of known ISP IP's hoping a few reply and are hackable. My router discards these packets without even replying to them. This technique would be nearly impossible on a pure IPv6 system because my internet systems are exposed to the entire g'damn world. Their each uniquely addressable, and while the state full packet inspection would still be scanning, a hacker would be able to address packets to specific clients. More ever they could scan the packets coming from an ISP and map the location and nature of every single client attached to that ISP.On this same note, ISP's could then charge you based on your "network device count" instead of a single charge. Since there is no way to hide your internal network layout from your ISP, they could easily say "hey looks like you got five devices there, that is $39.99 USD each". Five devices is router + XBOX 360 + PS3 + smartphone + PC.IPv6 gives unprecedented control of the network to a network administrator, it alleviates the IP address congestion we're facing and for these reasons network engineers love it. But it pose's serious risk home users and corporations alike. It completely removes privacy from the internet. This is the reason everyone has been super slow to adopt it, its neither cost-effective nor a wise move unless you absolutely have to.If they can ever add NAT and masquerading functions to IPv6 then you'd see a huge migration of ISP's and major networks over to it. IPv6 has been supported by nearly every network device for the past five years. Your $80 home router supports it now, and you can get its support on Windows XP and beyond.[/citation]

Correct me if I am wrong, but why couldn't the internal network be IPV4 private use subnets? I mean the run-out-of addresses scenario only applies to the "internet". I don't really see the need for "pure" ipv6, ever. In fact, I would bet that ipv4 never goes away, but just evolves to serve the internal portion of your network. Am I missing something? I see the "network device count" and "internal net devices exposed" as being non-issue.
 

hoofhearted

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[citation][nom]agnickolov[/nom]Due to the structure of the IPv6 address space, fewer than 2^128 IPv6 addresses can be defined. The total potential number of global unicast IPv6 addresses is 2^125 (they all start with binary prefix 001), but for now only 2^117 are allowed (8 of the bits must be zeroes - reserved for future expansion). 2^117 is still way more than trillions as the author claims though - it's 1.66 * 10^35. Of note, 1 trillion is 10^12, so this is closer to trillion of trillion of trillion (10^36). This doesn't include multicast addresses.In reality, there are fewer than 2^32 unicast addresses in IPv4 too. Only three quarters of the full IPv4 address space is available for unicast addresses and a few ranges in there are reserved for private addresses (192.168.0.0/16 being the most well known to home users with Internet routers).[/citation]

So I guess our "olive branch" to the hostile aliens we encounter could be internet space :)
 

NapoleonDK

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[citation][nom]theroguex[/nom]In High School? HIGH SCHOOL? What the hell! I have to pay out the nose to get a CCNA, and here you get to take it IN HIGH SCHOOL?[/citation]He's right. I took it from a small high school across my junior-senior year. We had a graduating class of about 80 kids, and there were 8 other guys in my CCNA class. The town we lived in was about 970 people. I had a CCNP instructor and all our learning material was online, then we had a collection of 8 Cisco 1700/2600 routers and 4-5 2900 switches mounted in an overhead rack. For the larger labs we had to go to a nearby college. I made some of my best friends in the class, making jokes, trolling /b/, inventing memes. THE INTERNET IS TUBES!

/goodtimes :)
 
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