ICANN Says Adoption Of IPv6 Is Essential

Less Than 10pct of Unallocated IPv4 Remaining

[engine]

ICANN Says Adoption Of IPv6 Is Essential [icann.org]

It has long been anticipated, but the available pool of unallocated Internet addresses using the older IPv4 protocol – which holds a total of slightly more than four billion IP addresses - has now dipped to below the 10 percent mark, meaning that there are only a bit over 400 million IP addresses left in the global pool of unallocated addresses.

“This is the time for the Internet community to act,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “For the global Internet to grow and prosper without limitation, we need to encourage the rapid and widespread adoption of the IPv6 protocol.”

[tangor]

What was that old adage? Programs expand to exceed all memory limits... We're just seeing the same thing happen to web access...

Then again, giving an ip address to a bathroom scale might explain the rapidly dwindling number of address locations!

As reported at The Register: [theregister.co.uk...]

[KenB]

Just you wait, someone is working on giving each light fixture and switch their own IP address so that neither has to be directly wired to each other. You'd simply tell the light fixture to listen to commands from the switches at the specified IPs and then tell the switches to send commands to lights at specified IPs. It would all work via TCP/IP over electric wires.

You think I'm kidding don't you.

[edited by: engine at 8:16 pm (utc) on Feb. 1, 2010]
[edit reason] tidied up [/edit]

[jdMorgan]

Bathroom scales and light fixtures can use non-routable private network (LAN) addresses, such a 192.168.0.x or 10.x.x.x and their status/commands can be routed using NAT, just as are most private-network (meaning yours) computers'. This allows them to share the single public-network address, e.g. the "WAN" address configured in your router.

Any use of public IP addresses for bathroom scales or light fixtures is due to lack of networking knowledge and abuse of the IP addressing scheme.

Not that I don't agree with ICANN, here -- Switching to IPv6 would give us back an awful lot of headroom to grow the internet.

Jim

[KenB]

But what if I want to turn on my porch lights while driving down the street? Then I'd need the light fixture on a public IP address. Oh and I also need to contact my refrigerator to see what's on the shopping list on the way home. Then there is the nanny cam in the kids room. Oh and.......

I dare say the world is going to need (errr... want) a LOT of IP addresses (and there will be a lot of distracted drivers).

[jdMorgan]

No, you would not. You'd simply contact the 'light fixture client' behind your NAT, using your one-and-only public IP address.

Ever sent an IM to a person on a network behind a router having only one public IP address? Works the same way.

Jim

[KenB]

Ya but all those IP addresses are just begging to be abused.

Seriously though, what will it take to finally get the U.S. over to IP6? What happens to everything on IPv4?

[g1smd]

I once read that "the company IBM has more IP addressed allocated to it, than there are IP addresses allocated for the whole of China".

So, one part of the problem is not the number that are alloacted, but the way they are allocated. Much has been done to overcome that with dynamic re-alloaction, but even that has limits.

[lammert]

There are still a number of hurdles to overcome. My new web/application server will be IPv6 capable. I asked a number of large dedicated server providers in the US if they could provide me with an IPv6 capable dedicated server. Some simply didn't understand my question. Others replied that the server was of course ready for IPv6, only their network wasn't... I couldn't find one decent solution and I am therefore now preparing a colo box which will go life in about one month in a data center which was until recently used by Google.

And that is only the server side. Most ISPs don't have the infrastructure to carry IPv6 traffic from their backbone to the home users. Many DSL networks are simply IPv4 and can't be upgraded easily. The better ISPs provide some sort of IPv6 tunneling over IPv4 but you need to be a real nerd to get it installed and working. Documentation is almost absent, and knowledge at helpdesks about IPv6 is zero.

[KenB]

Why would the large U.S. ISPs invest in the future when the CEOs can cash out the profits today?

I honestly don't think the U.S. will be able to shift to IPv6 unless there is a federal mandate to do so by a specific deadline like there was with analog TV.

[wheel]

No, you would not. You'd simply contact the 'light fixture client' behind your NAT, using your one-and-only public IP address.

With few exceptions, this same process could apply to every website being served from the entire data center my server is located in.

There's no reason webmasterworld needs it's own unique IP address. It could resolve to the main rackspace IP, and then rackspace could figure it out from there.

My entire 'empire' of domains and servers could all be run off of one IP with the exception of the SSL certificate stuff. But I've actually go websites spread across dozens and dozes of IP's. Not that I'm going to change :).

[KenB]

Well when it comes to your servers in a data center example this is a bit extreme and every server behind that NAT would take a latency hit, which would be a bad thing. It probably doesn't matter if my light fixture takes an extra 200ms to respond, but for servers this is a bad thing... Especially with Google's big push for page speed.

[lammert]

There is no need for a NAT to share one IP with multiple websites. Name based hosting in the HTTP protocol was one of the first attempts to combine many websites on one IP address to reduce the number of allocated IP addresses. Unfortunately the SEO community decided that a separate IP per site might have some benefits. Nowadays many webmasters are even willing to pay a monthly for a unique IP address.

[KenB]

Nowadays many webmasters are even willing to pay a monthly for a unique IP address.

I do because I don't want my sites to be associated with some site I have no control over.

[JS_Harris]

I wanted a unique IP when I read about concerns that sharing an IP could harm your site but search engines have done well in recognizing that my site has no malware etc regardless of the other sites on that IP. Until bandwidth and speed become an issue I don't recommend a unique IP address anymore.

I think the local cable company is offering a superbowl deal on cable/phone/internet with DVR on each TV. Just think, 5 TV's + 5 DVR's + Voip phone + 2 computers running on WiFi = how many IP's being used up?

Website owners aren't the biggest abusers.

[jdMorgan]

I want a unique IP address and IP-based virtual hosting so that I can control the hostname-to-filespace mapping, and add domains and subdomains at will rather than having to use some clunky and limited "control panel" to do it.

But for 'simple' sites with only one hostname, name-based virtual hosting is just fine, and only one IP address per server is required.

Jim

[Seb7]

fixtures can use non-routable private network (LAN) addresses

yes, but the powers that be, wont bother, we have loads of addresses now! every home can have subnets by default!

If everyone was using private networks, we probably wouldnt need to change to IPv6.