Coming This Summer: U.S. Will Run Out of Internet Addresses | Hacker News Reader

Coming This Summer: U.S. Will Run Out of Internet Addresses

wsj.com

35 pointsabetaha41 comments

Always interesting to check Google's report on IPv6 use by their users.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

tldr: Consistently above 5%, almost reaching 7% on weekends. The gap between weekday and weekend IPv6 usage is widening, indicating that home ISPs are moving faster than businesses.

I love playing with this graph. Anyone have any idea why there was an unusually high (for the time) spike on Oct 4th, 2014?

Mobile operators in USA started to roll ipv6? (http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/10/t-mobi...)

Probably. I recently discovered that my Verizon iPhone is now connecting to my home NAS via IPv6.

I'm surprised to learn that cloud computing solutions (EC2, Azure) don't already support IPv6. Can anyone share why this is? I would think the switch is inevitable. What roadblocks are in the way for enabling this?

> I'm surprised to learn that cloud computing solutions (EC2, Azure) don't already support IPv6.

Lots and lots of parts of the networking stack (esp. when talking about both virtual and hardware interfaces) either don't support IPv6, or didn't until very recently. For example: OpenVPN didn't support IPv6 until last year, and even today, you're hard-pressed to find a commercial VPN provider that provides IPv6 support, despite the fact that IPv4-only means that there's a massive privacy hole when using it unless IPv6 is explicitly disabled[0].

Also, it's very expensive to move existing systems over without risking any potential downtime or performance impact for existing customers. This is one of the reasons that new and smaller providers (like Digital Ocean) are more likely to support it than the bigger names (and even Digital Ocean didn't support IPv6 until very recently).

I don't have direct experience with this myself, but this is what my contacts at AWS and other companies told me.

[0] https://blog.dave.io/2011/06/vpn-ipv6-privacy/

Cloud companies are very proud of the fact that they developed their networking stacks completely from scratch after 2005... and they included zero IPv6 support.

I still don't get it. Cloud services are a recent thing, and they are bringing hundreds of servers online every day. This is prime territory for ipv6.

I took my first look at Google's offering last week.

You can set up a MySQL database, which has an IPv6 address by default. The documentation[1] says

> Each instance has an IPv6 address that is free to use. To connect over IPv4, > you must explicitly assign an IPv4 addresss to your instance, which incurs a > charge per hour idle.

IPv4 sounded like a hassle, so I tried to use the IPv6 address from my Google Compute Engine instance. But that doesn't support IPv6. It's the oldest outstanding feature request [2].

(Perhaps other parts of Google's cloud offering support IPv6, I haven't used much else so far.)

[1] https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql-client#connect-ipv6

[2] https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/detai...

> I still don't get it.

Cost/benefit. Your internal virtual machines don't need IPv6 addresses, only where you're terminating to the outside world (usually ELBs, but sometimes public addresses).

For the vast majority of AWS users, the status quo is sufficient.

Note that some do. I have native IPv6 on my DigitalOcean VPS.

FWIW, EC2 does have limited IPv6 support. You can get a v6 address for an ELB. Netflix uses them so that you can use it on an IPv6 only network (there are some, mostly outside the US, but there is at least one ISP in the US that is IPv6 only).

    $ dig AAAA www.netflix.com
    
    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;www.netflix.com.		IN	AAAA
    
    ;; ANSWER SECTION:
    www.netflix.com.	178	IN	CNAME   www.latency.prodaa.netflix.com
    www.latency.prodaa.netflix.com.	47 IN	AAAA	2620:108:700f::36d6:2a51

I did an assignment on networking last year, from what I found out it was that the service providers are having problems with traffic flows.

IPv6 behaves differently than IPv4 (which is known and predictable) and that the network congestion tools need to catch up. You are in effect having to monitor and adjust core routers for double the number of packet types.

The network administrators are not against IPv6, it's just that it requires careful steps forward.

no paywall https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=newss...

Still paywalled, actually. They're smarter than that. ;) You have to actually search from Google.

Also, they're discriminatory, it does not work from Bing, only from Google.

The link worked for me.

Worked for me also.

Interesting. Did you click their link before clicking on the original WSJ link? I'm wondering if they try to detect people using this workaround when they hit the paywall or something.

Yes, I clicked their link and got the paywall and then I used the google link above and got through.

It's only working for me in Chrome though- not in Firefox or IE.

Ah, yeah, I'm on Firefox.

i got the link in google via chrome, so maybe one of the url querystring params identifies the browser type and when it's not the same it reverts to paywall.

I know that ipV6 is theoretically better for me, but I am not looking forward to the day that instead of 192.168.1.1, I have to type in fd42:caae:ee42:0001:0001 with my phone keyboard.

Is there any reason to think I won't need to occasionally type in full ip addresses after this switch?

If you are using RFC4193, you can always use fd::1 for the "Easy to remember address".

Lots of customers I've worked with also do things like:

fd01:192:168:1::1

Kind of terrifying, actually.

Um, DNS? Bookmarks? Why do you have to type IP addresses into your phone?

Two things I can see popping up:

Router management pages

internal network stuff in places small enough not to have internal dns (Where I work we have like five NASs all accessed by IP, at home I have a plex server in the same boat)

> Router management pages

For home use, many current generation router/AP boxes are powerful enough to run a local DNS server (in addition to DHCP) and often hardcode a DNS entry for configuration, eg http://router

> internal network stuff in places small enough

The .local domain (ie http://hostname.local) has been a functional out of the box for many years now on osx/linux and NetBIOS have worked on Windows since forever.

Router management is something very common - and you start to learn all the OUIs very quickly, and fe80::0213:50FF:FE12:3456 starts to get into your finger DNA. Eventually you start to learn all your devices by the last 24 bits of their MAC address, and that's all you need to remembers - the first part (fe80::0213:50FF:FE) is natural.

In some ways, this is a big advantage of IPv6 over IPv4. You don't need those craptastic "Client Software" apps to configure the IP address (I'm looking at you Netgear), because every IPv6 device comes with it's only link-local IPv6 address, ready to go.

In Europe, RIPE has market place for that. You can even see transfers there https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-transfers-...

As the mobile providers convert over, this will be less of a problem. T-Mobile just did. China did years ago.

There are lots of underutilized IPv4 addresses out there. I'm sure there are lots of companies and institutions squatting on /8s that would sell some of their block for the right price.

The problem is that uptake is growing exponentially. I've seen the math where if all /8s were returned for immediate reallocation, that would delay the IPocalypse by like 3 months. It's just not worth the extraordinary legal hassle required to pry those netblocks away from their owners (many of whom are probably actually using them in some capacity and have zero interest in willfully migrating out of them).

Some companies and universities have given back their /8s, but it's sometimes difficult. If the company has been using it for a while then they may have addresses all over the space, which means they need to re-ip their infrastructure.

Unless I'm way off, it definitely seems possible that this could translate to higher prices for consumers. Does anyone have any idea what those changes might look like?

How can I determine my site or my host is using IPv6?

I use a Chrome plugin called IPvFoo. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipvfoo/ecanpcehffn...

If you Google for "what is my ip?" then Google will tell you. If it looks like "12.34.56.78" (known as "dotted quad") then your computer is using IPv4. If it looks like "FE80:0000:0000:0000:0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329" or "FE80::0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329" then you are using IPv6.

It's ironic that 12.34.56.78 is known as dotted quad, but www.acme.com 86400 IN AAAA fd::1 is known as a Quad-A.

This is the one I use:

http://ipv6-test.com/validate.php

Try http://en.internet.nl/ as a way to find whether your sites or ISPs use IPv6

Also this summer Voyager 1 will leave the solar system!

isnt this what ipv6 is for?

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