U.S. shrugs off world's address shortage

news.com ^ | July 28, 2003, 4:00 AM PT | Ben Charny

[glorgau]

IPV6 is slowly on the way. no difference for the average user, but lots of work on the infrastructure underneath the hood.

[Cyber Liberty]

As much of the world nears an Internet address crunch, North America stands as an island apart, threatening to fragment plans for the biggest overhaul of the Web in decades.

I see it's somehow become North America's fault.

[D. Brian Carter]

The resulting list of IP addresses is two googols long

This is the first time I've seen the use of the word googol outside of being used as the answer to a trivia question or in an anecdote as an oddity. That is, indeed, a tremendous number.

[Moose4]

So how are IP addresses represented in v6? No more 255.255.255.255-style addresses?

}:-)4

[D. Brian Carter]

And here is a googol (not Google) bump for you.

[krb]

I guess they are 255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255-style addresses :-)

[D. Brian Carter]

I'm sure one of the trusty techies will be around to verify, but I'd suspect it will be just like that, only longer.

[D. Brian Carter]

And now that I'm on a googol kick, something interesting from the googol.com website:

Googolhedron - A 3 dimensional shape bounded by 1 x 10^100 similar polygons. This shape would look very much like a sphere. Having this many sides or facets would make it smoother than any man made object. Although, you could never have a googolhedron because there are not a googol particles in the universe.

I find it quite amazing that we're actually dealing with a number here (with IPv6) that outnumbers the amount of particles in the universe. I'm not a mathematician, I'm blonde, and easily impressed, but this just boggles my mind.

[Michael Barnes]

Example IPv6 addr:

3ffe:3700:402:0:210:a4ff:fe12:fec4

[steveo]

threatening to fragment plans for the biggest overhaul of the Web in decades.

Yeah it's needed an overhaul for at least a decade or two...

[HenryLeeII]

The standard is widely seen as a necessary successor to the current IPv4 system, which some fear could run short of addresses in Asia and Europe within the next few years.

Screw Europe and Asia. Let them get their own Internet!

[ko_kyi]

Established five years ago, IPv6 creates enough IP addresses for every person on Earth to have 1,000 Web-enabled devices

I think somebody missed a few zeros. 1000 x 6 billion is 6 trillion, yes? Isn't that a whole lot less than 2 googol?

[tracer]

"....which some fear could run short of addresses in Asia and Europe within the next few years."

Well, boo-freaking-boo-hoo!! The US should speed up the process and let the developing world, which we should take to mean all of Europe and Asia, get an idea of how many different ways there are for them to taste the long-overdue sword.

And let's begin with France, the clymer-wipe nation who so arrogantly has banned the term "e-mail" from its sainted vocabulary..................

[chilepepper]

I throw this thought out for discussion: comments please

IMHO IPv6 is totally unnecessary because of -- NAT

it seems to me that security has driven the typical network configuration of N machines into a secluded subnet hidden behind a NAT (network address translation proxy router/firewall/etc), which allows N machines to use far, far fewer IP addresses.

So, is this going to be enough to make IPv6 irrelevant? there is NO question that it has slowed it down tremendously. I distinctly recall shrill warnings that the much ballyhoed IP crunch was upon us... then nothing!

has NAT been enough, or will Microsoft, the Communist Chinese and the US Security Agencies try to push through IPv6 as a trojan horse to foist this change upon us, in order to control licenses, dissent or terrorism as deemed important not necessarily in the latter order as deemed important by the former order of interested parties?

[tracer]

Indeed. Our own AlGore invented it, after all......

[tortoise]

So how are IP addresses represented in v6? No more 255.255.255.255-style addresses?

The addressing will be similar, but addresses won't be globally resolved in the way they are in IPv4. While the address space is MUCH larger, actually addressing will be much less in practice.

IIRC (and I am too lazy to look it up), IPv6 effectively uses a 48-bit "address" out of the 128-bit space, so you are only adding two octets to the current IPv4 addresses.

[Liberal Classic]

I guess you'll have to type

 255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255 

or something now. But seriously, in the early 90s running out of address space was thought to be a serious problem. Since then private networks and address translation have served to extend the life of the current 32-bit address.

The real problem came about because back in the day of a couple of thousand hosts on the Arpanet sixteen million addresses seemed "nearly infinite." Class-B blocks of addresses were given out for birthdays and in Christmas stockings, and now there are a lot of colleges and businesses who still have class-B blocks of addresses they don't need. Many companies and colleges still assign real-world addresses to their internally firewalled computers even if they aren't visible to the outside world.

Version 6 of the internet protocol will be a long time in adoption and will come in by way of the back-end, and won't be noticed by the end user.

[tortoise]

IMHO IPv6 is totally unnecessary because of -- NAT

NAT is a stopgap and doesn't address the underlying problem, only delaying it. NAT works well because of certain assumptions about network infrastructure that are less and less true every day. We are rapidly approaching the day when everyone will have (at least) one /30 (or its IPv6 equivalent) assigned to them, which will burn up the address space very quickly NAT or not.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

One thing worth pointing out is that there's probably not going to be one day when the whole world drops IPv4 and starts using IPv6 (like there was supposedly one day in Sweden when they switched from driving on the left like the Brits to driving on the right like us). It's probably going to be a much more complex and fluid situation with IPv6 being tunneled inside of IPv4 packets, and vice versa.

[Adam-ondi-Ahman]

My networking book says that with IPv6, each person in the world could have as many addresses as IPv4 has total. And it is expressed in hex to cut down on the number of digits to display.