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Diminishing returns, or The selling of deck chairs on sinking ocean liners.
mansaxel:
The attempts of people to extend the pain are reaching silly levels:
https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-127-00.html
To enforce what amounts to a IP routing conventions flag day to gain one /8 less one /16 must be the very definition of "diminishing returns". Of course; if you hold some v4 space you'll be tempted to extend the commercial life of it before the price drops; which it will when v6 adaptation is large enough.
ejeffrey:
It doesn't require a flag day as that expression is normally used. A flag day is when you are making a mutually incompatible change that everyone has to do at once or lose direct compatibility.
If this draft is approved, routers and network stacks could be updated and any threshold could be set for adoption before assigning any of those addresses.
I still don't expect it to be particularly successful given the difficulty of releasing and assigning the 240.0.0.0/4 former class E address block which is much larger and less used.
mansaxel:
--- Quote from: ejeffrey on December 28, 2021, 03:35:00 am ---It doesn't require a flag day as that expression is normally used. A flag day is when you are making a mutually incompatible change that everyone has to do at once or lose direct compatibility.
If this draft is approved, routers and network stacks could be updated and any threshold could be set for adoption before assigning any of those addresses.
I still don't expect it to be particularly successful given the difficulty of releasing and assigning the 240.0.0.0/4 former class E address block which is much larger and less used.
--- End quote ---
This borders on hair splitting, agreed, but since people do not update their network gear or their computers, this change is incompatible with the installed base in a way that'll make it impractical.
The Class E proposals suffer from basically the same, but not as ingrained as the loopback net. Also, a /4 is 16 times larger, so more addresses. Still not enough to accommodate the Internet growth. At the time when there actually was /8's to allocate from, the RIRen would go through one in about three months, using a very conservative allocation model. So, with Class E altered to general usage, you're looking at 4 years, tops.
There IS this new protocol, using 128-bit addresses, that shows some promise, and unfortunately a lot of resistance, likely from people who suffer from one or more of:
* Don't like change
* Suffer from second-system effect and think there are things not done right in the new protocol and want just one more feature
* Have financial stakes in selling v4 space
* Don't understand the concept of a network where there are no middle boxes that interfere, probably because they've never been exposed to one.
I'm saying it works, and we (as in "people who actually understand at least something about data communications") should all work to implement it.
golden_labels:
What’s the point of inventing conspiracy theories if there exist trivial and obvious explanation? The deployment of IPv6 is slow. For whatever reason, but certainly not because Illuminati have incentive in leasing/selling IPv4 addresses: in the v4-vs-v6 tug-o-war people in power to introdue v6 are on the opposite side of the rope than the supposed “they”.
Currently less than half of internet users have IPv6 connectivity with many areas seeing close to everyone in need of IPv4. Those, who can use IPv6, are not necessarily having ability to have that properly deployed.(1) While operating systems may nowadays support IPv6, much of software has no ability to work with it. On top of that the security and privacy concerns about removal of NATs persist. While NAT is by no means a security feature and should never be introduced as a pseudo-firewall,(2) the sad reality is it does protect uncountable machines whose owners would otherwise expose gaping holes to the internet.
16.7M addresses may not be much, but those are addresses that are lying around unused. The 127.0.0.0/8 range is in practice used only for debugging/experiments with addresses assigned as needed by humans with no reason to prefer e.g. 127.1.0.10 over 127.0.1.10. And even that is rare: to the point I myself know only a few people who ever did that (myself included).
____
(1) For example I am myself stuck with IPv4, because Liberty Global in Poland enforces use of shoddy modem-routers that are either IPv4-only or IPv6 with barely usable IPv4 shim — and I need IPv4 port forwarding.
(2) And even among IT crowd you will find those, who will swear it is equivalent to firewall — never realizing that is at best a conincidence.
mansaxel:
--- Quote from: golden_labels on December 29, 2021, 02:13:31 am ---What’s the point of inventing conspiracy theories if there exist trivial and obvious explanation?
The deployment of IPv6 is slow. For whatever reason, but certainly not because Illuminati have incentive in leasing/selling IPv4 addresses: in the v4-vs-v6 tug-o-war people in power to introdue v6 are on the opposite side of the rope than the supposed “they”.
Currently less than half of internet users have IPv6 connectivity with many areas seeing close to everyone in need of IPv4. Those, who can use IPv6, are not necessarily having ability to have that properly deployed.(1) While operating systems may nowadays support IPv6, much of software has no ability to work with it. On top of that the security and privacy concerns about removal of NATs persist. While NAT is by no means a security feature and should never be introduced as a pseudo-firewall,(2) the sad reality is it does protect uncountable machines whose owners would otherwise expose gaping holes to the internet.
--- End quote ---
The biggest problems are bad decisions made a long time ago, in building provisioning systems that are 32-bit only, and not insisting on v6 compat in things you bought. I've required RFC6540 compliance in everything I've bought and specified the last 15 years, and it helps, because I can trivially enable v6 for it all, even if the reality of applications requires me to run dual-stack.
--- Quote from: golden_labels on December 29, 2021, 02:13:31 am ---16.7M addresses may not be much, but those are addresses that are lying around unused. The 127.0.0.0/8 range is in practice used only for debugging/experiments with addresses assigned as needed by humans with no reason to prefer e.g. 127.1.0.10 over 127.0.1.10. And even that is rare: to the point I myself know only a few people who ever did that (myself included).
--- End quote ---
It is still only 3 months consumption at pre-runout rates -- probably less -- and it costs a routing convention soft flag day. It'll take 6 to 10 years before it is usable.
The fact in the "conspiracy" discussion is that the 127/8 proposals emanate from a relatively small group of people who since they co-authored the drafts and did other propaganda stunts, likely know each other. I suppose they have reasons to see v4 taper off ever so little slower. Their pension plan, of sorts. And no, this is not my idea. It was widely suggested on Nanog-l that this was the case.
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