[NANOG] fair warning: less than 1000 days left to IPv4

Tomas L. Byrnes tomb at byrneit.net
Sun May 4 18:37:11 UTC 2008


I'm not sure that I would tar everyone who does NXDOMAIN remapping with
the same brush as SPAM and DDOS. Handled the way OpenDNS does, on an
opt-in basis, it's a "good thing" IMO.

I would also say that disaggregating and remarketing dark address space,
assuming it's handled above board and in a way that doesn't break the
'net, could be a "very good thing". The artifact of MIT and others
having /8s while the entire Indian subcontinent scrapes for /29s, can
hardly be considered optimal or right. It's time for the supposedly
altruistic good guys to do the right thing, and give back the resources
they are not using, that are sorely needed. How about they resell it and
use the money to make getting an education affordable?

The routing prefix problem, OTOH, is an artificial shortage caused by
(mostly one) commercial entities maximizing their bottom line by
producing products that were obviously underpowered at the time they
were designed, so as to minimize component costs, and ensure users
upgraded due to planned obsolescence.

Can you give me a good technical reason, in this day of 128 bit network
processors that can handle 10GigE, why remapping the entire IPv4 address
space into /27s and propagating all the prefixes is a real engineering
problem? Especially if those end-points are relatively stable as to
connectivity, the allocations are non-portable, and you aggregate.

How is fork-lifting the existing garbage for better IPv4 routers any
worse than migrating to IPv6? At least with an IPv4 infrastructure
overhaul, it's relatively transparent to the end user. It's not
either/or anyway. Ideally you would have an IPv6 capable router that
could do IPv4 without being babied as to prefix table size or update
rate.

IPv4 has enough addresses for every computer on Earth, and then some.

That having been said, I think going to IPv6 has a lot of other benefits
that make it worthwhile.

YMMV, IANAL, yadda yadda yadda



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Vixie [mailto:vixie at isc.org] 
> Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2008 9:39 AM
> To: nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: Re: [NANOG] fair warning: less than 1000 days left to IPv4
> 
> nanog at daork.net (Nathan Ward) writes:
> 
> > > That also doesn't take into account how many /8's are 
> being hoarded 
> > > by organizations that don't need even 25% of that space.
> > 
> > Unless you're expecting those organisations to be really 
> nice and make 
> > that address space available to other organisations (ie. their RIR/ 
> > LIR, or the highest bidder on ebay), ...
> 
> first, a parable:
> 
> in datacenters, it used to be that the scarce resource was 
> rack space, but then it was connectivity, and now it's 
> power/heat/cooling.  there are fallow fields of empty racks 
> too far from fiber routes or power grids to be filled, all 
> because the scarcity selector has moved over time.  some 
> folks who were previously close to fiber routes and/or power 
> grids found that they could do greenfield construction and 
> that the customers would naturally move in, since too much 
> older datacenter capacity was unusable by modern standards.
> 
> then, a recounting:
> 
> michael dillon asked a while back what could happen if MIT 
> (holding 18/8) were to go into the ISP business, offering 
> dialup and/or tunnel/VPN access, and bundling a /24 with each 
> connection, and allowing each customer to multihome if they 
> so chose.  nobody could think of an RIR rule, or an ISP rule, 
> or indeed anything else that could prevent this from 
> occurring.  now, i don't think that MIT would do this, since 
> it would be a distraction for them, and they probably don't 
> need the money, and they're good guys, anyway.
> 
> now, a prediction:
> 
> but if the bottom feeding scumsuckers who saw the opportunity 
> now known as spam, or the ones who saw the opportunity now 
> known as NXDOMAIN remapping, or the ones who saw the 
> opportunity now known as DDoS for hire, realize that the next 
> great weakness in the internet's design and protocols is 
> explosive deaggregation by virtual shill networking, then we 
> can expect business plans whereby well suited shysters march 
> into MIT, and HP, and so on, offering to outsource this 
> monetization.  "you get half the money but none of the 
> distraction, all you have to do is renumber or use NAT or 
> IPv6, we'll do the rest."  nothing in recorded human history 
> argues against this occurring.
> --
> Paul Vixie
> 
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