Katrina Network Damage Report

Mon Sep 12 02:35:51 UTC 2005

On 12/09/05, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu <Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu> wrote:
> A /48 is 80 bits of address.  1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 addresses.
> Even at a million packets/second (which even Joe Sixpack will quite likely
> notice until such time as the Linksys router you get at Walmart does 1M pps),
> that's still 38,334,786,263 years of scanning.  Of course, that's about
> 20 billion years after the Sun runs out of hydrogen and goes red giant and
> incinerates the planet....
> 
> Now how big a pile of toasters were you planning to use?

I'm not planning to use any.  I was just assuming that people who
promote v6 as the best thing since sliced bread, and needed because v4
space is really really scarce now, are going to actually find enough
toasters, printers, phones, computers or whatever to fill all those
/48s that are getting allocated.

And of course, as I said, small end sites are getting allotted /48s
through tunnelbrokers and such

So the number of hosts in there is going to be highly limited and all
that /48 worth of IPs are going to wind up bound to the same host, or
the same LAN .. with IPs that are much closer to each other.

Once you find a host on a /48 jump to the next one I guess.  Or make
some guess on what IP addressing scheme is being followed and which
subnets of that /48 are being used [assuming that an end site like a
cellphone carrier decides to give v6 IPs to all its phone users] ...
scan from within the network.

Unless you say that v6 space is ever going to be as densely populated
as v4 where each IP is often a different host, possibly several miles
apart rather than in the next rack.

-- 
Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists at gmail.com)