News Desk: The Internet Runs Out of Addresses?

[blueonblack]

A new story entry has been added:

[drupal=608]News Desk: The Internet Runs Out of Addresses?[/drupal]

By: Shane McAnally

It looks like we'll all have to start looking for a new place to park our new domains. On Thursday Feb. 3rd the internet officially ran out of addresses. Sort of...more.

[Beta-brain]

So have the Chinese bought them all yet?

[x88x]

So have the Chinese bought them all yet?

Actually not that far off. The biggest consumer of IP addresses over the last few years has been APNIC, the registry organization that services the Asia/Pacific region. Here's a bit more in-depth article on it:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...y-runs-dry.ars

Of course, just because the last of the IPv4 addresses have been handed out to the registries doesn't mean that they're all gone yet. The registries then have to hand them out to the ISPs/etc, which means we should run out till...oh, idk...March?

In all seriousness though, this could actually get pretty serious if we don't get the IPv6 conversion moving faster. Fortunately, by this point, most end users won't have to do anything because every mainstream OS has supported IPv6 for quite a while (Linux and BSD, and therefore OSX, have supported it for years, and Windows started supporting it in XP SP2, iirc). It's the infrastructure that is the problem. Fortunately, a lot of ISPs are reserving IPv4 addresses for IPv6-to-4 bridges to ease the transition.

Once we actually complete the transition, however, we'll be set for a while.
For context:
IPv4 has an address space of 2^32, or 4,294,967,296 (~4.29E9) addresses. Actual usable addresses are a fair bit less than that between reserved addresses, gateways, etc (for more information, see here).
IPv6 has an address space of 2^128! Sorry Shane, but your numbers are off. 340 undecillion (undecillion == 10E11) is 'only' 34,000,000,000,000, or 3.4E13.
[EDIT]nvm, sorry, I looked up undecillion in the wrong place.. undecillion is actually 10E36, so 340 undecillion would be correct[/EDIT]
The number of possible addresses in the IPv6 space is ~3.4E38 (~340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,770,000, 000 sorry for the 0's on the end..the Windows calculator only showed my the first 32 digits ).

Of course, for network professionals, this produces a problem..instead of having addresses represented as strings of four 3-digit decimal numbers (ie, 012.232.112.022), they'll instead be strings of eight 4-character hexidecimal numbers (ie, 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334). ..that'll make it a bit more difficult to remember them off the top of our heads...

[slaveofconvention]

Of course, for network professionals, this produces a problem..instead of having addresses represented as strings of four 3-digit decimal numbers (ie, 012.232.112.022), they'll instead be strings of eight 4-character hexidecimal numbers (ie, 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334). ..that'll make it a bit more difficult to remember them off the top of our heads...

Surely you're up for a challenge heh

[Beta-brain]

Very interesting, who would have thought such massive numbers of IP's would ever be needed, then again there was a time when it was supposedly thought that there was only a world market for maybe five computers.

I've been reading here..
Just hope your network has IP's with lots of zero's because leading zero's are suppressed because of their long bit lengths, IPv6 addresses tend to contain a lot of zeros. When a section of an address starts with one or more zeros, those zeros are nothing more than placeholders. So any leading zeros can be suppressed. This address,
FE80:CD00:0000:0CDE:1257:0000:211E:729C

If this were a real address, any leading zero within a section could be suppressed. The result would look like this:

FE80:CD00:0:CDE:1257:0:211E:729C

suppressing leading zeros goes a long way toward shortening the address and inline zeros can sometimes be suppressed as well
Real IPv6 addresses tend to contain long sections of nothing but zeros, which can also be suppressed. For example, consider the address, FE80:CD00:0000:0000:0000:0000:211E:729C

In this address, there are four sequential sections separated by zeros. Rather than simply suppressing the leading zeros, you can get rid of all of the sequential zeros and replace them with two colons. The two colons tell the operating system that everything in between them is a zero. The address shown above then becomes:

FE80:CD00::211E:729C

You can suppress a section only if it contains nothing but zeros. For example, the second part of the address shown above still contains some trailing zeros. Those zeros were retained because there are non-zero characters in the section, you can use the double colon notation only once in any given address.

At least the loopback address should be easy to remember, In IPv4, a designated address known as a loopback address points to the local machine. The loopback address for any IPv4-enabled device is 127.0.0.1.

Like IPv4, there is also a designated loopback address for IPv6:

0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001

Once all of the zeros have been suppressed, however, the IPv6 loopback address doesn’t even look like a valid address. The loopback address is usually expressed as ::1.

As you said Windows has supported IPv6 for a while but seemingly does not fully support it yet, in Windows it is possible to include an IP address within a Universal Naming Convention (\\127.0.0.1\C$, for example). However, you can’t do this with IPv6 addresses because when Windows sees a colon, it assumes you’re referencing a drive letter.
To work around this issue, Microsoft has established a special domain for IPv6 address translation. If you want to include an IPv6 address within a Universal Naming Convention, you must replace the colons with dashes and append .ipv6.literal.net to the end of the address — for example, FE80-AB00–200D-617B.ipv6.literal.net.

Lastly, not all routers and switches support IPv6 so that might be expensive if a firmware upgrade does not fix the problem that's assuming the manufacturers bother to issue an update as the business for new IPv6 routers could be huge!

OK, that's given me more than enough to try and get my head around, as often seems the case because technology advances/moves at such a pace many of us (or is just me?) are all ways playing catch up.

[Oneslowz28]

So if you needed to tracecert or path ping an IPv6 address would the command still be the same? IE: tracert FE80:CD00:0:CDE:1257:0:211E:729C

[x88x]

FE80:CD00::211E:729C

You can suppress a section only if it contains nothing but zeros. For example, the second part of the address shown above still contains some trailing zeros. Those zeros were retained because there are non-zero characters in the section, you can use the double colon notation only once in any given address.

Those zero's also cannot be removed because they're what in mathematics are called 'significant digits'. The issue is not that there are non-zero digits in the section, it is that those non-zero digits come before the 0's rather than after. ie, FE80:CD00::211E:729C != FE80:CD::211E:729C ==FE80:00CD::211E:729C

So if you needed to tracecert or path ping an IPv6 address would the command still be the same? IE: tracert FE80:CD00:0:CDE:1257:0:211E:729C

It depends on your OS. I know Linux, for example, has separate utilities for IPv4 and IPv6. In this case, traceroute and traceroute6.

[Beta-brain]

Those zero's also cannot be removed because they're what in mathematics are called 'significant digits'. The issue is not that there are non-zero digits in the section, it is that those non-zero digits come before the 0's rather than after. ie, FE80:CD00::211E:729C != FE80:CD::211E:729C ==FE80:00CD::211E:729C

Hmm, So much for thinking I had learnt something from www.techrepublic.com/blog, it says on the site that the article has been amended because of previous errors but I guess it's still incorrect about some issues, who would have thought that you couldn't believe something that you had read on-line.

[altec]

And here I felt like a genius for setting up a second router in my house...



I'm gonna go cry now...

[mDust]

And here I felt like a genius for setting up a second router in my house...



I'm gonna go cry now...

Muahahahahahahaaaa!

Mission complete guys. Pack it up!