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If IPv4 were land

140 points • by rokostik • today at 12:19 PM • 132 comments • view on HN

Comments

shubhamjain • today at 1:15 PM

India: 47M

China: 358M

Both countries have roughly the same population. The IPv4 problem has been swept under the rug with CGNAT and a normal person doesn't even notice it. But it sucks. Forget having a dedicated IP, even on a broadband connection, you don't get a public IP that's truly yours. According to IPInfo[1], there are around 1,000 users sharing my IP. I get flagged for malicious activity, and online gaming is impossible without a Tailscale relay.

Of course, much of this comes down to the bad luck (+ policies) of developing late, when most IPv4 blocks had already been allocated. But it's pretty unfair how US DoD, Apple, Ford, and others [1] are sitting on enormous IPv4 blocks they'll probably never fully use, and may never sell. Meanwhile I am sharing a single public IP with a thousand strangers.

[1]: https://ipinfo.io/223.233.77.184

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

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andix • today at 1:07 PM

IPv6 got some real traction in the last decade. From around 10% adoption up to 50%. It's not dead, like many are claiming. It works fine, just keep implementing it.

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xacky • today at 12:41 PM

The fact that we have yet to fully deprecate IPv4 should be considered a great failure in the tech industry's competence.

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throw0101c • today at 1:11 PM

Ran across a comment a while ago on some "IPv6 math":

    On the surface of the Earth [land+water], there are 8.4 IPv4 addresses per km². Not counting the oceans, that would be 28 IPv4 addresses per km² land.

    IPv6 gives 10¹⁷ addresses per mm² (yes, square millimetre).

    In terms of volume, 10⁸ IPv6 addresses per mm³ throughout the Earth.
* Via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326806#unv_28331245

A second way of thinking about it:

* Stars in the Milky Way: 400 Billion

* Galaxies in the universe: 2 Trillion

* So (4x10¹¹)x(2x10¹²) = 8x10²³ stars in the universe.

* Size of IPv6 address space: 3.4x10³⁸

* Find the ratio between addresses and stars: 3.4x10³⁸ / 8x10²³

IPv6 offers about 430 trillion times more addresses than estimated stars in the universe. From Tom Coffee's presentation "An Enterprise IPv6 Address Planning Case-Study":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tnh4upTOC4

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schmichael • today at 3:07 PM

Comparing land area to IP address assignments is one of the sillier visualizations I've ever seen. I can't imagine what this is intending to convey. Should Siberia have more IP addresses than all of Europe?

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happyPersonR • today at 3:46 PM

I’m hoping with RE everything, for at least consumer IOT products we’ll get to a point where we can just get rid of a lot of the need for ipv4 for home.

What’s left are just apps and devices that people don’t wanna change out but are probably pwnd and I don’t think are gonna get updates because the teams that wrote the software moved on and the companies don’t wanna keep spending on sustaining.

cbondurant • today at 12:46 PM

I'd be interested to see how this compares to the same scaling procedure, but by population. Essentially seeing what the IPv4-per-capita is.

MisterMunchkin • today at 12:46 PM

I still think we should just extend the length of IPv4. In my proposed system, existing addresses would become a subnet of the new set.

Eg 192.168.0.1 becomes 0.0.0.0.192.168.0.1

And then we dish out all the new address space. You would get the network providers to handle address conversion until software and hardware has been updated. Because all the existing addresses are reserved in the new set, it doesn’t affect them.

Keeps all the nice parts of IPv4, doesn’t require everyone to switch to an entirely new system, backwards compatible with existing hardware/software. Problem solved.

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timvdalen • today at 12:30 PM

Good to see the Dutch were able to seize a lot of blocks from the sea!

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Guillaume86 • today at 12:46 PM

Population would make more sense.

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mtoner23 • today at 3:51 PM

This should be scaled by population. would make the India/china numbers more drastic.

huijzer • today at 1:58 PM

Unsurprisingly, the map is very similar to the World Population Density Map: https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#3/20.00/10.00

sebastianmestre • today at 2:25 PM

I initially read the "As" in the "As land" label as "land of plural letter A". Which I understood as the land of DNS A records, which seemed like a whimsical yet fitting name.

tgv • today at 12:53 PM

The elephant in the room: I didn't check the other mammoths, but e.g. Amazon has 4.4% of all ipv4 addresses.

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oakchris1955 • today at 12:39 PM

Either I've lost it, or there are other countries there that are bigger losers than the DRC. North Korea says it is 1069.6 times smaller, Greenland says it is 1507.8 times smaller, etc.

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fluxsolstice • today at 12:53 PM

What an interesting critter the UK is in terms of its shape

rayiner • today at 1:19 PM

Meanwhile I’m here carving out a couple of /64s from the /48 block of IPv6 addresses Comcast gave me.

nzeid • today at 1:06 PM

FWIW I get the most hilarious spam and strangest scanners from Netherlands.

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darkwater • today at 1:01 PM

As an Italian, I'm astonished by Italy.

yoggies_bro • today at 12:56 PM

I like how Hawaii migrates to California and Egpyt yeets itself into the Indian ocean. Quality animation that instills confidence in accuracy!

inglor_cz • today at 1:09 PM

Now this is an interesting map.

First impression: Poland stronk. Even Czechia strong. Charles IV.'s realm restored. Russia in shambles, not a very efficient conqueror of the address space. And the glory of Rome restored, with pitiful Constantinople looking at their backs from afar.

Second impression: Morocco, Kenya, Egypt and South Africa as the African heavy-weights. Corresponds to what I know.

Third impression: the real bosses are Taiwan and South Korea - just wow.

TZubiri • today at 1:05 PM

Hi, I’m helping a hospital in Buenos Aires that has lost their IPv4 due to their ISP moving to CGNAT, putting their on prem imaging servers offline for 7 days. (it’s ok for us though, we have a backup failover isp)

Might have to do something horrible like:

- setup an ipv4 tunnel, which will require hacking a VPN to allow TCP listening, and routing connections to some external proxy with a dedicated static ipv4 address

- or do some modem router level nat port forwarding, and use a ddns to avoid ip changes breaking stuff. but that won’t work probably since public ip is shared

will investigate the isp to see if they are truly short in ipv4 or if they are just moving clients off them in order to sell them to higher bidders and plans, which is likely since I’ve been upsold into optic fiber, static ip surcharge, sd-wan, dedicated connection so far

if you have any advice or RIR contacts (or an ipv4 block to donate, invest or sell), I’d be thankful, my email is in my profile

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hollowonepl • today at 2:22 PM

IP6 babe!

noelperez • today at 1:04 PM

Interesting.

georgestones • today at 1:01 PM

[dead]

bugake • today at 1:02 PM

Reddit shadowbanned me multiple times for either absurd or political reasons, but my ISP used to assign dynamic IPv4 addresses, so I could easily create a new account. Then it switched to IPv6 with a static address, and now I can't create new Reddit accounts anymore.

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