7 ms·

This counter is completely inaccurate. I used to work for a company that was doing email marketing (I quit because I disagreed with their practices). My employe

by vanzard 11y ago

This counter is completely inaccurate. I used to work for a company that was doing email marketing (I quit because I disagreed with their practices). My employer was buying about one /48 per week. What does this mean? We alone exhausted 2^80 ip addresses per week, or 2e18 addresses per second (that's 2 quintillion!). So this counter showing 2 addresses exhausted per second is wrong by an order of 1 quintillion. In fact, with the proper paperwork you can still relatively easily buy an entire /40 or maybe even /32. With these practices, IPv6 WILL run out of addresses within the next 100 years. Well, to be pedantic, it will run out of allocatable subnets, but the vast majority of their addresses will remain unused.

gruez 11y ago
>My employer was buying about one /48 per week Why?
- extesy 11y ago
  My guess is that their subnets would be periodically marked as spammers in various black lists, so they would need new subnets to continue "email marketing".
- tw04 11y ago
  Because "email marketing" means "spammers". They were buying new blocks of IP addresses to try to evade blacklists. They are the scum of the internet, dumping their pollution far and wide because nobody is stopping them. *to be clear, not all email marketers are spammers. But you can be damn sure anyone buying that many IP blocks is. There's literally no legitimate reason for them to need that many IP addresses.
- sbov 11y ago
  1/week seems like a lot. At the same time, where I work, at least with ipv4, we like to segment product by ip block. This way if one gets a bad reputation it can't adversely affect the others. This hasn't been an issue in practice, but its just an extra layer of protection we like to have. I'm not sure if there's the same concern with ipv6 or not.
worklogin 11y ago
While others are asking "Why is CompanyA buying a /48 a week?", my question is "Why isn't ISP-A asking CompanyA why they need a /48 a week?" IPv6 operates in several of these hierarchical subnets. A /64 is the smallest, and is usually for customers and edges. A /48 or /52 is reasonable for a datacenter, as it provides up to 2^12 subnets. But even then, doing a /48 per DC, there is no reason for not-Huge-Cloud-Provider to be gathering that much IP.
- mortenjorck 11y ago
  This may actually be a situation the market can take care of: If you're an ISP that is hooking up spammers with a new /48 each week, that starts to reflect poorly on your /40.
caf 11y ago
The same site has an alternate counter based on /48 allocation rates: https://samsclass.info/ipv6/exhaustion-p.htm https://samsclass.info/ipv6/exhaustion-p.htm
byuu 11y ago
I've wondered about that. My ISP gives me a /64. On the one hand, it seems cheap to give me one-four-billionth of the relative amount of space as the one IPv4 address they give me. On the other hand, I can't possibly imagine which consumer home network needs four billion times more IP addresses than all of IPv4 combined. (EUI-64 notwithstanding.) It would seem like /112 would be way more than enough for home use (131,072 unique IPs), even for complex setups with lots of subnetting, and /96 for small business use. I understand that giving out /64s will still take 4 billion times longer to exhaust all IPs than IPv4, but ... it still feels like they're being overly generous. 64-bit IPs would have more than enough to outlast our sun going supernova if we were smarter about allocating them.
- clinta 11y ago
  This is part of the design of IPv6. There are (amost) never networks other than /64. This allows the possibility of generating addresses based on a mac address, and frequently changing addresses for privacy reasons. Most devices will not work on a network with a mask longer than 64. The only common exception is point to point links between routers, which may be a /127. Removing variable length subnet masks from end networks makes routing and configuration a lot simpler.
  - asdfaoeu 11y ago
    You say that but in a few years we'll probably be fighting neighbour discovery DoS attacks. /64 prefixes seem to be the worst thought out idea of IPv6.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      IIRC (and I may not RC), ND traffic is supposed to be constrained to a local link. If this is true, then it would be totally safe to drop ND traffic that didn't originate on your network, and drop ND traffic that occurs on networks that you manage that have manually configured addresses. So, how would you DoS anything other than your upstream router [0], or the nodes on your own LAN? [0] Even this DoS seems trivially preventable by dropping ND requests that happen too frequently. If you assume that there is one router on each end of a link, then the rate of ND messages would have to be very low in the ordinary course of operation, no?
simoncion 11y ago
Were they holding on to a /48 per week? If they were, I'd have to imagine that at some point a single company that's not in the ISP or hosting business would be effectively holding on to a /32 and some questions would be raised.

by vanzard 11y ago

gruez 11y ago

>My employer was buying about one /48 per week Why?

extesy 11y ago
My guess is that their subnets would be periodically marked as spammers in various black lists, so they would need new subnets to continue "email marketing".
tw04 11y ago
Because "email marketing" means "spammers". They were buying new blocks of IP addresses to try to evade blacklists. They are the scum of the internet, dumping their pollution far and wide because nobody is stopping them. *to be clear, not all email marketers are spammers. But you can be damn sure anyone buying that many IP blocks is. There's literally no legitimate reason for them to need that many IP addresses.
sbov 11y ago
1/week seems like a lot. At the same time, where I work, at least with ipv4, we like to segment product by ip block. This way if one gets a bad reputation it can't adversely affect the others. This hasn't been an issue in practice, but its just an extra layer of protection we like to have. I'm not sure if there's the same concern with ipv6 or not.

worklogin 11y ago

While others are asking "Why is CompanyA buying a /48 a week?", my question is "Why isn't ISP-A asking CompanyA why they need a /48 a week?" IPv6 operates in several of these hierarchical subnets. A /64 is the smallest, and is usually for customers and edges. A /48 or /52 is reasonable for a datacenter, as it provides up to 2^12 subnets. But even then, doing a /48 per DC, there is no reason for not-Huge-Cloud-Provider to be gathering that much IP.

mortenjorck 11y ago
This may actually be a situation the market can take care of: If you're an ISP that is hooking up spammers with a new /48 each week, that starts to reflect poorly on your /40.

caf 11y ago

The same site has an alternate counter based on /48 allocation rates: https://samsclass.info/ipv6/exhaustion-p.htm https://samsclass.info/ipv6/exhaustion-p.htm

byuu 11y ago

I've wondered about that. My ISP gives me a /64. On the one hand, it seems cheap to give me one-four-billionth of the relative amount of space as the one IPv4 address they give me. On the other hand, I can't possibly imagine which consumer home network needs four billion times more IP addresses than all of IPv4 combined. (EUI-64 notwithstanding.) It would seem like /112 would be way more than enough for home use (131,072 unique IPs), even for complex setups with lots of subnetting, and /96 for small business use. I understand that giving out /64s will still take 4 billion times longer to exhaust all IPs than IPv4, but ... it still feels like they're being overly generous. 64-bit IPs would have more than enough to outlast our sun going supernova if we were smarter about allocating them.

clinta 11y ago
This is part of the design of IPv6. There are (amost) never networks other than /64. This allows the possibility of generating addresses based on a mac address, and frequently changing addresses for privacy reasons. Most devices will not work on a network with a mask longer than 64. The only common exception is point to point links between routers, which may be a /127. Removing variable length subnet masks from end networks makes routing and configuration a lot simpler.
- asdfaoeu 11y ago
  You say that but in a few years we'll probably be fighting neighbour discovery DoS attacks. /64 prefixes seem to be the worst thought out idea of IPv6.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    IIRC (and I may not RC), ND traffic is supposed to be constrained to a local link. If this is true, then it would be totally safe to drop ND traffic that didn't originate on your network, and drop ND traffic that occurs on networks that you manage that have manually configured addresses. So, how would you DoS anything other than your upstream router [0], or the nodes on your own LAN? [0] Even this DoS seems trivially preventable by dropping ND requests that happen too frequently. If you assume that there is one router on each end of a link, then the rate of ND messages would have to be very low in the ordinary course of operation, no?

simoncion 11y ago

Were they holding on to a /48 per week? If they were, I'd have to imagine that at some point a single company that's not in the ISP or hosting business would be effectively holding on to a /32 and some questions would be raised.