Beregond's Bar

Every couple of years there is another story about The Impending Death of the Internet, yet somehow the Internet is still here. The latest concern is an update of an issue I wrote about last year, running out of IPv4 address space. (I’ll put that in English in a minute.) The updated version of the story is that there is less than a year left till we run out of addresses.

Someone tweeted that this felt a bit like the Y2k scare. (Computers used to store dates as two digits, because memory was expensive. But once we reached the year 2000 a lot of the math operations for keeping track of dates were going to break. This was generally considered to be a Bad Thing.) The underlying implication was that Y2k was a fake scare. While I’ll confess that some of the stories of horrors that might happen got stretched a bit, Y2k was very real. A lot of people worked very hard to make sure that the problems didn’t happen, and a lot of people (including me) were doing double shifts when the year rolled over in case we had missed something. Why were Y2k issues fixed so completely that people thought it was a hoax? Fear of lawyers.

The dangers of the Y2k issue were well understood, and the damage was predictable and preventable. I was Y2k champion for my group where I worked at the time and our instructions were clear. Take NO chances. Anything that we couldn’t PROVE was going to work had to be fixed or replaced, and it had to be complete by July 1, 1999. The risks of high dollar lawsuits wiping out the company were clear. So Y2k got fixed so completely that most people thought the threat was a hoax.

To return to IP addresses, most people are not good at remembering long strings of apparently meaningless numbers. Most computers are not good at handling words. Yes, you’re reading these words on a computer. But the computer is only reproducing the words, not handling them. Want proof? Go to Google Translate, translate this page into some other language, and translate it back. The results won’t look pretty. (One autoblogging tool that I shan’t link to actually uses this to hide the fact that you scraped your content from somebody else’s site. It will translate what you stole to German, then back to English.)

Anyway, since computers speak numbers and people speak words there is a computer that translates the word addresses to number addresses. This is called a DNS  (Domain Name System) Server. (It doesn’t understand words either, but it can look them up in a table.) Thus you type in or click on beregondsbar.com and the DNS Server computer performs a lookup and tells your browser that it REALLY wants to talk to  97.74.215.234 (or whatever address I’m at by the time you read this.) The 97.74.215.234 is called an IP address.  IP stands for “Internet Protocol. The version that almost everyone in the world is using as I write this is version 4, usually written by techs as IPv4 because we HATE extra keystrokes. Besides, if you understood everything we said it would take half the fun out of being a geek.

IPv4 theoretically has 4,294,967,296 possible addresses. There are some addresses reserved for special purposes and private networks, but that still leaves a bunch. Still, we should have run out of IP addresses a long time ago. IPv4 was invented before the PC, when a computer was a big thing that lived in a clean computer room at a corporation or university and was attended by men who wore white lab coats. 4 billion addresses were enough to last forever, just like storing the year as two digits was plenty till we got to Y2k.

Even after the PC came along since there are probably fewer than 4 billion people with computers right now it wouldn’t seem to be a problem, would it? But wait a minute… My TiVo has an IP address. My SlingBox has an IP address. Each of my computers has an IP address. My smart phone has an IP address. My wireless router has an IP address, and my cable modem has an IP address. And all of that leaves out the IP address of my blog. So little old me is using a bunch of addresses all by myself. Worse, the special computers that get Internet traffic where it is supposed to go, called routers, use an IP address to manage them plus an IP address for each hardware connection to them.

The spread of individual computers and terminals that used Internet Protocol instead of earlier protocols (and later protocols that never were as widely adopted) caused the first crisis when the Death of the Internet was coming Real Soon Now. Without getting into details, the original system for defining how the address was split up so that data arrived at the correct network and not the network of the competing company next door was inefficient and led to a lot of wasted addresses. So a new way to split up the IP addresses was created. That worked fine for awhile, then we started running out again. The Internet Was Going To Die. So The Powers That Be declared that the people who had gotten lots of addresses in the early days had to give back big chunks of addresses that they weren’t using.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that another thing was created called NAT, which stands for Network Address Translation. This one actually has a bearing on the current problem, so pay attention. I don’t really use up 10 IP addresses for my home. The cable company gives ONE IP address to my cable router. The cable router then connects to my wireless router. The wireless router inside my house actually creates a private network, and gives out an IP address that the rest of the Internet can’t see. It then performs some technical magic to translate from those private addresses to the one IP address the cable company gave me. I can have as many devices as I want and still only use up one real IP address. So between more efficient use of the addresses and address translation we bought several years.

However, we really are running out of IPv4 addresses. The fix for this is Internet Protocol Version Six, henceforth IPv6. IPv6 has a LARGE number of addresses. Large like the number 340 followed by thirty-six zeros worth of addresses. That should last us while we’re limited to a single planet (he said, blithely ignoring history.)

The pull quote in the article that started all of this says

Moving from IPv4 to IPv6 is a little like changing the roads and tires while continuing to drive along in your car.

Fortunately almost everybody can remain asleep in the back seat. And it’s a good thing too, because there is a lot of consumer gear that isn’t compatible with IPv6. Most people don’t know what it is, or why they should look for it when buying new electronics that connect to the net. But your equipment doesn’t have to speak IPv6 yet (though Windows Vista and Windows 7 plus Macintosh operating systems do speak IPv6 if you tell them to.) At some future time when everything is IPv6 compatible you’ll need to borrow or hire a geek to set things up again, but you probably had to do that anyway once you had more than one device in your house connected to the Internet.

Your Internet Service Provider will upgrade to IPv6. They may have to send you a new cable modem or similar device, or they may fix it by sending new software to the device that already connects you to their network. But the ISP will change their network to do IPv6, while inside your house you keep using IPv4. They won’t do it because it made your TiVo not update correctly. They’ll do it because it causes security features to fail. Once that is documented that they are putting your banking, financial, and whatever other communications you do on a computer at risk and it gets around the legal community the Internet Service Providers will switch to IPv6 for the same reason that everybody fixed the Y2k bugs- They’re afraid of getting sued.

So the Internet is NOT going to die. We’re going to be OK. And the reason is something we usually curse, the litigious nature of our society.

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