

On the imminent phone number shortage - zdw
http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201306#09

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rachelbythebay
I love the PBX analogy for alternative ideas. I mean, what if we were actually
working towards a scheme which essentially put one 32 bit address inside
another, and you explicitly specified gateways? It might work really well for
real-world use cases.

Say I'm a small business and I sign up with the local cable modem provider and
get a static IP address from them: A.A.A.A. Then I have my machines configured
inside my network as 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2, 10.0.0.3, and so on. Just like now,
right? Well, now let's say I want those machines individually addressable from
the outside world. We'd need some way to encode that in the headers, and by
extension, into things like DNS.

    
    
        serv1.example.com.     IN A+    A.A.A.A:10.0.0.1
        serv2.example.com.     IN A+    A.A.A.A:10.0.0.2
    

So things change and now I want a second ISP. They also give me a second
static IP address: B.B.B.B. I add this as a second gateway and use it to
extend the possible ways to reach my machines.

    
    
        serv1.example.com.     IN A+    A.A.A.A:10.0.0.1
                               IN A+    B.B.B.B:10.0.0.1
        serv2.example.com.     IN A+    A.A.A.A:10.0.0.2
                               IN A+    B.B.B.B:10.0.0.2
    

Yep, my same systems are now accessible either way. I just "multi-homed" my
network without getting an ASN, setting up BGP and peering, buying a huge
router, or any of that. It didn't require any coordination between the ISPs,
and I didn't need to get "portable" IP space.

Now, obviously, the clients would need to know how to speak this. But hey, the
backbone doesn't have to change at all. To the rest of the Internet, it looks
like (slightly fatter) packets flying around to A.A.A.A and B.B.B.B. They
might have some extra IP options on board (to encode the internal address),
but who cares?

I'd think this would start showing up in systems which are mass-produced and
which nail up a _bunch_ of connections to servers - game consoles, cell
phones, that sort of thing. The fact that only the endpoints need to know
about it makes it even more obvious. And hey, the servers don't even need to
know about this scheme if the gateway manages that for them.

(Sound familiar? It's because I wrote about it in April as a "half-baked
idea":
[http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/04/22/ipspace/](http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/04/22/ipspace/))

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p1mrx
What you're describing is essentially 6to4, minus the anycast gateways.

The problem with using 6to4 as the IPv4 upgrade path is that it solves the
easy problem (pushing big addresses through the core of the network), but not
the hard problem (updating all the edge devices, and every piece of software
that stores or manipulates an IP address.)

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jacob019
Thinly veiled opinion piece on ipv6. Like it or not, ipv6 is happening.

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lmm
This is just dumb. It's on the same level as "why not make the whole plane out
of black-box stuff".

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mproud
The thing is, there are no good alternatives to IP addresses with the
Internet, whereas with phone numbers, you can easily do without. Between SMS,
e-mail, Facebook and Twitter, plus Skype/FaceTime, who really _needs_ a phone
number these days?

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goodcanadian
_You might not realize it, but there 's an imminent phone number shortage._

Citation needed.

~~~
kiallmacinnes
He's actually talking about IPv6 ;)

~~~
gggggggg
What's the PBX fix equal for the ipv4 issue?

~~~
kiallmacinnes
Well.. The fix would be entirely different, so I'm not sure.

Everyday people type phone numbers.. Sysadmins type IP's. His argument that
"people never type phone numbers anymore" is entirely without any backing in
truth IMHO, which makes the whole article moot.

