
Next Generation MITnet - zx2c4
https://gist.github.com/simonster/e22e50cd52b7dffcf5a4db2b8ea4cce0
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6d6b73
So they knew that IPv4 address space is nearing exhaustion, and they that they
are using only 2 mln out of 16 mln addresses yet they decided to wait until
now? And instead of returning the addresses (like Stanford did) they want to
sell them?

~~~
notacoward
Sort of reflects on MIT's business school (Sloan) vs. Stanford's, I'd say.

~~~
Tarrosion
Why business schools rather than institutes as a whole, bureaucratic
structure, beliefs of particular powerful people on campus, etc.? I'm not sure
what this comparison has to do with Sloan and GSB.

~~~
notacoward
MIT found a way to monetize something that Stanford had given away for free.
Not saying it's right, but it's a business decision. Also, it's a joke. People
seem to be taking it rather seriously, which says more about their levels of
(in)security than anything.

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pmarreck
This has been said many times in many places before, but the decision _not to_
design IPv6 such that it is backwards-compatible with IPv4 is one of the worst
technical decisions ever made, at least when it comes to organically adopting
a new standard.

The second worst decision would be not auctioning off their 16 million IPv4
addresses, right now, probably at peak value of around $250 million.

~~~
_wmd
There are a whole host of standards to support interoperability between
v4-only->v6, v4/v6->v4, v6-only->v4 addressing. I know it doesn't answer your
complaint, but really there is little "backwards compatible" to be done with
32 bits of address + 16 bits of port that doesn't look like another version of
NAT, and we all know how much the tech community loves to hate on NAT.

The transition hasn't really been that bad, it's picking up pace precisely
because there is increasingly valuable commercial logic in doing so (v4
addresses cost a fortune, as you noted!)

I've been surprised on a number of occasions recently to notice I've been
communicating by v6 from public wifi, other peoples' homes, etc. Progress is
slow but it is also sure.

In the UK, once BT flick the switch on their home offerings, there will be
very few significant sources of v4 traffic left in the UK still awaiting
transition

~~~
geofft
> _we all know how much the tech community loves to hate on NAT_

This, I think, is the unpopular but true reason the IPv6 transition has been
slow. It ties together two changes, "get rid of IPv4" and "get rid of NAT",
and making a business case for doing both of those simultaneously is very
hard. Lots of people understand NAT. Lots of vendors understand NAT. Lots of
managers understand NAT. ("NAT", of course, means "PAT with implicit
firewall," but "NAT" is the term people use.) You _can_ get the same security
and privacy benefits and an equally good or even better design without NAT,
but that's not what people are used to.

If IPv6 had been a straightforward extension of IPv4 to 128 bits instead of a
bunch of cool and reasonable and backwards-incompatible ideas, the transition
would probably be done already. The tradeoff, of course, is we'd still be on
the same quality of architecture we have on IPv4.

~~~
welterde
How exactly would this straightforward extension of IPv4 to 128 bits look
like? How would it differ from how IPv6 today looks like?

Frankly I can't see any way (that has at least some degree of sanity), to make
a backwards-compatible replacement for IPv4 with significantly more address
space than IPv4.

~~~
geofft
No implication that NAT is bad. 6to4 space (and RFC 4193 space, if needed)
would be explicitly okay for use with NAT, like RFC 1918 space. Allow NAT from
IPv6 on the inside to IPv4 on the outside, as well as IPv6-to-IPv6 NAT.

Extend ARP to support IPv6 addresses instead of designing NDP. Use DHCPv6 like
DHCPv4. Don't have SLAAC; encourage the use of existing techniques (static
addressing or DHCP). Don't have RAs.

Don't have privacy addresses, because they're not needed, because NAT is
expected. Don't have Teredo, because again, you're expected to get IPv6
addressing from some NAT technology.

Note that I'm not super advocating for extending the IPv4 _space_ to IPv6,
except via 6to4 if you want to. IPv6 continues to be its own space. But the
advantage here is that you don't have compatibility problems from clients that
support RDNSS and not DHCPv6 (looking at you, Android) or vice versa, because
the way you do things in IPv6 is just like the way you do them in IPv4 and you
can use the existing software stack with just a different typedef. You don't
have problems with IPv6's infatuation with multicast and aging network
architectures that only begrudgingly support it and fall back to broadcast
quickly (cf. [https://blog.bimajority.org/2014/09/05/the-network-
nightmare...](https://blog.bimajority.org/2014/09/05/the-network-nightmare-
that-ate-my-week/) ); you're only using network features that IPv4 already
requires your hardware to support. And so forth.

No implicit 64/64-bit split in addresses, where if you want to build an
equivalent architecture to IPv4 NAT, you must have at least a /64 (there are
plenty of service providers that give you a /128, and your only option becomes
NAT66). With IPv4, if you get so much as a /31, you can usefully put two
computers behind it. With IPv6, there's no way to implement, say, SLAAC with a
/127; you have to use static addressing or DHCPv6. And you lose privacy
addresses, which means you have less effective privacy than IPv4 NAT.

That's the sort of thing I mean by "backwards compatible."

Once we're on IPv6, by all means, convince everyone that you have better ways
of doing everything. But if you tie the IPv6 transition to "NAT is bad and if
you need it you suck", "multicast is great and if you don't support it you
suck", etc., the only thing you'll succeed in doing is delaying the IPv6
transition.

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mherdeg
Assuming Amazon paid them money for the IP addresses (which are now allocated
for EC2 use) it's kind of a shame.

A more forward-thinking deal would have bartered for, say, a lifetime
allocation of Amazon Web Services credit.

For the past 5-10 years timeshare computing has grown in popularity again,
this time on third-parties' computers. Given this reality and the changes it
implies for MITnet -- lots of students and staff spin up "a server" to do
experiments that they don't want to host on local physical machines -- it
would have been smart for MIT to negotiate some perpetual timeshare credit
with Amazon rather than just straight-up cash.

Then (my theory continues) MIT could have allotted some of its information-
processing credit for research use and some for student use. They could have
given each student a basic quota with the vendor, and reserved some additional
information-processing for student projects.

And instead of hiring some full-time staffer to coordinate the distribution of
timeshare credit to worthy projects ("I need 100 hours of EC2 c4.large for my
thesis") they could have done something really clever and asked students
themselves to divvy up the credit via an advisory organization of technically
minded folks.

Imagine that -- MIT could have helped support some kind of student information
processing board …

~~~
ohitsdom
> A more forward-thinking deal would have bartered for, say, a lifetime
> allocation of Amazon Web Services credit.

You'd prefer an unlimited gift card over cash? Amazon is a top provider in
cloud services now, but you'd be betting a lot on them in the future and
essentially locked into their platform (if you wanted to get fair value for
the IP addresses). Cash is a much safer deal, and as noted they will invest it
anyway.

------
simonster
Previous discussion (where I originally posted this gist):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150854)

------
mabbo
> David Clark, a Senior Research Scientist at our Computer Science and
> Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) quickly saw the importance of these
> addresses and requested an early allocation of them, both to support
> research and eventually to support all of computing at MIT. We hold a block
> of 16 million IPv4 addresses.

Smart man.

Anyone got a guess as to how much money this sale might raise?

~~~
matheweis
This was (indirectly) on HN yesterday...
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150854)

I'm seeing numbers between $10-$20 per IP, but this is also probably a bulk
sale so there might be a discount... Say +/\- $250 million?

Perfect time to sell them off as the IPv4 shortage tightens and IPv6 hasn't
reached critical mass yet.

~~~
OJFord
> _but this is also probably a bulk sale so there might be a discount_

I was thinking the opposite - isn't the block (or a sub-block) worth more in
bulk than its constituent addresses?

In the same way that a complete collection of N Foobars has more value to a
Foobar collector than N times the average value of a collectable Foobar.

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AdamN
They should do the responsible thing and give it to ARIN. They don't 'own' the
IPs and really have no right to sell them.

With that said, they basically built the Internet so I won't hold it against
them.

~~~
geofft
ARIN doesn't 'own' the IPs either.

(The fact that MIT refused to recognize ARIN's rights over the IP space was
historically why ARIN never gave MIT an IPv6 prefix, or so I hear....)

~~~
icedchai
I've never signed the legacy registration agreement for my IP space, either.
I've had it since 1993, before ARIN existed.

~~~
stingraycharles
What did you do with it ?

~~~
icedchai
I have it routed to a rack at a local datacenter. I use it for hosting
personal projects, etc.

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artursapek
Wow, they only use 2 million out of the 16 million addresses in their
stockpile? It would be interesting to be able to trade IPv4 addresses on an
exchange.

~~~
lgierth
There's stuff like
[http://www.ipv4auctions.com/](http://www.ipv4auctions.com/)

We recently bought a /24 for ~$4k and now use it with Vultr's BGP support.

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sly010
Won't this just delay the adoption of IPv6?

~~~
agumonkey
Depends, some who cant migrate will keep living on these, and maybe later
switch. Maybe even helping those migrating to do so by ensuring future
customers in a while.

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danielvf
" Our intention is not only to advance our own agenda, but to help shape the
future of the on-line world. For instance, non-technical issues are now
shaping the future of the Internet as much as, if not more than, technical
innovation."

Did they just say they were going to be funding politics and activism with
most of the money?

~~~
notacoward
No. They're more likely to be talking about social-science research, and tools
to apply that research. How about better tools to understand public sentiment,
to analyze or sort content, to facilitate positive online interaction? How
those tools are used might be political, but the science and technology behind
them are not.

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bognition
It was only a matter of time before this happened, I've been trying to come up
with ballpark estimates as to how much they could have sold the /9 for but I
can't seem to find too many numbers on how much a block of ip address actually
costs.

~~~
erentz
$11-15 per IP and that was what I was seeing three years ago. So if that lower
end is still valid (would seem unlikely) then something over $90 million.

