This is super brilliant, but why do so much of these things use Star Wars for context? Anything else would be just as cute as less creepily cultic worshipful of one movie series.
Screen dumps bypass the presentation here. Executing from console gives you slowly scrolling text which is the signature opening for the Star Wars series.
Normally, this is just identifying with a known theme, unless one reserves special vitriol for Star Wars for some reason.
You're forgetting that Star Wars was itself a tribute to other shows and movies, Flash Gordon etc. Lots of them had vertical scrolling text explaining what story you were being dropped into, but Star Wars had good film stock so you could read it even as it receded into the distance. (Edit for clarity: This was done on purpose just to show off.) Most of those shows had tiny "ships" floating around on strings, so Star Wars had a giant star destroyer fill the screen. And so on.
I was inspired by looking endlessly at traceroutes slowly scrolling by. Im snowed in and I decided to give it a try. It only uses 2 routers to do this and VRFs.
I suppose if you're going to this level of effort you want geeks of all flavours to appreciate the joke. I imagine Star Wars is probably the best 'rosetta stone' for this purpose.
Just use HE.net's tunnelbroker and set up a 6in4 tunnel[1]. FWIW there was no color for me either when I connected via ipv6. Just the same message about different visitors as printed above. Just to be sure ran:
Miredo/teredo is yuck indeed. ATIYA is not bad, I am not sure why you turn your nose to it. Practically it just adds 8 bytes to the headers compared to 6in4 yet is a lot easier to set up. Specifically, if you do not have a router that you control and that can do IPv6 and ip6tables, AYIYA is the easiest to set up and have a static address. I would not set it up for a server but for a small LAN it will be no different than 6in4.
Spend five minutes with /etc/shorewall6/shorewall6.conf and you are done. Granted my mom is not going to do that but for anyone on HN that should be a walk in the park.
It should be noted that the Star Wars asciimation guy also did the thoroughly awesome Jet Powered Beer Cooler using a jet engine built in his shed (in NZ) to chill his guinness to a respectable 2c, of which I am in awe.
This is hilarious - though I wish they had more of an artificial delay between the hops to keep the suspense. If you're curious how you might implement this without actually needing a whole bunch of different hosts with routes between them, see this tool by Moxie Marlinspike:
You still need a big block of IP addresses though since you want the reverse DNS lookup for each IP address to return a different line from the scroll. Definitely a waste of IPv4 addresses; someone some do a IPv6 implementation ;-)
Edit: I just noticed http://beaglenetworks.net/ at the bottom of the traceroute - this was implemented by carefully setting up routing tables and VRFs on a Cisco router. fakeroute seems easier but not a bad way to keep busy during a blizzard.
There's a Star Trek version as well, but it only works if you're on IPv6.
$ traceroute6 -m 120 tng.prolixium.com
traceroute to tng.prolixium.com (2001:48c8:1:137::32), 120 hops max, 24 byte packets
[snip]
11 v6-seattle-ix.voxel.net (2001:504:16::745f) 209.28 ms 207.781 ms 207.18 ms
12 3890.te6-2.tsr1.lga3.us.voxel.net (2001:48c8::8c9) 277.482 ms 279.604 ms 277.079 ms
13 0.ae1.tsr1.lga5.us.voxel.net (2001:48c8::822) 282.205 ms 286.997 ms 276.887 ms
14 0.ae2.csr2.lga6.us.voxel.net (2001:48c8::82e) 280.187 ms 284.989 ms 277.817 ms
15 em0.dax.prolixium.net (2001:48c8:1:2::2) 277.495 ms 277.68 ms 277.61 ms
16 si3.starfire.prolixium.net (2001:48c8:1:1ff::1a) 311.417 ms 305.949 ms 305.109 ms
17 0.re0.ra.prolixium.net (2001:48c8:1:119::2) 307.72 ms 305.633 ms 305.915 ms
18 0.fx0.voyager.prolixium.net (2001:48c8:1:11f::2) 304.583 ms 303.806 ms 304.216 ms
19 . (2001:48c8:1:137::2) 307.199 ms 303.983 ms 303.874 ms
20 Space (2001:48c8:1:137::6) 310.575 ms 308.043 ms 307.941 ms
21 the.Final.Frontier (2001:48c8:1:137::a) 307.198 ms 304.489 ms 305.967 ms
22 These.are.the.voyages.of.the.starship (2001:48c8:1:137::e) 306.484 ms 308.383 ms 308.094 ms
23 Enterprise (2001:48c8:1:137::12) 305.924 ms 305.817 ms 307.77 ms
24 Its.continuing.mission (2001:48c8:1:137::16) 308.692 ms 316.396 ms 306 ms
25 to.explore.strange.new.worlds (2001:48c8:1:137::1a) 306.123 ms 307.447 ms 312.365 ms
26 to.seek.out.new.life.forms (2001:48c8:1:137::1e) 308.785 ms 309.842 ms 308.362 ms
27 and.new.civilizations (2001:48c8:1:137::22) 309.347 ms 315.072 ms 307.912 ms
28 to.boldly.go (2001:48c8:1:137::26) 309.336 ms 306.98 ms 309.354 ms
29 where.no.one.has.gone.before (2001:48c8:1:137::2a) 308.284 ms 311.138 ms 310.111 ms
30 . (2001:48c8:1:137::2e) 310.227 ms 309.217 ms 309.752 ms
31 EOF (2001:48c8:1:137::32) 309.623 ms 311.074 ms 313.958 ms
Why should MIT have to pay for someone else's historical mistakes? The IP addresses are just as valuable as any other part of MIT's endowment, and universities don't typically give their assets away for no reason. (If someone wants MIT to change to a /16, I'm sure there's some sum of money that could convince them.)
Ultimately, even if everyone gave their IPv4 addresses back, there would still be a tiny supply of addresses that can't scale. So we need IPv6 regardless of who is greedy about their IPv4 space.
I tried tweaking a few flags (such as much longer timeout: -w 30), still no luck.
$ traceroute -m 100 -e -w 30 obiwan.scrye.net
(...all normal here...)
8 core2-te0-0-0-4.faraday.ukcore.bt.net (109.159.249.45) 6.795 ms
core1-te0-0-0-5.faraday.ukcore.bt.net (109.159.249.43) 11.500 ms
core1-te0-0-0-4.faraday.ukcore.bt.net (109.159.249.41) 13.669 ms
9 host213-121-193-129.ukcore.bt.net (213.121.193.129) 5.964 ms 6.068 ms
host213-121-193-137.ukcore.bt.net (213.121.193.137) 7.362 ms
Although, I'd have done it differently. using some packet capture tools, fake replies with the various different IP addresses. That way you don't even have to run a physical router that bounces it back and forth.
If you are committed to maintaining it, you might even give it a memorable DNS name. (Though, some of the coolness comes from it just being "out there" in the bowels of the Internets.)
If you have control over a block of IPs, you can set the PTR records to whatever you feel like. Having invalid PTR records will cause headaches for you in a limited set of cases (e.g. sane mail servers won't accept mail from a host which has a PTR record that doesn't have A and PTR records which refer to each other) but outside of that, the owner of the IP block can do essentially whatever they want with the records.
Someone clever decided to have a very long route to a box, and very clever PTR records.
It's in the middle of a /20 allocated to Epik Networks, and he's only using roughly a /27 of it. I think the Internet will survive.
If ARIN did ever want to recover space, there are much bigger fish in the sea (I doubt Apple is using all 16.7 million IPs in their 17.0.0.0/8 allocation, for example).
Yeah, using a /30 per hop is a bit of a waste, but one /24 is still insignificant to the Internet as a whole, especially when it's in the middle of a parent allocation.
Presumably if Epik runs out of IP space in their /20, they'll just shut this down. It's not like some other company could use that /24.
Again, if ARIN/IANA really wanted to reclaim "wasted" space, they'd be looking at the holders of big blocks like /8-16, and asking them to justify usage, not one random /24 which is ultimately insignificant.
By that logic, petit theft is fine since the police should be looking for people committing grand theft and the petit theft is "ultimately insignificant"
It's reasons like this why people now have to fill out forms justifying the need for additional IPv4 blocks.
Your analogy is nonsensical, since this is in no way "theft". He's borrowing some IP space inside an already allocated /20 that Epik isn't using at the moment.
Epik already went to ARIN, said "we need a /20 to meet our IPv4 needs", filled out the paperwork to justify the allocation, and ARIN said "yes". Out of those 16 /24's, they have one that doesn't have any hosts on it at the moment, so they let him play with it.
The only people this MIGHT be hurting is Epik, if they need to justify getting more space from ARIN at some point. For the other millions of people on the Internet: it's awesome. Lighten up and enjoy it.
Considering computers double in power every 18 months, most people stopped caring about IPv6's extra overhead in 1994.
(At some level, 128 > 32, so unless all the algorithms used for routing are constant-time over the addresses, IPv6 will always cost more. But if you add up a bunch of layers of NAT, that's not free either. So this argument boils down to "if nobody used the Internet, it would require less hardware to run". Well, yeah.)
while what you are saying is true, the upper bounds of all things limit the costs required to deploy infinite amounts of memory and processor cycles at scale.
As always, a happy medium is required. That being said, once you boot up another stack, allocate various caches, and have your engineers maintain an additional set of configuration, the costs come down. But for ~10k routes, the costs to route those ips is greater than routing v4.
60 by.ryan.werber (206.214.251.177) 153.282 ms 154.264 ms 149.479 ms
61 when.ccies.get.bored (206.214.251.182) 154.085 ms 150.249 ms 147.620 ms
62 ccie.38168 (206.214.251.185) 148.633 ms 150.156 ms 152.908 ms
63 fin (206.214.251.190) 155.715 ms * 429.865 ms
