Apparently you can buy IPv6 addresses, use them for the servers on your home network, and then if you change your ISP, continue to use the same IP addresses?
You need to be a RIR (RIPE/ARIN/LACNIC/APNIC/AfriNIC) member for that. The membership fee alone is within thousands/year. Then you need to arrange routing with the hosting providers, and those that are ready to do that will also charge at least hundreds per month. No public cloud I’m aware of supports that at all, so you also need your own hardware in a datacenter where your transit provider is present.
In other words, owning your IPv6 network is completely out of reach for individuals and small projects. I believe it shouldn’t be that way and that RIRs are basically rent-seeking organizations now that resources they still can distribute (32-bit ASNs and IPv6 addresses) are anything but scarce, but I can’t see why it may change any soon.
In the RIPE area at least, you can obtain a provider-independent IPv6 assignment via an LIR - you don’t have to go directly to RIPE. A cheap option is Snapserv, who offer an IPv6 PI assignment for 99 EUR/year and an ASN for a one-off fee of 99 EUR. These can both be transferred to another LIR if, for example, Snapserv went out of business, or you wanted to switch LIR for some other reason. They also offer IPv6 PA assignments for less money, but the trade-off is that a PA assignment is tied to the LIR.
You do need to be multi-homed to justify the PI/ASN assignments, so you’d need to find another upstream provider in addition to Vultr. Someone I know uses Vultr and a HE tunnel to justify it.
In other words, owning your IPv6 network is completely out of reach for individuals and small projects. I believe it shouldn’t be that way and that RIRs are basically rent-seeking organizations now that resources they still can distribute (32-bit ASNs and IPv6 addresses) are anything but scarce, but I can’t see why it may change any soon.
I suspect the problem is routing tables. It would be trivial to assign every person a /64 without making a dent in the address space but then you’d end up with every router on any Internet backbone needing a few billion entries in its routing table. That would completely kill current (and near-future) hardware. Not to mention the fact that if everyone moving between ISPs required a BGP update, the total amount of BGP traffic would overwhelm networks’ abilities to handle the update rate.
You need some mechanism to ration the number of routable networks and money tends to be how we ration things.
I doubt this will ever be a problem in practice. Even among those who host their own servers, the number of people who want to own their address space is always going to be small.
I’m also not advocating for making addresses free or charge, only for making them available for less than the current exorbitant prices that RIRs charge for membership.
TIL, that’s really interesting. I just remember many, many years ago that people were entertaining this, but also with Sixxs and HE tunnels that kinda worked for a while.
Yes of course, but at least the way it works you could in theory use it longer despite switching ISPs. And I think my Sixxs account was nearly a decade old at the end. Some people might have moved cities three times in that time.
welp for some reason my ISP provides every customer a /64, I don’t know what the reason for that is. There is no single person the internet that needs a /64 and I’m certain no german household needs. But yeah waste tons of network space for no reason. IPv8 we’re coming..
Its the minimum routing size and if you stray from it a lot of the protocol breaks, making it smaller would be insane. And its not wasteful, you could give every atom on the planet a /64, the address space is REALLY BIG. Ipv4 this is not. For it to show up in BGP it needs to be a /48, /32 is the minimum allocation. And there is as many of those as there are ip’s. It should be a /48 you’re given actually, not a /64 (or /60 /56 in comcast home/business cases)
Why do you believe ipv8 is needed because of /64 allocations? Can you back that up with some numbers?
I haven’t done the math but I’ll let the last apnic report speak for itself in that regard (you’ll have to serach, its long and there’s no way to mark some chapter).
However, before we go too far down this path it is also useful to bear in mind that the 128 bits of address space in IPv6 has become largely a myth. We sliced off 64 bits in the address span for no particularly good reason, as it turns out. We then sliced off a further 48 bits for, again, no particularly good reason. So, the vastness of the address space represented by 128 bits in IPv6 is in fact, not so vast.
And
Today’s IPv6 environment has some providers using a /60 end site allocation unit, many using a /56, and many others using a /48
So It’s not really a standard that breaks things, because then things would already break.
I just don’t see a reason why we’re throwing away massive address ranges, even my private server gets a /64, and that’s one server, not a household or such thing.
The main reason your LAN must be a /64 is that the second half of each address can contain a MAC address (SLAAC) or a big random number (privacy extension).
So It’s not really a standard that breaks things, because then things would already break.
For routing, not in general, but going below /64 does break things like SLAAC. The original guidance was a /48, its been relaxed somewhat since the original rfc but can go down to a /64. Doing work or i’d pull up the original rfc. Going below /64 does break things, but not at that level being referenced.
I just don’t see a reason why we’re throwing away massive address ranges, even my private server gets a /64, and that’s one server, not a household or such thing.
Have to get out of the ipv4 conservation mindset, a /64 is massive yes, but 64 bits of address is ipv4 to the power of ipv4, that is… a large amount of space. It also enables things like having ephemeral ip addresses that change every 8 hours. Its better to think of a /64 as the minimum addressable/routable subnet, not a single /32 like you would have in ipv4. And there is A LOT of them, we aren’t at risk of running out even if we get allocation crazy. And thats not hyperbole, we could give every single device, human, animal, place, thing a /64 and still not approach running out.
Today’s IPv6 environment has some providers using a /60 end site allocation unit, many using a /56, and many others using a /48
Also just realized that you might be confusing /60 or /56 as being smaller than a /64, its unintuitive but this is the mask of the subnets not the size. So smaller than /64 would be a CIDR above 64, not below. aka a /96 would break in my example. Its also why assigning “just* a /64 is a bit evil on the part of isp’s and the allocation should be larger.
You need to be a RIR (RIPE/ARIN/LACNIC/APNIC/AfriNIC) member for that. The membership fee alone is within thousands/year. Then you need to arrange routing with the hosting providers, and those that are ready to do that will also charge at least hundreds per month. No public cloud I’m aware of supports that at all, so you also need your own hardware in a datacenter where your transit provider is present.
In other words, owning your IPv6 network is completely out of reach for individuals and small projects. I believe it shouldn’t be that way and that RIRs are basically rent-seeking organizations now that resources they still can distribute (32-bit ASNs and IPv6 addresses) are anything but scarce, but I can’t see why it may change any soon.
Vultr will let you do BGP with them for (as far as I know) no additional cost above the price of your VPS: https://www.vultr.com/docs/configuring-bgp-on-vultr/
In the RIPE area at least, you can obtain a provider-independent IPv6 assignment via an LIR - you don’t have to go directly to RIPE. A cheap option is Snapserv, who offer an IPv6 PI assignment for 99 EUR/year and an ASN for a one-off fee of 99 EUR. These can both be transferred to another LIR if, for example, Snapserv went out of business, or you wanted to switch LIR for some other reason. They also offer IPv6 PA assignments for less money, but the trade-off is that a PA assignment is tied to the LIR.
You do need to be multi-homed to justify the PI/ASN assignments, so you’d need to find another upstream provider in addition to Vultr. Someone I know uses Vultr and a HE tunnel to justify it.
Interesting, that’s sure an improvement. My company is a RIPE member so I haven’t been watching the PI situation closely, I’m glad to see it improve.
I suspect the problem is routing tables. It would be trivial to assign every person a /64 without making a dent in the address space but then you’d end up with every router on any Internet backbone needing a few billion entries in its routing table. That would completely kill current (and near-future) hardware. Not to mention the fact that if everyone moving between ISPs required a BGP update, the total amount of BGP traffic would overwhelm networks’ abilities to handle the update rate.
You need some mechanism to ration the number of routable networks and money tends to be how we ration things.
I doubt this will ever be a problem in practice. Even among those who host their own servers, the number of people who want to own their address space is always going to be small.
I’m also not advocating for making addresses free or charge, only for making them available for less than the current exorbitant prices that RIRs charge for membership.
TIL, that’s really interesting. I just remember many, many years ago that people were entertaining this, but also with Sixxs and HE tunnels that kinda worked for a while.
Oh, but with tunnelbroker.net and similar, the provider owns the network, you just get a temporary permission to use it and can’t take it with you.
Yes of course, but at least the way it works you could in theory use it longer despite switching ISPs. And I think my Sixxs account was nearly a decade old at the end. Some people might have moved cities three times in that time.
I always wish that addresses were more equitably distributed. With IPv6 there’s no reason not to. And yet ☹
welp for some reason my ISP provides every customer a /64, I don’t know what the reason for that is. There is no single person the internet that needs a /64 and I’m certain no german household needs. But yeah waste tons of network space for no reason. IPv8 we’re coming..
Its the minimum routing size and if you stray from it a lot of the protocol breaks, making it smaller would be insane. And its not wasteful, you could give every atom on the planet a /64, the address space is REALLY BIG. Ipv4 this is not. For it to show up in BGP it needs to be a /48, /32 is the minimum allocation. And there is as many of those as there are ip’s. It should be a /48 you’re given actually, not a /64 (or /60 /56 in comcast home/business cases)
Why do you believe ipv8 is needed because of /64 allocations? Can you back that up with some numbers?
I think we’re good to be honest: https://www.samsclass.info/ipv6/exhaustion.htm
I haven’t done the math but I’ll let the last apnic report speak for itself in that regard (you’ll have to serach, its long and there’s no way to mark some chapter).
And
So It’s not really a standard that breaks things, because then things would already break.
I just don’t see a reason why we’re throwing away massive address ranges, even my private server gets a /64, and that’s one server, not a household or such thing.
The main reason your LAN must be a /64 is that the second half of each address can contain a MAC address (SLAAC) or a big random number (privacy extension).
For routing, not in general, but going below /64 does break things like SLAAC. The original guidance was a /48, its been relaxed somewhat since the original rfc but can go down to a /64. Doing work or i’d pull up the original rfc. Going below /64 does break things, but not at that level being referenced.
Have to get out of the ipv4 conservation mindset, a /64 is massive yes, but 64 bits of address is ipv4 to the power of ipv4, that is… a large amount of space. It also enables things like having ephemeral ip addresses that change every 8 hours. Its better to think of a /64 as the minimum addressable/routable subnet, not a single /32 like you would have in ipv4. And there is A LOT of them, we aren’t at risk of running out even if we get allocation crazy. And thats not hyperbole, we could give every single device, human, animal, place, thing a /64 and still not approach running out.
Also just realized that you might be confusing /60 or /56 as being smaller than a /64, its unintuitive but this is the mask of the subnets not the size. So smaller than /64 would be a CIDR above 64, not below. aka a /96 would break in my example. Its also why assigning “just* a /64 is a bit evil on the part of isp’s and the allocation should be larger.
fun fact: it’s called 6 because it’s the 6th version (kinda). Not because of the number of bytes (which is 8 anyway). You’re rooting for IPv7!