IPv6

10 Articles

FLOSS Weekly Episode 770: 10% More Internet

February 14, 2024 by 7 Comments

This week, Jonathan Bennett and Doc Searls talk with David Taht about the state of the Internet and, specifically, IPv4 exhaustion. We’re running out of IPv4 addresses! But we’ve been running out for something like ten years now. What gives? And why are nearly 20% of the world’s IPv4 addresses sitting unused? David has a hack that would give the world 10% more Internet, but Amazon might have something to say about it.

There’s even more, like Kessler Syndrome, some musing on what the Interplanetary Internet will look like, the worth of real paper books, and a long-term bet for some IPv4 addresses to come to fruition in 2038.

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Where Exactly Did That Network Packet Come From?

May 26, 2023 by 11 Comments

Have you ever noticed that some websites can figure out, at least roughly, where you are? Sometimes they use it to find you a closer content provider. Or they might block you from seeing certain things while offering you other things specific to your location. This is possible because there are databases that map IPs to locations. [Mark Litwintschik] looks at using those databases from an API or downloading them into your own database. He also shows some very large database queries, which is interesting, too. He uses IPInfo, although there are other providers. Some only provide a limited number of lookups, but there are plenty of free tiers for low-volume usage.

The database changes every day. Of course, each provider has a different way of getting data, and so there are differences. [Mark] compares the IPInfo dataset against MaxMind’s also free database. That involved comparing over 3 billion records! Actually, the 3 billion are the number of IPs that matched up in both databases. There were an additional 118 million that didn’t match and 34 million that were not in the MaxMind database.

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Starlink: A Review And Some Hacks

May 24, 2021 by 130 Comments

I could probably be described as a SpaceX enthusiast. I catch their launches when I can, and I’ve watched the development of Starship with great interest. But the side-effect of SpaceX’s reusable launch system is that getting to space has become a lot cheaper. Having excess launch capacity means that space projects that were previously infeasible become suddenly at least plausible. One of those is Starlink.

Starlink is SpaceX’s satellite Internet service. Wireless and cellular internet have helped in some places, but if you really live out in the sticks, satellite internet is your only option. And while satellite Internet isn’t exactly new, Starlink is a bit different. Hughesnet, another provider, has a handful of satellites in geostationary orbit, which is about 22,000 miles above the earth. To quote Grace Hopper, holding a nearly foot-long length of wire representing a nanosecond, “Between here and the satellite, there are a very large number nanoseconds.”

SpaceX opted to do something a bit different. In what seemed like an insane pipe dream at the time, they planned to launch a satellite constellation of 12,000 birds, some of them flying as low as 214 mile altitude. The downside of flying so low is that they won’t stay in orbit as long, but SpaceX is launching them significantly faster than they’re coming down. So far, nearly 1,600 Starlink satellites are in orbit, in a criss-crossing pattern at 342 miles (550 km) up.

This hundred-fold difference in altitude matters. A Hughesnet connection has a minimum theoretical latency of 480 ms, and in reality runs closer to 600 ms. Starlink predicts a theoretical minimum of under 10 ms, though real-world performance isn’t quite that low yet. In the few weeks I’ve had the service, ping times have fallen from mid-60s down to 20s and 30s. The way Starlink works right now, data goes up to the closest satellite and directly back to the connected ground station. The long-term plan is to allow the satellites to talk directly to each other over laser links, skipping over the ground stations. Since the speed of light is higher in a vacuum than in a fiber-optic cable, the fully deployed system could potentially have lower latency than even fiber Internet, depending on the location of the endpoint and how many hops need to be made.

I got a Starlink setup, and have been trying out the beta service. Here’s my experience, and a bonus hack to boot.

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That’s It, No More European IPV4 Addresses

November 29, 2019 by 80 Comments

When did you first hear concern expressed about the prospect of explosive growth of the internet resulting in exhaustion of the stock of available IP addresses? About twenty years ago perhaps? All computers directly connected to the internet must have an individual unique address, and the IPv4 scheme used since the 1980s has a 32-bit address space that provides only 4,294,967,296 possibilities. All that growth now means that IPv4 addresses are now in short supply, and this week RIPE, the body which allocates them in Europe, has announced that it no longer has any to allocate. Instead of handing new address blocks they will instead now provide ones that have been relinquished for example by companies that have gone out of business, and parties interested can join a waiting list.

Is the Internet dead then? Hardly, because of course IPv6, the replacement for IPv4, has been with us for decades and has a much larger 128-bit address space. The problem is that there is a huge installed base of IPv4 infrastructure which has always been cited as the reason to delay its adoption, so the vast majority of the internet-connected world has remained with IPv4. Even in an IPv4 world there are opportunities to be more efficient in the use of addresses such as the network address translation or NAT that many private networks use to share one address between many hosts, so it’s not quite curtains for your smart TV or IoT light bulb even though the situation will not get any easier.

The mystery comes in why after so many years we still use IPv4 so much. Your home router and millions like it will pick up an IPv4 address from your broadband provider’s pool, and there seems little reason why it can not instead pick up an IPv6 address and contain a gateway between the two. The same goes for addresses outside the domestic arena, and even in out community we find that IPv6 networks at events are labelled as experimental. Perhaps this news will spur the change, but meanwhile we don’t expect to be using an IPv6 address day-to-day very soon.

We know among Hackaday’s readership there will be people close to the coalface when it comes to IPv6 adoption. As always the comments are open, and we’d like to hear your views.

Header: Robert.Harker [CC BY-SA 3.0].

IPv6 Christmas Display Uses 75 Internet’s Worth Of Addresses

December 24, 2018 by 32 Comments

We’ve seen internet-enabled holiday displays before, and we know IPv6 offers much more space than the older IPv4 addressing scheme that most of us still use today, but the two have never been more spectacularly demonstrated than at jinglepings.com. The live video stream shows an Internet-connected Christmas tree and an LED display wall that you can control by sending IPv6 ICMP echo request messages, more commonly known as pings.

Reading the page, you quickly parse the fact that there are three ways to control the tree. First, you can type a message in the box and press send – this message gets displayed on the crawl at the bottom of the LED screen.  Second, you can light up the tree by sending a ping to the IPv6 address 2001:4c08:2028:2019::RR:GG:BB, where RR, GG, and BB are 8-bit hex values for red, green, and blue. This is a neat abuse of the IPv6 address space, in that the tree has 224 (around 16.8 million) IPv6 addresses, one for each color you can set. We were impressed by this brute-force use of address space, at least until we read on a little further.

You can also make your own drawings on the LED wall, again by sending pings. In this case, the address to set a pixel to a particular color is: 2001:4c08:2028:X:Y:RR:GG:BB, where X and Y are the pixel coordinates. This seems easy enough: to set pixel (10, 11) to magenta, the RGB value (0xFF, 0x00, 0xFF), you’d simply ping the IPv6 address 2001:4c08:2028:10:11:FF:00:FF. Having  an array of addressable LEDs is commonplace in hacker circles today, although each of them having their own live IPv6 address on the Internet seems a little excessive at first. Then it hits you – each LED has an IPv6 address for every possible color, just like the tree: 16.8 million addresses for each LED. The LED display is 160×120 pixels in size, so the total number of IPv6 addresses used is 160x120x224, which is 75 times larger than all possible IPv4 addresses!  This is a hack of monstrous proportions, and we love it.

In case you’re not running IPv6 yet, we’ve got you covered. To send individual pings using your browser, you can use a site like Ipv6now. If you want to send pixels to the display wall, you’re better off using a 6in4 tunnel that lets you access IPv6 sites using your current IPv4 connectivity.  Hurricane Electric offers a free 6in4 tunnel service that we’ve found useful. Then it’s just a matter of writing some code to send pixel values as pings.  The python scapy module is perfect for this sort of thing. But, first you’ll have to fill out the form on jinglepings.com and wait to get your IPv6 address whitelisted before you can draw on the display; evidently the usual bad actors have found the site and started drawing inappropriate things.

If you think this use of addresses seems wasteful, you needn’t worry. There are around 3.4×1038 IPv6 addresses, enough for 1027 such displays. We’re going to go out on a limb here and say it: nobody will ever need more than 2128 IP addresses.

If you’re looking to build an LED holiday display on a smaller budget, check out this one that re-purposes normal LED strings.

Thanks to [Ward] for the tip!

Becoming Your Own ISP, Just For Fun

November 18, 2017 by 46 Comments

When moving into a new house, it’s important to arrange for the connection of basic utilities. Electricity, water, and gas are simple enough, and then it’s generally fairly easy to set up a connection to an ISP for your internet connection. A router plugs into a phone line, or maybe a fiber connection and lovely packets start flowing out of the wall. But if you’re connected to the internet through an ISP, how is the ISP connected? [Kenneth] answers this in the form of an amusing tale.

It was during the purchase of data centre rack space that [Kenneth]’s challenge was laid down by a friend. Rather then simply rely on the connection provided by the data centre, they would instead rely on forging their own connection to the ‘net, essentially becoming their own Internet Service Provider.

This is known as creating an Autonomous System. To do this involves several challenges, the first of which is understanding just how things work at this level of networking. [Kenneth] explains the vagaries of the Border Gateway Protocol, and why its neccessary to secure your own address space. There’s also an amusing discussion on the routing hardware required for such a feat and why [Kenneth]’s setup may fall over within the next two years or so.

It’s not for the faint hearted, and takes a fair bit of paperwork, but [Kenneth] has provided an excellent guide to the process if you really, really just need to own your own corner of the internet. That said, there are other networking tricks to cut your teeth on if you’d like a simpler challenge, like tunneling IP over ICMP.

 

Untether From Your Location With A VPN

October 12, 2017 by 38 Comments

By now, most of us know the perks of using a VPN: they make private one’s online activity (at least from your ISP’s point of view, probably), and they can also make it appear as if you are in a different locale than you physically are. This is especially important for trying to watch events such as the Olympics which might air different things at different times in different countries. It’s also starting to be an issue with services like Netflix which allow content in some areas but not others.

While VPNs can help solve this problem, it can be tedious to set them up for specific purposes like this if you have to do it often. Luckily, [clashtherage] has created a router with a Raspberry Pi that takes care of all of the complicated VPN routing automatically. In much the same way that another RPi router we’ve seen eliminates ads from all of your internet traffic, this one takes all of your traffic and sends it to a locale of your choosing. (In theory one could use both at the same time.)

Obviously this creates issues for Netflix as a company, and indeed a number of services (like craigslist, for example) are starting to block access to their sites if they detect that a VPN is being used. Of course, this only leads to an arms race of VPNs being blocked, and them finding ways around the obstacles, and on and on. If only IPv6 was finally implemented, we might have a solution for all of these issues.