Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Ryan Wagner]

I'm not sure if you have heard the myth before that Standford or MIT have more IP addresses allocated for them to use than the entire country of China? After several years I finally decided to search the net to see if I could find some truth to that, and this is what I came up with:

There is a factoid on the Internet that some American universities (normally listed as either Stanford or MIT) have more IP addresses than the entire country of China.  This has been repeated in the mainstream press so often (To the edge of cyberspace, United Nations ponders Net's future, etc), it has to be true, right?

If we take a look at the statistics located at http://ftp.apnic.net/stats/apnic/assigned-apnic-latest (Warning: non-user friendly; heavy befuddlement factor; do not operate heavy machinery while deciphering) we will find that China currently has nine IPv4 /8 address blocks assigned to it.  I'm sure you can all do CIDR notation off the top of your head, but for those who can't, a single /8 address block contains about 16,777,216 addresses.  Since China has about nine of these, it means that they have roughly 151 million (9*16,777,216) IP addresses.

Looking at http://ws.arin.net/whois/, we can see that Stanford has been assigned five/16s, each of which contains about 65,536 addresses.  Multiplying this out (5*65,536) gives us about 327,680 total addresses.  (There are some additional suballocations assigned, but they are all pretty small, and all appear to add up to less than 500 addresses, so for simplicity sake, I am ignoring them)
...
This is a factoid that became untrue with age. It was true when the Internet was in its infancy, around 1995-1998. At that point, Stanford was assigned a Class A address (what we call a /8 using CIDR notation) which gave them about 16 million addresses, while China only had a few Class Bs (/16s).  That all changed around 2000, though, when (a) Stanford turned their /8 address block back in, and (b) China began requesting more addresses. At that point (2000-2001) China received the equivalent of a /8 address and has been increasing their web presence ever since.  Today, China is one of the fastest growing sectors of the APNIC (the organization that assigns IP addresses in the Asia-Pacific region)

Source:IPv6 Blog

[Nogg3r5]

Curious. The internet really is astounding. Its so so compicated, yet pretty much every nation uses it.

[Ryan Wagner]

I'm just afraid of the day that I'll have to remember IPv6 addresses that look something like this:
2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334

instead of just knowing my simple 12-digit IPv4 address like I do now. I'm sure domains will be getting snatched up even faster then!

I guess we'll be set for a long time though because there are about 4 billion IPv4 addresses possible, where IPv6 has enough room for 3.4×10³⁸ unique addresses

[Nogg3r5]

I guess we'll be set for a long time though because there are about 4 billion IPv4 addresses possible, where IPv6 has enough room for 3.4×10³⁸ unique addresses

Quite a few then!

[El Guru (Al)]

We were just talking about this in class on Friday.

[OldManDeath]

I guess we'll be set for a long time though because there are about 4 billion IPv4 addresses possible, where IPv6 has enough room for 3.4×10³⁸ unique addresses

Quite a few then!

Yeah, more than you can count on 2 hands!

[Ryan Wagner]

I guess we'll be set for a long time though because there are about 4 billion IPv4 addresses possible, where IPv6 has enough room for 3.4×10³⁸ unique addresses

Quite a few then!

Yeah, more than you can count on 2 hands!

I don't know...maybe there is someone with a lot of fingers.

[Nogg3r5]

They would need 3.4x10³⁷ fingers. Thats um... 1.7x10³⁷ per hand.

Oh and with the actual zeroes 3.4x10³⁸...

3400000000000000000000000000000000000000

That's 38 zeroes.

[Ryan Wagner]

Hey, anything is possible. Take this burger for example (http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/03/pf/biggest_burger/):

The "Beer Barrel Belly Buster" weighs in with 10 pounds of meat molded into a 20-inch patty on a specially baked, 17-inch bun.

The balance of the weight comes from 25 slices of cheese, a head of lettuce, three tomatoes, two onions, plus copious quantities of mayo, ketchup, relish, mustard, and peppers.

Any two people who can eat it within a three-hour sitting get it for free. For everyone else, it costs $30.

The 15-pound burger can feed a family of 10, according to Liegey. He has sold two so far to teams of two people, and neither team did much more than put a dent in it.

[Ashley Wagner]

Hey, anything is possible. Take this burger for example (http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/03/pf/biggest_burger/):

The "Beer Barrel Belly Buster" weighs in with 10 pounds of meat molded into a 20-inch patty on a specially baked, 17-inch bun.

The balance of the weight comes from 25 slices of cheese, a head of lettuce, three tomatoes, two onions, plus copious quantities of mayo, ketchup, relish, mustard, and peppers.

Any two people who can eat it within a three-hour sitting get it for free. For everyone else, it costs $30.

The 15-pound burger can feed a family of 10, according to Liegey. He has sold two so far to teams of two people, and neither team did much more than put a dent in it.

Ewe, that is sickening! I can't imagine two people trying to eat that thing... yuck!