Solving IPv4 address space exhaustion as easy as 1.0 + 1.0 = 2.0

[Thomas]

The answer to the lack of IPv4 addresses may be at hand,
and it doesn't involve a radical shift to IPv6.

IP addresses are stored in 4 8-bit numbers.
Traditionally these are regarded as integers.

The problem is that integers have a very small range.
Even combined these 4 bytes only span a measly 4 billion
or so potential addresses.

But there's another way to store numbers on a computer, called
'floating point'.
This storage format reserves a few bits to denote the order of
magnitude of the number.
This trick allows a vastly greater range of numbers to be store
using the same number of bits.

Using floating point IP addresses, rather than integer, we can
potentially address 3.4 * (10 ^ 38) numbers, that's around
340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Note that this is the same number of addresses as offered by IPv6,
but without the need to painfully upgrade your network infrastructure!

Purists may be concerned by the 'lack of precision' of floating point
numbers: Floating point operations suffer from 'round off' errors.

This concerns would be valid if we used IP addresses in arithmetic
equations.

Raw IP addresses would shift from the current dotted-decimal notation
http://10.11.3.4/SomePage
to a floating point format:
http://1.234e+10/SomePage

Negative exponents could be used for private address ranges, giving
plenty of space to avoid the dreaded "192.168.0" clashes.

As always the raw addresses would be masked by the user-friendly
DNS mappings so end-users would never even know anything has changed.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-precision_floating-point_format

[Steven Pickles]

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[Paul Schulz]

Big badda boom. that's the sound of my head exploding. Where do I start to pulling this apart.

[Kapheroph]

I'm sure there was an amusing thread on the ausnog list about this, but it seems to have vanished unfortunately. Or maybe it was the fulldisclosure list...

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[Andrew Helgeson]

i wish i had a majik computer that could store and operate on floating point numbers that only had 32 bits...

Andrew

[Ryan Leach]

Wow this is amazing, someone get Internode onto this and maybe we could have rollout by the end of next april!

[Thomas]

On 01/04/13 15:44, Ryan Leach wrote:
> Wow this is amazing, someone get Internode onto this and maybe we
> could have rollout by the end of next april!

Don't hold your breath, they haven't even implemented this yet:

http://www.linuxsa.org.au/pipermail/linuxsa/2011-April/094020.html


Thomas

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