By Drew FitzGerald
Network engineers are buzzing this week that the Internet is
outgrowing some of its gear.
While a precise count is elusive, many technicians are reporting
that the total number of world-wide Internet routes is near or
already past about 512,000. Internet providers, corporations and
universities all rely on this roughly common set of directions to
send data where it needs to go.The number matters because the
machines that send Internet data from one network to another carry
a map of these routes, and older network routers from Cisco Systems
Inc. and other manufacturers won't hold more routes unless they are
tweaked.
The fix is simple. Engineers can solve the problem by simply
raising the router's memory cap and rebooting. But it is a manual
process, and the fallout is hard to judge given the numbers
involved. That could cause the routers left online to become
overloaded, slowing Internet speeds for billions of people around
the world.
The situation echoes, if more faintly, the hubbub over the Y2K
computer glitch in the late 1990s, when experts warned systems
could fail because their dating functions hadn't been designed to
handle the turn of the century. Internet specialists are being
careful to warn against a descent into that era's hyperbole and
shrill warnings of disasters that never materialized.
Still, the issue is a real one. Website hosting service Liquid
Web Inc. said some users had trouble connecting to a portion of its
customers' Web pages Tuesday until its technicians were able to
sort out the problem.
"It's certainly an issue that pushed some of our routers over
the limit, " Liquid Web spokesman Cale Sauter said. "Getting to the
bottom of everything took a large portion of the business day."
More websites and broadband companies are likely to encounter
the problem when they hit the seemingly arbitrary limit in the
coming days, according to Jim Cowie, president of network research
firm Renesys. Web companies usually have slightly different
versions of this digital set of directions, so their databases will
breach the 512,000 route mark at different times.
Network experts say the problem draws attention to the shrinking
number of unique numbers available under the most popular routing
system, IPv4, which can only fit a few billion addresses. Version
6, or IPv6, can hold many orders of magnitude more addresses but
has been slow to catch fire.
"That relentless pressure has pushed the distribution of global
routing table sizes up and up, as more and more people join the
Internet, and find themselves fighting over smaller and smaller
crumbs of IPv4 space," Mr. Cowie says in his blog post.
Write to Drew FitzGerald at andrew.fitzgerald@wsj.com
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