Assigning IPv6 IP addresses that don't belong to me.

Hello,

Just curious if this is a bug or not. I guess I don't enough about how IP addresses are assigned to servers. I rent a VPS from GoDaddy and currently, I'm allowed 3 IPv4 addresses. They assign them to me. Right now, I'm using two. If I want another free one, I just click a button and I receive it. To my knowledge, I don't have any control over what IP address I receive.

How does this work? How does GoDaddy get these IP addresses? I understand they probably have something like a Class A network, but where do they get it from? Their ISP? And where does they're ISP get it from? I mean, I don't really want to know what company, I'm just asking if there's some main organization that hands out IP addresses to various people.

The reason I ask, I want an IPv6 address. I was messing around in cPanel, and I went to where I could add an IPv6 range. I pinged google from my LAN and saw what their IPv6 address was. I entered something very similar for a range....and this is where it gets weird, it actually worked. I was able to ping my domain using an IPv6 version of ping, and my domain responded with the IPv6 address I assigned to it, even though no one assigned me one. What's preventing me from just stealing someone else's IPv6 address? I would imagine I shouldn't be able to do this, that something's wrong somewheres. Shouldn't there be some sort of check or something that only lets me assign IPv6 addresses that have been assigned to me?

Thanks and sorry if this is a dumb question.

 

Thank you! I found out who assigns the IP addresses and how they're assigned. I really appreciate the link!

I would have thought it'd be much harder to spoof an IP address. I didn't realize I could just randomly pick up and configure it in cPanel. With my IPv4 IP addresses, I cannot do this. I have to pick one that's been assigned, and although, from the console, I'm sure I could manually set an IP address to one that I wasn't assigned, but I figured if I wasn't assigned it, traffic just wouldn't go to my server. I didn't realize I could just pick an IP address no one was using and (illegally) just configure my server to use it.

I wanted to add, as soon as I set it, I didn't expect cPanel to take it. So I pinged my server and right after seeing I got a response, I was like oh no! This isn't right!!! And I undid the changes. I was hoping no one else used it. I borrowed it from Google. I looked at their IPv6 address and entered it into cPanel, minus the last group there, where I just put :::'s.

A little off topic here now, but this really sucks. I contacted GoDaddy again and they said my VPS is a newer type of server and doesn't support IPv6 (I was able to assign an address, so I believe this statement is incorrect) and worse off, they cannot provide me with any type of server that accepts an IPv6 address because only their old servers support them and I cannot have an old server. The fact that the tech support person said stuff like, "When you say IPv6, are you talking about something like PHP4 or MySQL 6?" makes me think maybe he didn't know what he was talking about. But he actually went to an admin and asked them and they gave him the response. What sucks even more is their documents say VPSes have 16 IPv6 addresses by default and if we need more, just contact them. Their support forum says if I'm not assigned any, contact live support, they'll hook me up.

At this point, I have to find a new hosting provider but I'm a bit worried. I've been googling them, but everyone says their hosting service is the bomb, and I'm sure some are better than others. I like talking to real people and asking them for advice. I can't go to the GoDaddy forums and ask them to recommend a service. Not sure where I could talk to people and ask them who to go through. cPanel doesn't seem to have a sub-topic forum for this kind of stuff.

I'd hate to go for a hosting provider and rent a VPS for something like 2 years and find out it's really bad. You know?

 

Hi Daniel,

Right now, I'm trying to learn it and have a bit of a need. I switched over to PowerDNS and every time cPanel updates PowerDNS, the PowerDNS expects an IPv6 address and breaks. I have to log in via SSH using the IP address of my server, revert the config file, and then restart in order for people to visit my site.

My site is for an open source piece of software I've been working on. I don't have as much time as I had in the past, before our baby was born, to work on it, but I still work on it. It's a long term project and slowly, I'm getting there. My open source program, without going into to much detail, will have the ability to communicate with my domain, if the user decides they want to use certain features. My open source project is based off an old DOS program that became freeware years ago. The developer never released the source code. My open source program will be just like the old DOS program, but with many new features that just weren't in the old program. It'll have telnet support, SSH support, etc.

Because the IPv4 addresses are running out and IPv6 is the future, my program is going to support IPv6. Although I'm not at the point where I need to start worrying about implementing network functionality, sooner or later, I will. It might be a ways down the road, but there's no sense paying for a VPS that isn't going to be able to do what I need it to do. Hence the reason I'm going to make the switch to another provider.

 

Thinking of the what if's is the key! I always try to write my code in such away where it expects the wrong stuff. Let me give you an example. Let's say I have a simple program that justs ask for a name and then an age (in numbers). The program is expecting numbers for the age, but the user, they might try writing words. If my program doesn't specifically check to see if they actually entered a number, all kinds of bad things could happen.

When I worked at Deposit Computer Services, Inc as a system programmer, the Transmissions department had a VB program they ran. It'd connect to a remote server, download a database, and then process entries in the database. The database file was always there, but sometimes, it was empty. The previous programmer never checked to see if it was empty or not. His code worked like this:
Connect to the remote server
Download the database
Open the first entry and process it
Check to see if there's anymore entries, if so, process and repeat, if not, quit.

Every time their was an empty database, the program would error out with some message like Error (Null): -49715. The Transmission department would have to go in, create a database, add a fake entry, let the program run, delete what it processed, and hope the next day there was a database with entries or do the process all over again.

It took them time to do. I just changed the code a little to check first to see if the database had an entry, and if not, display a little message saying no entries. They absolutely loved that.

 

I now have a VPS that has IPv6 addresses, so your links are very helpful cPanelMichael. I just have to install cPanel now on the new VPS.