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IP Shortage In Asia Just Myth, Says APNIC
rekkanoryo writes "News.com is carrying a story in which the Director General of APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre) says that the "shortage" of IP addresses in Asia is a total myth. There's also some talk of IPv6 in this article."
Asia should be disconnected from the web. Damn spammers.
Exec: No shortage of Net addresses
/8, addresses are consumed worldwide each year. Each block allows for 16 million host addresses. There are 100 blocks still available in the current IPv4 (IP version 4) system--enough for 20 years, or perhaps fewer when 3G, or third-generation, phones take off, but certainly more than the two years predicted by doomsayers, he said.
By John Lui
Special to CNET News.com
June 24, 2003, 6:04 PM PT
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-1020653.html
The idea that there is an Internet address shortage looming in Asia or any part of the world is "misinformation," according to a senior executive at the body responsible for Internet addresses in the Asia-Pacific region.
Paul Wilson, director general of APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre), which distributes and registers Internet address resources in that region, denies the shortage, saying that it will take one or even two decades before the current address system runs out.
"The source of the rumor has been one I've been tackling for the last five years, since I started in this position at APNIC," he said.
APNIC is one of four regional Internet registries currently operating. It provides allocation and registration services that support the operation of the Internet globally. The registry gets blocks of addresses from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA, in the United States before allocating these to Asia-Pacific Internet service providers and other bodies that ask for them.
Some industry analysts have predicted that IP (Internet Protocol) addresses will run out in as little as two years, as more people get access. The experts also point to the historical imbalance in the way addresses have been issued, with the United States grabbing the most, leaving little for the burgeoning Internet masses of China.
The sums just don't add up, Wilson said.
He said that around five blocks of "slash eight," or
Wilson cites several reasons for the birth of the myth of the IP address shortage and the related idea that Asia is a latecomer to the IP address buffet.
"There is a lingering perception that maybe APNIC has been difficult to get addresses from in the past, and people will simply look at the number of addresses allocated in different parts of the world and conclude that somehow things are different in the Asia-Pacific (region). Historically, they were different, but in today's world, they are not," he said.
Today, any organization applying for addresses plays by the same rules, regardless of which country it is from, he said.
"The blocks are allocated as they are required. So we don't have a set of addresses earmarked for the Asia-Pacific. There is no pre-allocation for the region which can run out. When addresses are not available, there will be no more addresses left for the whole world," he said.
The shift to IPv6
There are several good reasons to adopt IPv6 worldwide, he said, but he also hoped that there would be less lobbying from parties with a vested interest in pushing rapid adoption.
He warned of the adverse effect that could occur if panicked companies spent large sums on IPv6 networking hardware.
"The danger of doing that--if you promote that IP addresses are going to run out in a few years, then two or three years will pass, there will be no address shortage. Then what will people think about it?" he said.
However, he added that in the last two years, due to the efforts of APNIC and other bodies, such messages of doom have grown fainter.
In the last few years, the governments of Korea, China and Japan have been strong supporters of IPv6, their efforts strongly backed by domestic network equipment manufacturers and bodies such as the IPv6 Forum.
Equipment makers naturally want ISPs and enterprises to spend money to upgrade to IPv6-compatible products, while Asian governments have felt the new numbering system, with its hugely expanded address space, gave them
The reality is that broadband adoption is slower than anticipated and not everybody in Asia wants or can afford a computer. Not everyone who gets a cell phone wants to surf on it.
The implementation of IPv6 is to prevent the problem before it occurred.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You could argue there's a shortage of IPv4 addresses everywhere as long as it involves more than the most trivial amount of effort or any cost to get hold of them.
IPv6 is very easy to set up and run on top of ipv4. More and more people are doing it and the most effort you have to do it enable the option in your kernel.
Running ipv6 on top of your existing ipv4 address is as simple as these 5 shell commands
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+IPv6-HOWTO/configu ring-ipv6to4-tunnels.html
What people seem to be missing in this is that there's a lot of space still around (100 /8's if the Director is to be believed), which is not allocated to *anyone* right now. If Asias use of IP space grows more rapidly than the US', then APNIC will simply ask for new allocations more often than ARIN would.
I can see running out of space being a concern during the 'net boom, since routing tables and IP space requests were growing exponentially during that time. But, the growth of the routing table has slowed down from that rate (see http://bgp.potaroo.net/), so the time when we'll run out has moved much farther back. We'll need to move to v6 eventually, sure, but I don't think it'll happen for 10 or so years.
Nice plan, except for the fact that flawed MTAs like MS Exchange don't send a fully qualified domain name per default.
Where a real MTA would send HELO/EHLO real.full.domain, Exchange only sends the hostname. Thus the reverse lookup fails miserably.
If you're running a mail server for thousands of users, you would soon enough have thousands of disgruntled people. A lot, and I mean a lot of mail servers are running Exchange with the default settings. This means perfectly legit mail is dropped.
And Exchange admins being pretty daft, of course it's your server that's misconfigured. Trying to educate them otherwise is an exercise in futility. So, no.. this is not a viable option.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life