IPv4 Unallocated Addresses Exhausted by 2010

An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica is reporting on how the unallocated IPv4 address pool could run out as soon as 2010. The IPv4 Address Report gives details on just how fast the available pool of IPv4 addresses is diminishing. Will ISPs be moving towards IPv6 any time soon? Or will IPv4 exhaustion become the next Y2K?"

Comments

From TFA: free pr0n!

[Rodness]

Despite the best efforts of organizations like ARIN, the simple fact is that, compared to IPv4, IPv6 gives you access to very little content and very few users. So far, nobody has been able to get past this chicken-and-egg issue, although a The Great IPv6 Experiment proposes to change this by giving away free access to "10 gigabytes of the most popular 'adult entertainment,'" but only over IPv6.

Is IPv6 so unappealing that they've gotta bribe people with pr0n to use it?

Reshuffle existing IPv4 space

[McDutchie]

They could delay the inevitable by reallocating existing IPv4 space more efficiently. Many old/historical allocations are inefficient. Apple Computer, for example, has all of the 17.x.x.x space, comprising 256^3 = more than 16 million addresses, which is just plain absurd in this day and age.

Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space

[Detritus]

You and what army of lawyers? :-)

Class A blocks were one of the benefits of being a Internet pioneer. Why should they give them up?

Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space

[Wolfier]

Halliburton Company     34.0.0.0 - 34.255.255.255

Even as someone who doesn't think of Microsoft as an Internet pioneer, I'd rather MS owns this block than Halliburton.

Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

They could delay the inevitable by reallocating existing IPv4 space more efficiently. Many old/historical allocations are inefficient. Apple Computer, for example, has all of the 17.x.x.x space, comprising 256^3 = more than 16 million addresses, which is just plain absurd in this day and age.

Don't complain about Apple. HP has all of 15.x.x.x and all of 16.x.x.x, because they purchased DEC who also had a class-A.

Interestingly, HP is the only company that effectively has a /7 because their block is contiguous.

Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space

[TooMuchToDo]

Actually, you don't need an army of lawyers. Those Class A blocks are delegated solely at the whim of ARIN (at least those Class A blocks that fall under ARIN control). If ARIN has a vote, and the majority of stakeholders create a resolution requiring action to be taken to stave off address exhaustion, then anything is possible.

Disclaimer: I've worked with ARIN to get/manage/return blocks of IPs for years.

Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space

[Kadin2048]

It only seems ridiculous because of the way we distribute IP addresses today, using CIDR. Prior to 1993 (or whenever CIDR was implemented), if you wanted to run a network with subnets, then you needed at least a Class B allocation, so that your subnets could have Class C blocks (254 hosts each).

This is why MIT, Apple, DEC, IBM, and lots of other big companies were given Class A's. It wasn't just a "thanks for playing" reward, it was because the original design for the IP system required Class A blocks if you wanted to run big networks: if you had a big organization, you needed a Class A, in order to do multiple levels of subnetting.

When you look at the IP allocations and see GE or DEC's Class A blocks, it seems ridiculous. But you have to understand that when those allocations were made, what they were looking at was less the number of actual host IPs in the block (which is what we care about now) but the number of Class B and C subnet blocks that were inside. Put yourself in the shoes of someone at a big company like IBM or GE, with lots of regional offices. Each region/office needs to have a network, with its own subnets (for each department or whatever). That's how they were laying things out. "IBM" as an organization gets a Class A. Each regional office or some other division, Class B. Each network or further subdivision, Class C. Yeah, you end up with a lot of wasted capacity, but this whole scheme was designed back when a "host" was a PDP or VAX; there just weren't enough of them for it to seem like a major issue.

The problem people sometimes refer to when they talk about "the last time we were running out of IPs" (back in the early 90s) wasn't really a shortage of IPs at all (well, at least not immediately, although people were definitely realizing it was going to be a problem), it was a shortage of Class B and C subnet blocks. (Particularly Class B's, since that's what medium-size businesses and .edu's really wanted, and there are only like 16k of them around for direct allocation.)

So that's when CIDR was introduced, and it ended the whole 'Classed Network' concept (A, B, and C classes) and replaced it with the now-familiar bitwise/subnet-mask format. (E.g., IBM's Class A block is 9.0.0.0/8, Apple's is 17.0.0.0/8, etc.) This, along with prefix aggregation, allowed more efficient address allocation, and kept the routing tables from growing out of control. Now that you can subnet at the bit level, rather than at the Class level, those A Blocks seem huge. But keep in mind that before CIDR, each of those A Blocks was looked at, not as 16M hosts, but as 254 subnetworks.

It's only in retrospect, with the help of a bunch of new technologies, that the allocations made back in the Internet's early years look ridiculous.

Re:From TFA: free pr0n!

[Kadin2048]

That's really just not true. With IPv6, you can get a lot more anonymity than you have now with IPv4. v6 has all sorts of special provisions for randomly assigning addresses, letting you reset them when you want, so that you can appear to be a new user in the middle of a browsing session. That's tough to do with IPv4; even if you try a DHCP release-and-renew from your ISP, generally they won't issue you a new address until the other one has expired.

IPv6 doesn't force you to give up any privacy, and there's no 'user serialization' unless you buy into it voluntarily.

IPv6 is already here. Been here for awhile

[Zaffle]

I'm continually amazed at the number of people in the IT and Net industry who keep "wondering" when IPv6 will arrive. Its been here for a long time. I'm running a series of web servers for internal company use that have native IPv6 addresses. For public consumption, we have an IPv4 reverse proxy that allows us to run our entire web services behind one IPv4 address. Any customer who has an IPv6 address gets to talk to the individual servers.

The advantage comes when you consider management. In order to have 20 SSH/FTP/etc accessible Internet servers, I'd either need 20 separate IPv4 addresses (getting a decent segment of a class C here is expensive), or I'd have to play fun games with ports. All our technicians have IPv6 on their laptops, and use tunnel brokers for access to the v6 network.

Most of our clients have IPv6 connectivity, though they don't notice it. When we put in a firewall, IPv6 comes default setup with tunnel brokers.

People keep asking, when's there gonna be v6 content? There is no v6 content (ok, their is full colour ascii starwars). Any content provider would be nuts to say "you have to have v6 to see our content" at this point (with the exception of mobile phones). IT Techs brought v4 to the public, we'll bring v6 to the public. Its technicians like myself who appreciate having an Internet accessible toaster (ok, so its not yet accessible) that have already started the ball rolling.

Before long you'll see hosting providers saying, you can have one web gateway shared v4 address and a /64 v6 address for a cheap price. You'll design your websites to be usable on v4, but for management tools, etc, you'll need to install a v6 tunnel.

Easy way to speed IPv6 Adoption

[Anonymous Coward]

Just move slashdot to an IPv6 only address; voilla by monday every corporate will have a functioning IPv6 setup... ;-)

No, it was about Music Piracy!

[billstewart]

I did some business with the @Home cable modem people back during the 90s boom. They had a very schizophrenic attitude about Napster - not only were they paranoid about users running anything serverlike that might interfere with network performance, but they had an official policy about "Napster Users are EEEVILLLL Content Thieves who'll steal television next! Bad! Bad!"

But if you talked to @Home's people as individuals rather than Corporate Employees, almost all of them would say "Well, Duh! Napster is the reason that people are *buying* broadband internet connections, of *course* we like it."

And, ok, the paranoia about servers on home cable modems was partly because their early trial equipment didn't work very well and they had no way to regulate individual upstream bandwidth usage, and PacBell's dishonest "Cable Modem Web Hog" ads made them really worried about perceptions of slow performance, but they were worried that somebody would run a pr0n webserver from home, become Cool Site of the Day because doing that on cable modem would be cool, and trash their neighborhood's network performance while causing a lot of publicity. And unfortunately most of the cable companies have not only not recovered from that attitude, they've been propagating it to the DSL providers, and they've been learning other cluelessly paranoid attitudes from the Australian ex-monopoly who thinks you should cap the total monthly download of their users (since that used to be expensive in Oz), and cap it to a ridiculously low level like 1GB/month, which is like 1.5 days of continuous 56kbps usage.

But when I had my corporate hat on, especially if I was talking to non-California customers, it was certainly much more proper to talk about the big internet usage being for music piracy than for pr0n :-) These days, BitTorrent occupies over 1/3 of the Internet's bits, apparently mostly copying movies and TV and Linux distros as opposed to music (that's by volume, not by number of items), and I don't know what fraction of that is what kind of movies.