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At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses
An anonymous reader excerpts from an interesting article at Ars Technica, which begins "There are 3,706,650,624 usable IPv4 addresses. On January 1, 2000, approximately 1,615 million (44 percent) were in use and 2,092 million were still available. Today, ten years later, 2,985 million addresses (81 percent) are in use, and 722 million are still free. In that time, the number of addresses used per year increased from 79 million in 2000 to 203 million in 2009. So it's a near certainty that before Barack Obama vacates the White House, we'll be out of IPv4 address[es]. (Even if he doesn't get re-elected.)"
No, not really. There's companies with whole fucking /8 that have no real purpose to own them, but they've just always had them:
003/8 General Electric Company 1994-05 LEGACY /8's ?)
004/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc. 1992-12 LEGACY
008/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc. 1992-12 LEGACY (two
009/8 IBM 1992-08 LEGACY
013/8 Xerox Corporation 1991-09 LEGACY
015/8 Hewlett-Packard Company 1994-07 LEGACY
016/8 Digital Equipment Corporation 1994-11 LEGACY
017/8 Apple Computer Inc. 1992-07 LEGACY
019/8 Ford Motor Company 1995-05 LEGACY
034/8 Halliburton Company 1993-03 LEGACY
044/8 Amateur Radio Digital Communications 1992-07 LEGACY
045/8 Interop Show Network 1995-01 LEGACY
047/8 Bell-Northern Research 1991-01 LEGACY
048/8 Prudential Securities Inc. 1995-05 LEGACY
052/8 E.I. duPont de Nemours and Co., Inc. 1991-12 LEGACY
053/8 Cap Debis CCS 1993-10 LEGACY
054/8 Merck and Co., Inc. 1992-03 LEGACY
056/8 US Postal Service 1994-06 LEGACY
Just get rid of the companies that are reserving such huge spaces without having a real reason to do so, other than that they were there to reserve them in start of 90's. Also US and UK army and defence and other ministers have several /8, but why really? Other countries do just fine without too.
No, not really. There's companies with whole fucking /8 [iana.org] that have no real purpose to own them, but they've just always had them:
The block you listed contain a total of 301,989,888 addresses. At 2009's rate of 203 million addresses per year, returning those blocks would buy us less than 18 months. Big whoop.
Also, some of those companies actually do make significant use of the addresses they have. For example, I happen to know that IBM uses a good chunk of the 9.0.0.0 space.
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For what? Do all their PCs have public IPs?
At present, yes. Also their phones. But the employees' PCs are a fraction of IBM's computers. Keep in mind that IBM runs large data centers all over the world.
Yes, were IBM to go through a very large and expensive network restructuring to move many of the internal networks to NAT, they could probably give a few million addresses back. Maybe as many as 15 million. And at the 2009 rate that would buy us 26 days.
Where I work has an entire class B and all of our PCs are public and we're talking now about NAT'ing them all, for security reasons.
That's silly.
There's no security value to NAT. NAT does provide a stateful firewall that disallows inbound connections, but you can do that just as well without NAT, and with a great deal more flexibility.
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Thank you for pointing that out. So many people seem to think NAT is a security tool. I think it's because just about any router capable of NAT also has a stateful firewall (since NAT requires tracking of connections) and many people don't understand the distinction.
Repurposing the D and E spaces won't fly. The D space is used. Think of the hell entailed if 224.0.0.5 and 224.0.0.6 get routed. Bye bye OSPF. Plus you'd have to recode every OS and firmware that understands those as multicast addresses to treat them as unicast. That's not even discussing what might be coded in for the E space in random OSes and firmwares. And after all that work, it'd buy us maybe two more years. Just go v6, it's already in the OSes, and would be in the firmwares if the end-user ISPs would just push the CPE manufacturers a little bit.
That's already been thought of. As an ISP, you don't get to just make up whatever rules you want to determine how many IPs you can assign, beyond a certain point, you have to apply RFC 2050, per the name resource policies:
Because it is.
In actuality, need is defined as the minimum number of IP addresses that will be required within a certain period of time in the future, according to Network Engineering plans that get submitted to ISPs (LIRs and RIRs) in order to apply for IPs; efficient utilization means utilizing 80% of the IPs to address internet hosts. IPs that will be required in the near future are needed and part of the justification.
Currently 25% immediate utilization is required after 6 months, 50% required after 1 year.
All existing IP allocations must be 80% utilized.
ARIN NRPM, 4.2.3.1. Efficient utilization ISPs are required to apply a utilization efficiency criterion in providing address space to their customers.
ARIN NRPM, 4.2.3.6 Reassignment to multihomed downstream customers: Under normal circumstances an ISP is required to determine the prefix size of their reassignment to a downstream customer according to the guidelines set forth in RFC 2050.
Specifically, a downstream customer justifies their reassignment by demonstrating they have an immediate requirement for 25% of the IP addresses being assigned, and that they have a plan to utilize 50% of their assignment within one year of its receipt.
4.2.3.3. Contiguous blocks: if a customer moves to another service provider or otherwise terminates a contract with an ISP, it is recommended that the customer return the network addresses to the ISP and renumber into the new provider's address space. The original ISP should allow sufficient time for the renumbering process to be completed before requiring the address space to be returned.
RFC 2050.
Why have a legal battle? Just let the current holders auction off sub-blocks.
You're assuming that the holders of these /8's have been using some sane way in which to assign the IPs within their blocks such that large, contiguous regions are still readily available that make the unused addresses readily routeable. Which, from my experience, they don't. And as the Internet would become nearly unroutable if millions of /31's and /32's suddenly appeared, the only way you could make this work is by having each and every one of those organizations effectively defragment their address use to make large, routable blocks that could be reassigned (e.g., /24s or /16s) -- and for organizations of the size that we're discussing, the cost of that is going to be way more than they'll be able to charge for those address blocks, and they aren't going to do it, fight or no fight.
You can't take an entity the size of (for example) IBM and have them compress their address use into a /12 to free up 240 new /24's without it being a very significant cost in terms of effort and downtime -- particularly when they have absolutely no incentive to do so. Nobody in their right mind would spend the necessary amount of money to make it worth their time and effort, when they can get millions of addresses in IPv6 for next to nothing.
Yaz.
I'm still waiting for ISP:s to offer IPv6.
As soon as the ISP:s starts to offer IPv6 it will be easier in general to use and develop for IPv6
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.