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IPv4 Will Not Die In 2010
darthcamaro writes "A couple of years ago, the big shots at IANA (that's the people that handle internet addressing) issued a release stating that the IPv4 address space was likely to be gone by 2010. Here we are in 2010 and guess what, IPv4 with its 4.3 billion addresses will NOT be all used up this year. In fact there could be another two years worth of addresses still left at this point. 'We're at about 10.2 percent (IPv4 address space) remaining globally,' John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN said. 'At our current trend rate we've got about 625 days before we will not have new IPv4 addresses available. We're still handling IPv4 requests from ISPs, hosting companies and large users for IPv4 address space, but that's a very short time period.'"
Another two years? Good, now we can all can put off panicking for another two years and not do anything to resolve this in the meantime.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
"...At our current trend rate we've got about 625 days before we will not have new IPv4 addresses available..."
I think this:http://www.xkcd.com/605/ sums it up
Domain squatters and the like use one IP (and one server) for thousands and thousands of domains. They're parasites but they're not using anything like a significant fraction of the available IP space.
...another financial crisis. Because that's the reason there was a slump in allocation rates. The current best projection for IANA pool exhaustion is Sep/Oct 2011. Without the financial crisis that would have been end of 2010. The IANA guys would have been dead on, if not for a once in a 100 years financial event.
/8 is theoretically usable, even before subtracting the legacy allocations. The summary makes it sound like it was a doom-and-gloom prediction that didn't happen to be true, but that's not the case.
The tone of the submission is really silly. There wasn't 4.3B allocatable addresses in the first place. Out of the 256 "/8s" only 219.914
Also, it's "not the next 2 or 3 years", based on the available number of addresses 1.5 years for the IANA pool and 2,5 years are hard bars until RIRs (regional internet registries) run out.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Nothing new there. The university I work at have a /16 network. Everything has its own ip, even projectors. And by God thats how its supposed to work
I predict that 2012 we will still have available IPv4 addresses.
This will happen because some IPv4 addresses will be reallocated as client-side doesn't need IPv4 addresses in IPv6 to access IPv4 resources. So IPv6 adaptation it self will slow the need to migrate to IPv6 as singular Internet Protocol.
...if we actually went after those who currently hold "monster" /8 and even /16 blocks that aren't doing squat (pun intended) with them.
When the IPv4 addresses run out, those "monster" holders will be doing something with them. Selling them.
The "monster" holders are big IT players, and they would never give away something that they see could be a valuable asset in the future.
Go knock at HP's door, with a bowl in your hand, and say: "Please, Sir, can I have some more IPv4 addresses?"
"More? You want MORE!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
No. Repeat after me, there is no market in IPv4 addresses. The current rule is that when a RIR requests a block from IANA that would bring the IANA pool below 5 /8s, then every RIR gets one last /8 from the "final five". Then IANA is done and the RIRs have whatever addresses they have left in their unused pool. For AfrNIC it'll last decades, for APNIC/ARIN it's curtains in about a year.
There is no market in IPv4. There never will be, because reclaiming addresses is too hard and routing can't handle it atm (routing too small blocks). Let's switch to IPv6 already, for fuck's sake, we'll have to do that anyway even if a miracle happens, technical problems get worked out and someone sets up an IPv4 market, about 6 months after.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
You're correct... I'm careful to point out the uncertainty when doing the interviews, but reporters tend to lock onto the IPv4 depletion countdown number regardless...
IPX won't die in 2010, either.
But, in all seriousness, there's a few things to remember here.
1. The v4 address space will be exhausted in the foreseeable future.
2. Reclaiming large blocks only delays that inevitability by a few months.
3. With a few exceptions, modern, supported OSes (Windows [2003, 2008, Vista, 7], GNU/Linux, all of the BSDs, OS X) support IPv6 perfectly.
4. Most of the critical applications support IPv6 perfectly.
5. The big holdup on the consumer side has been with the ISPs. The DOCSIS 3.0 roll-out is ongoing in many places.
6. The US government has mandated it. The compliance date was in 2008 for all of the Federal agencies on their backbones. It's just a matter now of getting ISP access to those sites, and configuring lower-level systems.
The luddite attitude here about this is amazing. If you're really all that concerned about it, and don't want to focus too much on the nuts-and-bolts, here's some advice: Learn BIND. Setting up your resolvers properly will spare you headaches.
I use IPv6 every day. I get lots of e-mail over IPv6 (netbsd and freebsd mailing lists, to name just a couple). I enjoy being able to ssh to all of my machines at home directly. It's here. Evaluate your crap, and see what's not going to work. Plan to replace that stuff. Most of it probably will need replacing by the time you get assigned a /64 or /48 by your ISP, anyway. This isn't rocket science. /rant
Yes there are a lot of ipv6 addresses, however looking at the total size of a 128 bit address space is very misleading as ipv6 addresses are designed to be allocated in a more heirachical manner and designed to support stateless autoconfiguration for clients. Originally end sites were meant to be allocated a /48 though ripe now seems to be pushing for smaller allocations to smaller end sites.
Plus only 2::/3 is assigned to the ipv6 internet with other address space being reserved for other purposes.
Those figures would give us 2^45 end sites, this should be enough that we don't run out of addresses any time soon but it's a lot less than the ammount people assume from just looking at the number of bits in the IP.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
One of the quick and dirty ways to continuing to use IPv4 is to have some of the huge chunks of the address space given back. Do FORD, MIT, Apple, IBM, etc each need 256^3 addresses? (http://xkcd.com/195/) IPv4 has almost 256^4 or around 4 billion IP's that's almost one IP per person on the planet and plenty to last a *LONG* time.
There are going to be lots of little solutions that will stretch out IPv4 for a while.
One that I came up would be to offer a financial incentive to reclaim unused blocks of addresses. Ten or fifteen years ago, IP address space was handed out like candy. You could get a class C block readily, and class B blocks just needed a little justification. I did some contract work in the late 90s for a company that I still keep up with, and they have a few entire C nets in their possession and not in use. Now how do we get these back? There is going to be demand for IP addresses, and as the supply becomes more and more limited, that demand will make people desperate.
So why not let people who already have address space sell what they have? It does reward unrightfully holding onto stuff, but if these addresses are needed, then hey!
You could easily use 64 bit addresses in IPV4 by sticking the rest of the source and destination addresses in the options field of the packet. But why? We would still need to upgrade all the routers and software to work with the new system, except we would be upgrading to a hack not a solution, and we would be ignoring the solution that has already been implemented in many computers around the world. As likely as not, IPv6 already works with the computer you are holding, it just needs to be turned on.
IPv6 is the way to go, and everyone is already heading that way. By the time IPv4 addresses run out, the biggest difficulty may be explaining to your friends how to fix their internet that is no longer working and they don't know why.
Qxe4