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IPv4 Free Pool Drops Below 10%, 1.0.0.0/8 Allocated
mysidia writes "A total of 16,777,216 IP address numbers were just allocated to the Asian Pacific Network Information Centre IP address registry for assignment to users. Some venerable IP addresses such as 1.1.1.1 and 1.2.3.4 have been officially assigned to the registry itself temporarily, for testing as part of the DEBOGON project. The major address blocks 1.0.0.0/8 and 27.0.0.0/8, are chosen accordance with a decision by ICANN to assign the least-desirable remaining IP address ranges to the largest regional registries first, reserving most more desirable blocks of addresses for the African and Latin American internet users, instead of North America, Europe, or Asia. In other words: of the 256 major networks in IPv4, only 24 network blocks remain unallocated in the global free pool, and many of the remaining networks have been tainted or made less desirable by unofficial users who attempted an end-run around the registration process, and treated 'RESERVED' IP addresses as 'freely available' for their own internal use. This allocation is right on target with projected IPv4 consumption and was predicted by the IPv4 report, which has continuously and reliably estimated global pool IP address exhaustion for late 2011 and regional registry exhaustion by late 2012. So, does your enterprise intranet use any unofficial address ranges for private networks?" Reader dude_nl sends in a summary of the issues with allocating from 1.0.0.0/8 from the BGPmon.net blog. "As Alain Durand mentioned on Nanog: 'Who said the water at the bottom of the barrel of IPv4 addresses will be very pure? We ARE running out and the global pain is increasing.'"
And for each of those /8s, you buy maybe 1.5-2 months more time until v4 exhaustion. Most of those /8s were also allocated prior to any policies permitting reclamation. Any recovery of them would involve legal wrangling, which would be expensive and time consuming. Prolonging the end result isn't a viable solution to the problem, when the solution is available now.
A good example of an undesirable IP address is one that's on a bunch of spam blacklists.
Some IP addresses are more likely to have connectivity issues than others.
One major issue improper or poorly maintained filters, that effects most address blocks that were previously not being assigned from equally, hence the DEBOGON projects and testing.
There are more insidious issues that only effect some blocks, however.
For example the guerilla usage of "1.0.0.0/8" by AnoNet, and "5.0.0.0/8" by Hamachi, plus private use of those, and other ranges instead of proper RFC1918 addresses by some enterprises.
Makes hosts that use those IP addresses more likely to have communication problems with other hosts on the internet, just because their IP address is in that block.
Or do a Google search for "jeroen sixxs". You'll hit the motherlode, including these gems (among many):
http://en.linuxreviews.org/SixXS
http://www.koopman.me/2008/04/stay-away-from-sixxs-run-by-a-couple-kids/
https://rejo.zenger.nl/misc/1221048210.php