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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.'"
What will happen will be the standard that us humans have followed throughout the ages.
We will wait until the IPv4 addresses run out and then force businesses to start using IPv6 if they want to get on the internet.
There will be a temporary boon for networking manufacturers as companies will have to change their equipment
As a side curiosity, I wonder how many public IPv4 IPs are actually in use.
I seriously doubt that GE, IBM, AT&T, Xerox, HP, Apple, MIT, Ford, AT&T (again), Halliburton, Bell, Prudential securities, UK government Department for work and Pensions, Dupont de Nemours and Co., Inc, Merck, USPS and some others deserve or need a /8.
From the beginning of IPv6, something was missing: the possibility for IPv4 only hosts to reach IPv6 only hosts. The solution is a form of nat, called NAT64, but a few months ago it was just a vague proposal AFAIK. As long as this is not solved, the transition to IPv6 *cannot* work. There is a simple reason: the planned transition involves ALL hosts talking both IPv4 and IPv6. When you speak both, inevitably the least used IPv6 is not supported well, and people end up using only IPv4.
It's so obvious, I find it shocking it's not taken into account more seriously.
This has been addressed time and time (and time) again. a) Those organizations would have to defrag their IP space before large blocks could get released, a process that's slow, intensive, and expensive. But more importantly, b) even if they did that, and then release those blocks for reallocation, at the current rate of consumption, it'd buy us, what? 18 months? Two years at the outside? Meanwhile, global routing tables would get even *larger*, and they're already gigantic.
No, reallocating unused IPs is a total fucking waste of time. That time would be *far* better spent getting IPv6 deployed so we could all move on from this mess.
I have dual stack at home, natively. For all intents and purposes, IPv6 is useless to me. As a result, support is worse. If it goes down, I don't really notice it, and my ISP doesn't give much of a fuck ("err, use IPv4").
Furthermore, as long as not everybody has dual stack, everybody suffers from IPv4 address exhaustion. In other words, the dual stack "solution" means that we have to use IPv4 until every single host (or at least every host we need to talk to) has implemented IPv6. In reality, it's clear that 20 years in the future there will still be idiots still running IPv4, because they can't be fucked to migrate. When I see how networking is broken in many enterprises, I don't see how they'll ever migrate to IPv6. I could tell you about all the brokenness I've witnessed, even in companies that are supposed to be somewhat technically oriented, and it's fucking scary.
Forget dual stack. And don't call it a "solution," it's not just ridiculous, it's delusional.
IPv6 works like this. Every ISP and backbone peer has looked at the massive investment necessary to make their entire installed plant IPv6 ready, the large amount of work required, the fact that they will probably break everything about five times in the process because they did something wrong, and has decided that they will migrate when someone holds a gun to their heads and absolutely forces them. Not before.
The IPv6 spec reserves space for the entire IPv4 network, making translation between the two a snap
That reservation is more or less a joke. It is great (in principle) if you want to send a packet from an IPv6 host to an IPv4 host. But how does the IPv4 host send a reply back? The short answer is, it can't. It can't because there (obviously) is no static mapping of IPv6 addresses to IPv4 address. There is no way to cleanly fold 128 bits into 32.
That means that there are only three basic ways for IPv4 hosts and IPv6 hosts to interoperate: v4v6 network address transation (NAT), application layer gateways (ALGs), and dual stacks. Presumably, the main point of IPv6 is to avoid NAT, so v4v6 NAT is a relatively undesirable solution. Application layer gateways for every external communication protocol are even more problematic. That leaves dual stacking, which is a way of solving the IPv4 IPv6 interoperability problem by conceding the plain truth - that IPv4 and IPv6 are not interoperable and never will be.
The only way to avoid NAT or ALGs is for every last Internet connected device on the planet to be dual stacked. That is going to take at least a decade. There will probably be lots of strange NAT and ALG solutions in between.
The more interesting question is if there were a market for IPv4 addresses, such that organizations had a significant economic incentive to renumber and minimize the number of IPv4 addresses they used (and the size of the routing tables necessary to reach them) how long could we survive on the current system? I would guess a half century at least.
Given the likelihood of this sort of economically motivated renumbering effort once centrally allocated blocks of IPv4 addresses run out, at what point does the overhead of the necessary network address translation outweigh the cost of administering a parallel IPv6 network that reaches nearly every device on the planet, in addition to the IPv4 network that is already there and which must remain there indefinitely (down to the level of each individual PC) in the absence of all the alternative v4v6 NAT and ALG devices we are trying to avoid in the first place?
Essentially IPv4 has a defective design, and IPv6 has exactly the same defect, with a slightly larger address space. Slightly because hierarchical allocation will use up those initial 64 network addressing bits in a big hurry. IPv6 is no more than a stop gap for a some sort of variable length address (VLA) scheme, the only alternative that that isn't essentially an exercise in planned obsolescence.
It doesn't matter how many IPv6 addresses you have as long as there remain IPv4 only clients that cannot access them. The only way the transition is going to be gradual is with a whole host of v4v6 and v6v4 NAT and application layer gateway devices.
The main people that need to run such devices are the end user ISPs. Until they do, no IPv4 only client will ever be able to reach a IPv6 only server. SNI aside, every publicly addressable IPv6 server will require the same number of IPv4 addresses as it does now. Dual stacking will not save an iota of IPv4 address space until IPv4 clients are practically required to use some sort of v4v6 NAT or ALG to access the rest of the (IPv6) Internet. To say nothing of the v4v4 or v6v4 NAT required so that every last ISP client doesn't require a routable IPv4 address as well.
I have have seen the future, and it is NAT until the cows come home (unfortunately). All this dual stacking is a worthless exercise without the v4v6 and v6v4 NAT (or ALGs) necessary so that the number of IPv4 addresses required actually goes down. I sure hope somebody is reserving the address space so that v4v6 NAT is actually practical, because we are going to need it for a long time, and the IPv4->IPv6 transition won't happen without it.