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.'"

Comments

Ill bet this will happen

[jhoegl]

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.

Re:Ill bet this will happen

[causality]

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.

Unfortunately I think you're right. We are a very reactive culture, generally. We don't seem to believe in using foresight to ease predictable and inevitable suffering of any kind. I suspect that's because there is a great deal of political power and quick money to be had in crises when people are desperate and afraid, but not so much in preparedness and prevention.

Re:Ill bet this will happen

[Bigjeff5]

Amen to that.

The fact is, we've been preparing for the IPv6 switch for years now. The IPv6 spec reserves space for the entire IPv4 network, making translation between the two a snap. Any modern OS less than 5 years old has IPv6 built in, including conversion between v4 and v6. Almost all commercial networking hardware sold in the last 5-10 years is IPv6 capable, and as I already said using IPv4 within IPv6 is a piece of cake.

The only issue here is going to be the fighting between registrars over address blocks, and that's nothing new. Private addressing with NAT doesn't even need to change if you don't want to bother with it, just change your gateway IP's from v4 to v6 and there you go, bandaid applied until you actually truly need to upgrade everything.

The whole uproar over this issue is silly. It has already been taken care of. Hell it was half taken care of in the IPv6 spec itself, and the rest by the router and switch vendors that have been putting the option in their equipment over the last decade. At worst there will be some minor pains to actually enable and configure the IPv6 capable equipment, and those using really old equipment will have to upgrade their gateways. Those like AnoNet who improperly used IPv4 addresses in the first place are going to have to come up with something else until the switch is finally thrown on IPv6, and that's entirely their own fault. By definition they were not supposed to use those addresses, and they've been bitten for it. Sucks to be them.

The IPv4 problem isn't 1/10th the problem people seem to think it is. The only reason it hasn't been done yet is because it is quite a bit cheaper to spend no money at all than it is to spend a little money for no immediate gain. Companies will spend the money to switch when they need to, and not a moment before; as long as we still have 10% of the addresses unassigned or reserved, there is no need to spend the money yet.

Re:Ill bet this will happen

[Jarik C-Bol]

your right, because if we had been thinking ahead at all, we would have fully switched to IPv6 by now. personally, I'm surprised we 're not having a new Y2K-esque freak-out over this already. (heck, more effort was put into the digital TV switch than seems to be going into IPv6 switch).

Re:Ill bet this will happen

[causality]

Why? He's right. When a problem is right on top of you, it's very easy to quantify.

Yes I know the saying, "ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". But it doesn't work that way. It's hard to quantify a problem that's years in the future, so preventions tend to be financially wasteful.

Note that I specifically (and plainly) said problems which are predictable and inevitable. By definition, these are not difficult to quantify. This is why attention to detail, good reading comprehension, or whatever you prefer to call it is important. Sorry but I see this mistake all the time and it's a careless one.

At any rate, Aesop had it right. The ant had a much easier time than did the grasshopper.

Lao Tzu had it right as well. To paraphrase, every large and difficult-to-solve problem was once a small problem that could have been easily solved. Once realized, the only limit to the application of this principle is whether you have the fine perception necessary to notice a problem while it is in its early stages and nip it in the bud before it blossoms. What I was saying before is that government does not grok this principle because it doesn't want to; it has no such incentive. That is, it's unreasonable to expect an amoral organization to willingly take any action that would result in less money and power for that organization. Government is unfortunately no exception.

It's hard to institute a Federal Reserve system if there is no Great Depression. It's hard to pass a law like the Patriot Act if there is no September 11th attack. It's hard to justify warrantless wiretapping if there is no bogeyman around every corner. The term for the technique is the Hegelian Dialectic, aka "Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis," aka "Problem, Reaction, Solution."

Re:Ill bet this will happen

[lennier]

"every large and difficult-to-solve problem was once a small problem that could have been easily solved."

Or alternatively, it was a small problem that could not be easily solved, because all attempted solutions caused other problems.

Just because a problem exists doesn't mean a solution does.

Re:Ill bet this will happen

[toddestan]

Well, you can put a little asterisk next to Windows as XP cannot do DNS lookups over IPv6, which is kind of a big problem if you want to browse the internet using just IPv6 in XP. I kind of doubt Microsoft is ever going to fix this, as this will end up forcing a bunch of people off of XP if the switch ever happens.

What about getting back some...

[mrboyd]

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.

How's NAT64 coming along?

[Nicolas MONNET]

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.

Dual stack is NOT the solution.

[Nicolas MONNET]

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.

Re:IPv6?

[Chris Mattern]

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.