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What Happens When IPv4 Address Space Is Gone
darthcamaro writes 'We all know that IPv4 address space is almost all gone — but how will we know when the exact date is? And what will happen that day? In a new report, ARIN's CIO explains exactly what will happen on that last day of IPv4 address availability: '"We will run out of IPv4 address space and the real difficult part is that there is no flag date. It's a real moving date based on demand and the amount of address space we can reclaim from organizations," Jimmerson told InternetNews.com. "If things continue they way they have, ARIN will for the very first time, sometime between the middle and end of next year, receive a request for IPv4 address space that is justified and meets the policy. However, ARIN won't have the address space. So we'll have to say no for the very first time."'
However, ARIN won't have the address space. So we'll have to say no for the very first time.
Hmmm, maybe that's part of the problem? They never say no to anyone. Do all those companies really need all those IP blocks? Maybe if they had said "no" once in a while we'd have another year or so to work out how we'll get everyone over to IPv6.
The Internet was designed so that any computer could connect to any other computer. This is evident in the design of things like FTP, etc.
Every phone, watch, fridge, TiVo, computer, and printer should have a public IP address. Imagine if you didn't need to port forward for Bittorrent, if Skype could connect right to your friend's computer, or you could print to your home printer by just entering its address. That's how the internet was/is supposed to work.
NAT breaks this. Behind a NAT box, nobody can address a specific computer - only the NAT itself. This happens to lend some security, but is essentially accidental. With IPv6, your home router will instead be a firewall. Each computer will be addressable, but will still need to pass through.
Plus, there's enough address to give each subscriber many thousand. And they don't need to change. No more charging for a static IP...
Also, routing is more efficient since it can be done properly by hierarchy.
So there's a bunch of reasons. Pick some.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
in the short term it will add value to IPv4 addresses, and organizations not using them might *gasp* make money getting rid of ones it doesn't need. That's not a bad thing. We have this problem with spectrum too, there's no particular cost in having a huge chunk idling away once you've got it. Anything which motivated more efficient utilization is good, and money creates a motivation.
A short term will drive up the cost of IPv4 addresses will, in turn, make IPv6 look much more economically viable to people who actually pay for things. As with everything else in the real wold: money makes things happen. IPv6 isn't magically cheaper than IPv4, so no one has been all that bothered about it, so either you lower the cost of IPv6 or raise the cost of IPv4, and running out of IPv4 addresses manages the latter nicely.
That's not necessary, IPv6 already has the IPv4 address space blocked off and reserved for IPv4 addresses, so all you need is protocol translation for the systems that can't understand IPv6. It's not a hard problem. Yeah it will cost a little money, but really it's a drop in the bucket compared to everything else a business needs to deal with.
You band-aid it until you can justify the necessary overhaul. Eventually everyone will be on IPv6.
In other words, the reason nobody is rushing to fix it is because it's not that big of a deal. The problem is small enough that you won't really need to worry about it until it actually comes up.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Similar to the expansion of the US "wild west", we're due for years of backfilling and territory arguments. Look ahead to the owners of /8 address ranges having them confiscated. (MIT, for example, hardly needs it: they should be NAT'ing all their internal traffic anyway to prevent "computer science majors" from pulling stupid stunts like the David LaMacchia case (http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=169520).
NAT is notoriously lighter weight to support than IPv6, and helps provide some border control of undesirable services from inside your network. Replacing the router infrastructure and the configuration tools for stable, legacy systems to support IPv6 is expensive and the benefits of IPv6 are frankly underwhelming. It's exciting "auto-configuration" is, in most cases, a horrendously bad idea for public facing systems, and private systems don't need it. Useful security features, such as IPsec, were backported to IPv4. And the robust technical features of IPsec seem to be overwhelmed by the far easier to use client behavior of PPTP.
Multicast? Oh, dear. Do _not_ get me started on the flaws of multicast programmers decided that the lack of information about missed packets in multicast forcing them to rewrite TCP, badly, as an unstable software layer on top of multicast.
No, it's artificial scarcity because the demand only exceeds the supply because those who control the demand (e.g. ISPs) choose to limit the supply by not upgrading their networks to use IPv6.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Uhuh.
Let's pretend, just for the moment, that this idea isn't ridiculous (it'd be simpler to deploy v6 than to get all those operators to re-number their networks). The current projected timeline for the remaining 20 /8s to run out is September, 2011, which is 17 months away. You propose to return 26 /8s to the pool. So, assuming the rate remains constant (which it won't), that gives us, what, 24 more months? Maybe?
Wow, way to go big guy! Instead of 2011 for IANA exhaustion, it'll now be 2013! Problem solved.