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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."'
The Internet is full ... come back later.
Send users to dev/null.
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.
Just do what I do at work. Ping the address, if there is no reply, assign it to something else.
But somehow I doubt it.
There are a few. See figure 5 of Geoff Huston's IPv4 Address Report.
Trying? I'm done.
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.
I guess it's time to start filling bathtubs with IPv4 addresses!
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.
An important job had to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done
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You seem to think that that company will be ok with an IPv6-only setup. This is not the case. An IPv6-only host can only be reached by other IPv6 hosts. So all those schmucks out there without IPv6 won't be able to reach the company. That's probably a dealbreaker.
They could reclaim blocks from companies and then hand out 1 IP for them to run behind a NAT firewall
I believe that's already being done. Though I believe the biggest single owner is DoD.
they could start to charge for IPv4 addresses on a yearly basis
Good idea. Never happen.
I've advocated charging a higher fee for second level domain names for a long time. After all, if you really need one, paying $30/year or even a lot more, is a minor expense compared to your hosting costs. It would put an end to cybersquatting. But every time I suggest it, I get flamed half to death. People won't pay a penny more than they have to for something, and never mind the consequences. Call it the WalMart effect.
The only solution is to move to IPv6. But, as you point out, people won't do this until they have to.
No, worse, they won't even begin preparations. Not a big deal for most of us, but the changeover is going to be non-trivial for ISPs, manufacturers, and a lot of other people who do Internet infrastructure.
When I was at Sun, I was on a product team for a new product with an embedded Service Processor (for remote control, diagnostics, lights-out management, etc.). Whenever I suggested that the new SP have IPv6 support, I was told "none of our customers is asking for this feature."
Yeah, there are calculations. They all come to the same conclusion: The effort needed to get those addresses back in to use is enormous and the benefit would be that the final deadline moved 12-18 months forward...
In other words, it's not even close to being worth it.
Well, personally I'm not into BSDM. NAT is an unnecessary pain and a ugly hack that raises complexity and breaks stuff.
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...and offer them some serious wonga to switch to IPv6 and/or make more use of DHCP/NAT etc.
A lot of Universities have class B blocks (and a lot of those addresses are assigned to Ethernet cards now sitting in dusty cupboards and landfills). Still a non-trivial job, but probably easier for universities than big business.
Universities are gagging for cash at the moment - and even if all the cash is spent on the switch
Or the gub'ment can make them do it. Here in the UK, back in the 80s, the powers that be were forcing universities to use the ISO networking protocols: forcing them to switch to IPv6 is far less silly than that (e.g. unlike the ISO stack the IPv6 protocol actually exists and has been implemented by people).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Phones, TVs, and millions of other devices that will never need to act as servers will be forced behind NAT walls.
There will be two price structures, client access and server addresses.
Client, will be NAT only. Server will have a real address whether it be fixed or variable.
Maybe they will even charge by DHCP lease time statistics.
Eventually, the entire IPv4 address range will be relegated to servers. And all the clients will be IPv6. They will be told that the "tunneling" is just temporary, but it will in fact be permanent.
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.
I just relocated to Virginia and to my surprise, Comcast is providing IPv6 addresses on their residential links. I'm going to activate IPv6 on my dd-wrt router and all my PCs sometime this weekend.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Back in the day when SCO was still headquartered in Santa Cruz, I had one of their OS coders teaching a Unix class at a local college. He pointed out that SCO had ended up owning two entire /8 networks.
Wonder if selling those could fund another round of lawsuits?
Funny. Despite the amount of posts you have created here, you still don't realize where the real problem is. For any IPv4 host to reach your IPv6 hosts through protocol translation, you still need to have an IPv4 address. And this is a problem if there are no more IPv4 addresses available.
Try a thought experiment, you are an IPv4 host on the "old" internet, and you are trying to ping an IPv6 host behind protocol translation. What will you write to the command line? I would be interested to see how you would manage to answer this without the IPv6 host having an IPv4 address assigned as well.
Of course you are correct about all the routers and operating systems being IPv6 ready. But that is not the problem, accessing the old internet is the problem.
Berkeley Software Distribution Masochism?
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Ok, let's say the IPv4 space ran out today and your ISP said you now have to run your server out of an IPv6 address.
You're now forced to move your server to another ISP that still has addresses available (probably ones that will start NATing all their non-server based clients so they can use their IPv4 allocations for server use).
If ISPs start moving non-server clients over to IPv6, then things will transition slowly, and at some point (ie. in 5 years) it will become feasible to run a server solely in the IPv6 address space as it will be accessible by the majority of users. Things progress this way until only a few dedicated IPv4 servers/clients are now safely behind translation routers.
However, instead of using IPv6, the sad thing is those ISPs will probably use IPv4 NAT to do the translation. The net effect is we push the crunch out a couple more years, but the following future is likely to develop as:
Fast forward a couple of years and now you find that all the ISPs charge a significant amount extra to run your server from an IPv4 address. You just pay more as it's just business as usual and you have no other choice. The ISPs with huge allocations are all laughing as they can leverage their allocated spaces at ever increasing dollar amounts. It's wonderful! The geeks aren't happy, because now it costs a lot more money to run their non-profit servers. Big business doesn't care, because it helps them by increasing the barrier to entry for smaller companies trying to compete with them on the internet front.
Fast forward five more years and things are now getting out of hand. Everyone is running behind NATed 10.x.x.x addresses (except large public servers), every second URL contains a port designator, port 80 web servers are now a luxury, ISPs are giving users the option of cheaper port redirects back to their own servers, and people are claiming that we've solved the problem for another 10 years.
Still the geeks are worried, but no one else cares. They now have less 'cruft' on the internet to worry about, and as long as they can still get to their Bittorrent/Porn/Facebook/YouTube they are happy as Larry.
There will suddenly be massive demand for IPV6.
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There are currently two companies forcing the hand of the consumer ISPs to adopt IPv6.
Since February this year Youtube has put all the actual media reachable on IPv6 as default when you access the youtube website through their normal DNS name.
Apple's time capsule and airport extreme by default sets up IPv6 through tunnels.
This means that a lot of people with Apple computers browsing youtube movies are heavy users of IPv6.
As there are only a few tunnel brokers, the load on those will be quite high.
The Class A owners will sell off chunks of their space one B class at a time.
...and we can watch the nerds scramble to upgrade their home and work enterprises so they can access it. :-P
I'm joking, or at least I think I am. If Slashdot did that I'm sure I would put more effort into getting an ipv6 address.
I was part of Open Systems Interconnection, OSI. We were pushing one of those many technologies like XNS, CHAOSnet, DECnet, IPX, SNA, and ATM/SONET that 'competed' with TCP/IP (NCP had been beaten back by then;^). Before the days of NAT, I had a "very persuasive" presentation that showed the Internet running out of 32-bit IP addresses by 1995 (China and India were my big closers that silenced a lot of TCP wonks). OSI had a 'better' addressing scheme that did everything -- distinguished end systems (ES) from intermediate systems (IS), facilitated class of service, extended addressing to the transport/session/presentation layer services, incorporated MAC layer addressing, facilitated source routing, provided network management hooks, and would give you a blow job that pealed the cover off a plenum cable. It was the ultimate networking addressing scheme. The routing vendors, who were accustomed to shoving the whole network layer address into a 32-bit register, said they couldn't implement a 20+ byte NSAP address, even though they only had to route on a small portion of it. In the 1980s, that was probably true. Most of OSI died (X.500, ASN.1 and a few others survived), partly due to its massive scope (like ADA), and partly due to the fact that the authors ignored the IETF and most of the people who implemented the Internet. Much of what OSI tried to do is now being done by the IETF on their own schedule and their own mandate. To the victors go the spoils and the spillage.
this is one of the biggest hypes since the y2k bug fiasco... they've been telling us we're going to run out next year for YEARS now..
No they haven't. At least not the serious people. 2011 has been the projected year for quite a while. Easily verified by just using archive.org to look at the history of the potaroo.net automated IPv4 exhaustion counter. It has tracked 2011 as the year of exhaustion since at least 2006 (first entry in archive.org)
I heard they've got some IPv4 left in California.
well y2k arrived just a the predicted time ...
I paid thousands for 127.0.0.1 years ago in anticipation of this. Cha-ching!