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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.
But somehow I doubt it.
Whatever. The world has had how long now to move to IPv6? If we had two additional years, we'd be talking about this two years from now instead of right now. I've been using it for nearly 10 years now. I just hope that this threat is finally becoming significant enough to get ISPs and other organizations moving faster in the right direction.
To be fair, we've had almost 10 years. Strike that, 12 years.
We've even had all OS and router support for 5 years.
Fact of the matter is, nobody's moving to IPv6 until they *have* to. We can cry doom and gloom all we want (we have been, after all), and nobody cares. When Comcast can't address new customers, they'll get off their ass.
Though that's a bit of a gamble. The right answer is moving to IPv6, the best answer is doing that in advance, but they'll definitely consider just NATting new customers. Hopefully they'll do things properly, but this is ISPs we're talking about.
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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.
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They definitely say no. Not only that, if the utilization of your existing IP space drops below a certain threshold, ARIN will start taking it back. And they won't take back your emptier networks, they'll take back whatever they want (usually the largest ones, i.e. the ones you most want to keep). They also no longer issue anything bigger than... I think a /22? It might even be smaller.
Everybody except ARIN was always like this, of course. ARIN could afford to be more generous because the US has a disproportionately large number of IPs for its population (and even for its server count). But now they're in the same boat as APNIC and RIPE, so they've gotten much stricter than they used to be.
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.
You conveniently cut out the part of the quote that said ARIN would "receive a request for IPv4 address space that is justified and meets the policy". Have you ever applied for IPv4 space? ARIN does say no if your application does not have sufficient justification. I've had it happen, when someone decided we needed to apply for space when we hadn't really filled our existing space (it was just assigned inefficiently).
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.
Too late. Hindsight is 20/20, etc. Does MIT really need a /8? No. Does HP need two? No. But as with any scarce resource when no more IPv4 addresses are available they will rise in value and people will auction off their space. The price will have an upper bound at the cost of deploying IPv6. That'll buy us another few years. And then people will NAT even more. That'll buy us a few more. And by that time most people will be ready to move to v6. There really is no need to panic here. I'm not sure where all of the anxiety stems from. The people that understand the issue and care about it are aware of it and on top of it. I suspect an ulterior motive.
add some protocol translation to their network to deal with anything that can't handle IPv6
You do realize that you need IPv4 addresses to do that, don't you? IPv4 systems can't talk to you if you don't have IPv4 addresses. Let's say you want to host virtual private servers for 1000 customers and each server must be individually reachable from the IPv4-only internet. What do you do if you can't get 1000 IPv4 addresses? Nothing, you're fucked.
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.
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.