Slashdot Mirror
NRO Warns They Are On Final IPv4 Address Blocks
eldavojohn writes "According to the Number Resources Organization, they will have issued their final twelve IPv4 blocks in a few months. Each block is 16 million addresses and represents 1/256th of the total addresses issued. We are now down to 12 blocks left in the global pool for issuing to Regional Internet Registries, who will then assign the last addresses that will run out sometime later in 2011. The pool of free addresses works out to be less than half of where we were in January. The new numbers from the NRO indicate estimated global pool IP address exhaustion in a few months, a year earlier than they estimated at the beginning of 2010."
I've heard "we'll run out of addresses in one more year" for the last...well, for certain the last 5 years, but possibly longer.
When will this actually happen?
Living With a Nerd
Well, once the large blocks are used up, there will finally be an impact on ISPs/Businesses to start migrating to IPv6. .... right?
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
I'd like to see you try.
jhw
I want to make milk this IPV4 bubble before it pops. Someone out there must be stockpiling and securitizing addresses. Is there a fund or trust out there?
There's no claim of unused IPs back to LIR. I bet that there's a lartgw number of IPv4 blocks actually unused or overbooked.
As a network admin I've never seen a real check about IP usage for customers without ASs.
This looks like the garbage problem. One side is the production, one is the disposal.
You cannot solve this kind of problem by just lookin gat one of the two sides.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Yes! Let's revoke blocks from AT&T and Level 3! Then we can hand out addresses to everyone that suddenly and mysteriously lost connectivity.
They've been crying wolf for a decade about this. If they'd stop issuing 16 MILLION ip addresses to companies with no viable reason for offices to not use private/NAT addresses, this wouldn't be an issue. How about talking to some of those original companies that got issued /8's? HP now has 2(!!!) /8's in their control. (DEC/Compaq's and their own initial allocation) I doubt a company (even HP) can justify 32 million IPs. Or how about the US DoD? 7(!!!!!) /8's in their control. I find it hard to believe that even the government, who is all about conservation of resources you know, wouldn't be able to use a few different 10.0.0.0/8 networks globally and such. :) (c'mon 112 MILLION ip addresses just for the DoD?! LEARN2NAT ALREADY! Individual missiles do NOT need a public IP address!)
I work for a small company that at most has had 14 full-time employees that started back in the mid 90s. My boss had full class-C block back in the day which worked out to about 20 IPs per employee. He surrendered it years ago, though.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I worked for a company that had a /8 and may have been using at most /20 worth of them....
Bye!
It will pass silently. Just like the Millennium Bug.
Privacy is terrorism.
That's the same mentality as pawning the stuff in your house because your unemployment insurance is about to run out, rather than putting yourself to work and getting a job.
What happens when you run out of IP blocks to reclaim? (Please don't say NAT.)
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Believe it or not, people have suggested that very thing on Slashdot before.
Why do we have to have this conversation every single time the issue comes up? gods...
We have allocated 14 /8 networks since January of 2010 (source: http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.txt )....meaning we go through about 1.5 /8s every month. Reclaiming a /8 will take more than a couple weeks, so the simple fact is that reclamation isn't worth the effort: we would burn through several /8s in the time it would take us to reclaim one of them.
We will just NAT the NATed NATed NeTed NAT and run the entire internet on a single IP address TRA-LA!
Then there's the free market cool-aid crowd who can't see why bidding wars driving the price of a single IP into the thousands a year is a big deal.
Next up, the "It's so HAAAAAAAAaaaaaRRRRRRRRrrrd!" crowd who don't understand why they should burn their geek card for saying that. That and their close relatives who still haven't realized that very simple firewall rules grant 100% of the security NAT does.
Actually there are plenty of places where a /30 is used where they could go address less and use a loop back IP only so that gear goes from a /30 per point to point interface to a /32 for the whole box. In any event it's just wasted time we can not reclaim things fast enough to matter just move on to IPv6 and be done with it.
No sir I dont like it.
I know of a class B address block that is sitting unused. It's a weird dispute - company A received it (I was sysadm then @Company A) However, company A split into two - Company B and Company A. Company B claimed the address block as part of their assets, so I let it go (company A was later bought by company C which was then aquired by company D which encouraged most of A and C to find other opportunities.) A few years after the split - company B closed.
A few years (say, about 10) I start snooping around the net, and lo and behold - my original class B addy space has gone untouched! As it turns out, I now work for Company G, and company B's corp lawyer also works for company G, so I shot him a note. He said two things: 1) Company B still claims it as an asset 2) If I aid him in selling it, I'll get a percentage. Also, I read this as: if I upset the apple cart, my butt will be lawyer grass.
Sooooo... Kind slashdotters - help me make things right. My reading, is that the right thing to do is to contact the number gods, and let them know this addy space is idle. However, as someone who has a keen interest in preserving my own butt, I'd don't want to upset the apple card (see above.)
Comments?
We use up almost 2 /8's every month.
You could go through every one of those and fight the massive legal battle to get them all back ( probably taking us well beyond the date when we are out anyway ), and you have only bought a year or two.
Save yourself the trouble and deploy IPv6, instead of making lawyers rich and then deploying IPv6.
I am a lawyer and this constitutes legal advice and I shall indemnify you against any losses arising from taking it.
No. IPv4 specifies that the host portion of the address with all-0's is the network address, and the all-1's address is the broadcast address for that subnet. If you assign these to an actual host, you will break things very badly. Since a /31 would contain only address 0 and 1, it has no addresses that can be assigned to a host. The /30 subnet is the smallest block that can be given out.
Not a typewriter
We have assigned 14 /8's _this year_ so far, so if you magically get all of those back, you don't even get a years delay. I guess when you say 'That's a LOT of unused IP's' the missing information is that 'We go through a LOT of IP's'.
Spend that effort and money on deploying IPv6 instead.
I am a lawyer and this constitutes legal advice and I shall indemnify you against any losses arising from taking it.
Seriously, we've had IPv6 stacks and routing on all the major OS and trunk lines since 2000.
So why should we care?
Move to IPv6 already.
It's like people complaining because SUVs are now outlawed due to low mpg, but there are cheap hybrids and cars that get 36 mpg on the market for the past ten years.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I want IPv4 to run out. The sooner the better. When Y2K was about to come around, all the businesses who had old code some of it from the '60s, started hiring programmers like crazy. They needed to convert all the dates from two digit year to 4 digits. A massive effort but still only a very small amount of the total codebase that was out there needed to be modified.
Fast forward to 2010, 4-byte IPv4 address running out. A new protocol exists but much of the old software and networks cannot use them. The only solution is to hire a massive number of programmers and rewrite the software..
Think of this, every piece of software on every computer that accesses the internet, has to be rewritten. How big is that codebase? A lot larger than Y2K. I can see this pulling in programmer after programmer like some huge vortex, in a race to be done before last address is given out..
You see why I welcome the new of IPv4. The end of the recession in the tech industry and plethora of new job.
Probably around the same time we stop pretending that a toothless regulatory agency staffed via a revolving door to the regulated industry provides any regulation or safe guards to the public.
ARIN has made small IPv6 address acquisition expensive and complicated. /64 for a modest ONE-TIME (under $50) fee, the fee would go into a pool used to assist in the reimbursement of the government and commercial resources used. Heck, use the US Postal Service to make the assignment of a /64 to every square meter orf our territories. River, mountain whatever, doesn't matter, grid it all up and make an assignment and you have almost eliminated BGP fragmentation concerns.
Two things really need to happen. Large providers need to be forced to offer IPv6 to the doorstep.
In order to prevent the fiber rip-off perpetuated on the American people, any monetary reimbursement to be made only after the fact, but the claim and the validation (by trusted 3rd party or gubmint) of completion should be streamlined (under 90 days).
The U.S. gubmint needs to claim, finance (or declare eminent domain on) the allocation of a sufficiently large IPv6 block to allow ANY existing or future public facing connection to claim a
If an entity needs something bigger, go beg ARIN for a independent allocation.
The Department of Education is almost entirely IPvf6 internally. /64 for every building in every school district.
But no one in the DoE or any other gubmint department has taken the initiative to acquire a large enough IPv6 allocation to provide a
Start with the easy part and get the internal networks renumbered while the public infrastructure transitions.
Connection s should have a default standard ACL for inbound and outbound ports in the upstream router. If you need "special" port access, you have to request it. Since you are already doing a transition, limit port 20 connections to the providers server and "teergrube" (rate limit) the number of connections to 1 per minute.
Problem solved! ;)
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
We use up almost 2 /8's every month.
Don't you mean 1/4 every month? Remember! Always simplify your fractions.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
RFC3021
That's for point-to-point links. It doesn't work for 2 hosts plus a gateway.
Not a typewriter
The trick to get arround that is proxy arp. So the end systens think they are on (say) a /24 but all addresses that client doesn't own are picked up by the router and sent to their real owner.
In this way you can allocate any number of IPs to each client and you can share one subnet,broadcast and gateway address between many clients.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Oh wow, oh wow. I've had this account for over 10 years. I have no other Slashdot login. I hit the karama cap years ago and just don't care anymore. My only self-interest in this is that I've had to deal with NAT problems for a long time (like trying to get two people to play C&C: Generals behind the same gateway at the same time) and want it dead.
If you want proof, go here or here or here or here or here. Or go look at my posting history, where for some reason, I'm using this shrill account to troll a teabagger. (And yes, I very much am trolling there, and pretty much admit to it in the thread. Like I said, I don't care about karama.)
Not a typewriter
We hear plenty of people acting as if we can duct tape IPv4 for ever and plug their ears at the shear mention of IPv6. The truth is instead of spending energy trying to hold afloat a sinking ship, it may be time to start putting the gang-plank out to that shiny new boat that can take us the rest of the way. It doesn't make sense to wait for the boat to be sunk before jumping ship, since you will find yourself having deal with bigger issues. Then again overpopulation and lack of natural resources may have started world war three in a few years, so none of this is worth worrying about ;)
For those of you that have already decided that its time to make the move, what steps have you put in place to ensure you get to IPv6 in one piece.
BTW Akamai is already working on upgrading its network to support IPv6 and have a target date of 2011. The admit that its going to be a tough challenge, but at least they have recognised it makes sense to start moving now, rather than later.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
That is exactly what I thought made it funny. Apparently only one person got the joke. Oh well.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Off with their heads!
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Don't you mean 1/4 every month? Remember! Always simplify your fractions.
It's 1 /7 every month. Computer maths is a little stranger than normal maths.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Bruce is behind a NAT device, which is why news of the disaster is never routed to him.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Hear me out, I'll keep it tl;dr.
Start at 0.0.0.*, these are the bare-root DNS servers, 256 in total.
From those, you have the next level. Repeat until you get to 1.0.0.* and that becomes a NEW bare-root DNS zone.
And from there, you repeat this structure, like a downwards-branching model, very similar to a genetic tree.
This should (assuming a robust enough NAT with a large enough address space,) to allow the IPv4 internet space to last another few millennia, assuming optimal organization and assigning of address space at each level.
Of course, IPv6 was probably designed to do what I propose with fewer digits involved in the address, but hey, eventually it will hit its own limit and either my solution will end up being the optimal one or we design yet another new networking address space.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
We need the vendors like Linksys, Belkin, Apple, Netgear, Motorola and others who make the home routers, cable/ADSL modems and modem/router combos to start supporting IPv6.
And we need ISPs to start supporting IPv6 too.
Phase 1 for IPv6 changeover.
First, Just tell the boos that the internet is full unless you buy more. Explain that in order to buy more internet you need the ipv6 extension equipment.
Only tell this in confidence to the highest ranking person wherever you work. This Especially includes those people working at ISP's or other large carriers as they have been feeding their customers with bullshit for years.
Phase 2 or deux
Begin a spam rumor on as many social networking sites as possible. Perhaps even hang out at places that sell $200 monsters HDMI cables...cough...BestBuy.
Simply Tell people that when shopping for a service provider or device, No matter what kind as it really doesn't matter. Tell them that they should ask for, neh demand IPv6 service or built into their watcha-ma-call-it. Anything less and their internet/cell/icpad/pod won't work to it's best. If it isn't ipv6 then internet will have fewer colours, calls will be slow, or sound won't be as clear and pages won't scroll properly and besides ipv4 is old school obsolete crap.
Phase 1-2 is the master plan to get ipv6 adopted. Then everyone can have one number. Doesn't matter what number it is, but everyone can have one.
Nice troll. How about you read all the other comments before claiming the GP is offering no proof and launching into a some shit fit.
and as usual it's from an anonymous coward..
There's not a whole lot of wasted space left. The only reason we've gotten this far is gratuitous use of NAT. Without NAT, we'd have been out of addresses around 2003.
RIPE has been trying to reclaim space and tighten the requirements to get address space, but it's largely pointless and isn't slowing exhaustion down to any relevant degree.
Reclaiming a /16 will delay exhaustion by about 2 hours, so you'd need to reclaim a lot of those to make any difference at all.
Yes, there are some /8s held by the DOD and various companies. Recovering those would be a legal mess, if it's even possible (those blocks were assigned by IANA before the RIRs existed and were assigned without conditions, so it's not clear if anyone even has the authority to reclaim those addresses, never mind how long it would take until those blocks are really to be reassigned), and it would only delay things by about 18 months, then we're back where we are now, and unless you have a hell of a lot more optimism than me, you know that companies and ISPs will sit on their hands for those 18 months rather than work to implement IPv6 networks.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
When we run out the world will not break. The internet will stop growing for a while.
There will be those that have ipv4 addresses and those that do not.
Those on the outside and having only ipv6 connectivity will be limited by the rate of adoption on the client side. There will be glitches as ipv6 traffic traverses ipv4 links and gateways.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.