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Last Days For Central IPv4 Address Pool
jibjibjib writes "According to projections by APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston, IANA's central IPv4 address pool is expected to run out any day now, leaving the internet with a very limited remaining supply of addresses. APNIC will probably request two /8s (33 million addresses) within the next few weeks. This will leave five /8s available, which will be immediately distributed to the five Regional Internet Registries in accordance with IANA policy. It's expected that APNIC's own address pool will run low during 2011, making ISPs and businesses in the Asia-Pacific region the first to feel the effects of IPv4 exhaustion. The long-term solution to IP address exhaustion is provided by IPv6, the next version of the Internet Protocol. IPv6 has been an internet standard for over a decade, but is still unsupported on many networks and makes up an almost negligible fraction of Internet traffic. Unless ISPs dramatically accelerate the pace of IPv6 deployment, users in some regions will be stuck on IPv4-only connections while ISPs in other regions run out of public IPv4 addresses, leading to a fragmented Internet without the universal connectivity we've previously taken for granted."
It's called "tunneling." If you're playing those on a modern system capable of IPv6, the system can make the game see an IPv4 connection. It doesn't have to know the IPv4 connection is wrapped inside a v6 connection.
Next thing you tell me you can't own domain names or email addresses either? Of course you can't own numbers, but you can own IPv4 addresses
You can't own an IPv4 address. That's been the policy for over a decade.
And no, you can't own a domain name either. If you don't pay the renewal fee, and anyone can register it after it lapses - so you're just licensing or leasing it.
And since email addresses are connected to domain names, you don't own them either.
What I don't get is why the people who came up with IPv6 didn't make the upgrade path easier? Obviously I'm missing something, but what if (for the sake of argument) they had decided that the first 'n' IPv6 addresses would correspond to the complete set of IPv4 addresses, and all IPv6 routers, etc, would understand that one of the first IPv6 addresses meant 'route the traffic to the corresponding IPv4 address'. Could that have been done?
This is the way it is. The first 4 billion IPv6 addresses maps to the entire IPv4 address space.
If so, then people could have been upgrading to IPv6 over the last 10 years as opportunities arose (ie as old equipment needed replacing they'd have replaced with the IPv6 option) and still have been able to see the IPv4 world. As more w/s moved to IPv6 only there would be a compelling reason for more people to follow suit ...
People could have been doing that but they didn't. So here we are.
Or am I completely missing something that would have made this impossible?
Yes, just mapping between IPv4 and IPv6 using this mechanism does not make it possible for your old IPv4 host to communicate with a IPv6 host using an address outside the 4 billion address space supported by IPv4. So what you describe is not actually backwards compability.
The real compability is called "dual stack" meaning all IPv6 hosts also have IPv4. As we are running out of IPv4 this might be using NAT to conserve addresses. People have been doing dual stack for a decade now, but just not enough. It is said about 0.5% of the traffic is on IPv6.
Your ISP was supposed to give you an IPv6 address along with your IPv4 address 10 years ago. But they didn't.
Your OS provider was supposed to make your OS support dual stack 10 years ago. They actually did.
Your router provider was supposed to make your router dual stack capable 10 years ago. They didn't.
Your software provider was supposed to implement dual stack support 10 years ago. To a large extend they did, but some programs are still lacking here.
IPv6 is great, but they could have solved the problem far more elegantly 10 years ago.
Add two octets to the front of v4. Solved after a firmware flash.
Any existing IP becomes 1.0.x.x.x.x
If a router encounters a x.x.x.x address, it just appends 1.0 to the front.
The old internet and the new internet would have run side by side - for the most part working fine until everyone had updated their firmware.
Sure, it's not the engineering solution v6 is, but it would have been in use long ago.
They did this. Except they added 12 octets in front of v4 and mapped existing v4 addresses to 0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.x.x.x.x.
And the old and new internet runs side by side currently and we are just waiting for everyone to update their firmware.
An easy way to promote IPv6 would be if it were know or assumed that Google assigns higher pagerank to sites using IPv6 addresses. Then it would be something that customers of hosting companies would insist on, at least.
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