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RIPE Region Runs Out of IPv4 Addresses
New submitter 8-Track writes "The RIPE NCC, the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, distributed the last blocks of IPv4 address space from the available pool. This means they are now distributing IPv4 address space to Local Internet Registries (LIRs) from the last /8. An ISP may receive one /22 allocation (1,024 IPv4 addresses), even if they can justify a larger allocation. This /22 allocation will only be made to LIRs if they have already received an IPv6 allocation from an upstream LIR or the RIPE NCC. Time to move to IPv6!"
or, you know, just use ipv6.
I don't know where you get that IPv6 is a "full protocol rewrite" of IPv4. For the most part it does exactly the same as IPv4 except with more address bits, and in some cases it even simplifies its predecessor (e.g. no IP header checksum). Any person able to understand or implement IPv4 ought to be able to understand or implement IPv6, because there are no fundamentally new concepts. (I would venture that most people who criticise IPv6 don't even understand fully what IPv4 does, so they don't really know what they're talking about.)
I am also interested in hearing what a "simple extension of IPv4" would be, in your opinion. Odds are you will propose something to the tune of keeping the original IPv4 header and semantics, and tacking some extra address bits at the end. Except in that case you'd still have to teach every fucking router and end system in the world how to decode the new-fangled packets, which is not any different from IPv6 from a cost perspective. You might as well do it right and fix some of IPv4's warts (header checksum, autoconfiguration, node mobility, etc) instead of applying a band-aid solution.
NAT is hardly an acceptable extension of the IPv4 addressing space because NATted clients do not have the same capabilities of non-NATted clients. (Yes, I know about hole-punching techniques; they do not solve the problem fully, and in respect to what they do, they are defeated by many real-world NAT implementations.) If you don't understand the importance of this, I encourage you to read about the end-to-end principle. Finally, it is ludicrous to suggest that implementing NAT at the scale that will be required by the ever-growing Internet would be any cheaper than IPv6. Carrier-grade NAT doesn't exactly come for free.
Score: i, Imaginary
how much longer would they have?
We currently use around 12 class A networks per year of which there are only 255 in total (many of which are unrelocatable due to being reserved for localhost, multicast and so on) . Whenever you hear people complaining about IBM or whoever holding a large chunk of IP addresses, that refers to a single class A network. So getting IBM, HP or Xerox to restructure their network and give back their IPs would buy you one month each time. There aren't a whole lot of companies holding class A networks, so you could at maximum get probably 2 years or so, realistically much less.
A little extra time to shake out the bugs from any infrastructure upgrade seems couldn't hurt, too.
We already had 14 years to do that, another one or two won't make a difference. IPv6 doesn't need time, it needs something that forces people to make the switch, running out of IPv4 seems to slowly building up to be that force.
If you don't know the answer to that question, then the answer is no. You need to actually update your DNS records for the domain to include an AAAA record with your IPv6 address. Without that record an IPv6 only client will have no way of even trying to reach your domain. So, you need to get an IPv6 address, and then put that IPv6 record in DNS. If your Internet provider doesn't provide IPv6, then you have three options. Use a tunnel (tunnelbroker.net is the one I have the best experience with), switch to a better Internet provider, or wait for your current Internet provider to catch up.
Users who have both IPv4 and IPv6 will be able to reach your website, even if your website only has IPv4. The users, which will experience problems, are those who have only IPv6. There is still a couple of ways ISPs can make those users reach your site, but they involve NAT, which will reduce the reliability. Those NAT solutions come in two flavours. There are the CGN solutions, which are just doing IPv4 and work similar to the typical NAT people have at home, just at a larger scale. The other option is NAT64, where the NAT translates between IPv6 and IPv4.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Fuck NAT. Don't you dare preach that ugly hack as the Right Way to solve the problem.