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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!"
Don't we already have enough people on the internet? Why do we keep encouraging more? :-)
Note: to all you humor-impaired people, the smiley face indicates this is a JOKE.
John
I will soon run out of underwear (I have been told this since 2009). I still have not done anything about it despite holes in them. Count on my continued responsiveness to this problem.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I'm going to wait it out and skip straight from IPv4 to IPv8... IPv6 could be the Windows Vista of the IP world.
or, you know, just use ipv6.
Yeah agreed. I've been on native IPv6 (dual stack, obviously) for, hmm, approaching two years now (I'm in the APNIC area so they ran out of IPv4 a while ago) and honestly I'm only reminded of the fact when someone brings IPv6 up in an article or something. The changeover was easy from the user's perspective - it just works. Indeed I suspect many users of my ISP don't even know they are on IPv6.
The resistance and heel-dragging on the changeover in many places/companies is a bit mystifying to me. It's not really that hard.
Sigh. We've been over this countless times. Even if you managed to reclaim all IPv4 ranges that are not being completely used presently, you would buy yourself only a few more months (at current growth rates) until you ran out of addresses again.
I seriously have a hard time trying to understand why so many people on Slashdot seem to be militantly against IPv6. You'd expect more of an allegedly technologically literate audience.
Score: i, Imaginary
Like youtube, google, facebook and slashdot.
ok, all except slashdot.
>The rapture is here!
It's the IPocalypse!
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Bullshit. I have followed IPv4 exhaustion in detail for the last 5 years. The prediction was always that IPv4 will run out at the global level between 2010 and 2013 (it happened in February 2011), and run out at the regional level in the years after that (it happened in April 2011 in Asia-Pacific and today in Europe-Middle East). So no surprises at all. If you are a European ISP, and you stuck to the rules of RIPE NCC, you now have IPv4 stocks that should satisfy your growth needs for the next three months. After that, you cannot grow your network anymore without resorting to the mess that CGN is.
Guess what, they did: ::FFFF:111.222.111.222 is IPv6 for 111.222.111.222. But you still need to "fool around" with equipment because there is no way that an IPv4-only device can address an IPv6 device.
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.