Slashdot Mirror
UK's 'Unallocated' IPv4 Block Actually In Use, Not For Sale
jimboh2k writes "The UK may have 16.9 million 'unused' IPv4 addresses but according to the department that owns them, they're not for sale. The Department of Work and Pensions says it would be too expensive to reallocate those addresses and, even if it did, it would not stave off IPv4 address exhaustion by much."
The addresses in question are being used for a new internal government network. Of course, why that project wasn't built using IPv6...
For a home user it is not all that much of an issue, if you are running a remotely recent OS then it is probably already IPv6 capable. At worst you may need to replace your modem/router box, and those who would have trouble with this are likely to be with an ISP that takes care of such matters for them.
When you are dealing with large scale infrastructure and corporate networks however, things become a little more difficult. At that scale the assumption of running a recent OS doesn't always hold, so you have software updates to worry about which incurs at least a time cost (and time is money). Also the possibly replacing your router becomes replacing racks worth of managed switches, routers, dchp servers and so on. That's not even beginning to take into account all of the legacy software that expects IPv4 and requires it in order to work.
So, yeah. Simple for home/small business users, but a major project for the IT guys who make things work behind the scenes. Fortunately said tech guys should have been working on getting ready for this for a while already; just like when they made sure that the world didn't fall over at the turn of the millenium.
Because nobody has any real interest in changing to IPv6. Everybody has a working IPv4 infrastructure, and isn't interested in spending money to change over because they have no idea of how that's going to make anything better.
IPv6 has been coming "real soon now" almost as long as I can remember. And people have mostly been saying "I don't see any good reason" for just as long.
For large organizations, changing to this is one of those things that nobody can figure out why they'd go through the time and expense.
I know a lot of people on Slashdot look at IPv6 as some serious awesomeness that everybody should be jumping at. But, really, if you have thousands of machines already running IPv4, that 10.0.0.0 address is just fine for now and there's simply not a compelling reason to start undertaking the transition.
What's the benefit? What reason would a large corporation find that makes them decide to go through the pain of transitioning? By the time you invest in changing everything over and going through all of the expense and disruption ... in what way would companies be looking at getting an ROI from this?
I just can't see why people think organizations should be undertaking this, because I don't see the pay off and the business case to be made for it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
One does not simply "file" a report in the UK.
...report to be filed, signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public enquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
Fear is the mind killer.
I think what people have forgotten here is quite how old the internet is, for how long the British have been involved in it, and how tightly integrated into British government it has been for a long, long time.
I'm sure Slashdotters don't need a history lesson on the origins on the internet; as a cold war military network designed to re-route traffic in the event of a nuclear strike on what would otherwise be single points of failure. What readers might need a reminder on, is the UK aspect of this early history.
Whilst the internet began as a US-only operation, within only a handful of years this had spread to the US' closest NATO ally, the British. Given that even us Brits cheerfully admit that, from a NATO perspective, our island is essentially a 700-mile long aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic that can never be sunk, the involvement of the UK in the early days of the internet should come as no surprise. It's also well known that both American and British universities got in on the act fairly quickly, initially from the perspective of military research; most British universities were either directly addressable or a short hop through a gateway from the internet by the early 1980s. Other close NATO allies, notably the Canadians, ditto.
What's not so well understood is that, as absolutely certain first exchange targets, the British had an extremely highly developed government continuity strategy for nuclear war. Some parts of this have come to minor public attention in the form of amusingly retro nuclear bunkers that have been re-purposed as museums, archives or modern telecoms junction points (look up the codenames Guardian, Anchor and Kingsway) with varying degrees of practicality. There are some very chilling bits like the "Protect and Survive" videos (now on Youtube) that frankly still scare me silly and we'd all rather forget. Further, there other parts such as the RSG Regional Seats of Government which remains partially, or perhaps even largely, obscured by national secrecy (and probably rightly so).
This stuff was set-and-forget, it's original design brief was that you wouldn't be able to call the IT department if the IT department had been killed in the first strike, it had to work and remain working without significant intervention.
Understand that concept - understand that the internet has been at the heart of the most serious British government infrastructure for around 40 years - and you begin to understand why /8 IPV4 address blocks have been, often literally, hard-wired in to the British government. This network was the network we would rely on, to survive. It was the one thing the British government could depend upon. It was the one thing which, when planning IT infrastructure, the government could be absolutely certain about.
Having that level of certainty allowed us to build other infrastructure around it, such as the PSN Public Services Network,
To those arguing that it's just a bunch of router reconfigurations... this is not your piddling little /24 home office network. Nor is it simply a bunch of VPNs linking regional offices over a few leased lines. This is not even one IT-savvy megacorporation like IBM. This is a nuclear-war-proof combined civilian and military network which over 40 years has been integrated into every government department and every local government office in a country of 70 million people. It's in the job centres, the benefits offices, the local tax offices, the post offices, the village doctors' offices. It's throughout public service departments which are staffed by people who, on the whole, are pretty good civil servants but who don't actually have a reason to need to know how it all hangs together, and in the vast majority weren't around when it was plumbed in.
Would this cost more than the value of the address space to reconfigure to 10.x.x.x or IPV6? Crikey, yes, Ten times yes. Magnitudes of scale yes.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com