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Latin America Exhausts IPv4 Addresses
An anonymous reader writes "LACNIC, the regional Internet registry for Latin America and the Caribbean, considers its IPv4 address pool exhausted, because it is down to less than a quarter of an /8, roughly 4 million IPv4 addresses which are reserved for facilitating transitioning mechanisms. Half of those addresses will be assigned on a first come, first served basis, but no more than 1024 addresses per organization every 6 six months. Allocations from the last 2 million addresses will be a maximum of 1024 addresses total per organization. To maintain connectivity, it is now indispensable to make the switch to IPv6. LACNIC's CEO expressed his concern that many operators and companies still haven't taken the steps needed to duly address this circumstance. The RIRs for Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America have all imposed similar limitations on IPv4 assignments when they also crossed their local exhaustion thresholds. As of now, only AfriNIC is not in address exhaustion mode."
Joining North America, and Europe/the Middle East/Central Asia.
We warned you years ago this would happen! But no-one ever listens.
For years, indeed. I think it was 14 years ago, in 2000, on April Fool's day I announced on a major forum that the internet would be down for about 20 minutes while the root nameservers were switched over to IPv6.
Surprisingly, Comcast is now giving out /64 IPv6 addresses in my area (south-eastern Massachusetts). Spent a couple of evenings last week getting it all connected. Works fine.
Yeah soon you won't be able to go on the internet!
Let us know when it gets down to zero available and then we'll spend the weekend fixing it.
If we're too lazy to switch to ipv6 then they need to just start charging per ip.
$1 per ip per year should be sufficient to cause plenty of ip hoarders to return their stock.
If that's not enough then increase it to $1 per ip per month. Still small enough that
it shouldn't really affect anyone too much. My guess is any computer that can't
absorb a $1/month charge is not an actually computer and should have a private
10.0 number anyways.
Charge per ip might also be a good way to help encourage ipv6 switchover.
This sounds like Y2K all over again...
What, that legitimate problem lots of people worked on successfully to avoid before it could have major consequences? Yeah, I agree.
Does every cellphone, toilet, refrigerator, atm, medical device, desktop terminal, etc etc etc really need a public IP address?
How else do you expect the NSA to track them?
1024 per 6 months per organization.
So what will organizations do? Right. Reserve 1024 IP addresses every 6 months, need them or not, because they MIGHT need a few 1000 down the road at some time. Chances are they don't, but "just in case".
Our government tried to limit water use by cutting off water supply whenever it got scarce. Can you imagine how much water got wasted? The reason is simple, people filled every kind of container (bathrub, sinks, buckets, even coffee cups) whenever water was available, only to drain it whenever water got available again to refill with fresh water...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not saying it's not possible but all of the cable modem they've put out that is IP6 compatable has it's IP6 disabled
If you're looking at the modem's status page (192.168.100.1) and it says IPv4-Only, that actually has nothing to do with whether you have IPv6.
The quick and easy way to find out is to just run "tcpdump -n ip6" and see if anything shows up. I didn't realize I had IPv6 until I did that, as the configuration changes I made to Linux to support a Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel rendered it unable to configure itself automatically with my native IPv6. Even after knowing it was there, it took me a couple of days to figure out how to get it working. Seems the OS support for IPv6 isn't completely sorted out, and so you run into a lot of odd things that work in strange ways that you then have to sort out. In particular, if you want to use a Linux box as a router, you have to set up a DHCPv4 client, a DHCPv6 client, a DHCPv4 server, a DHCPv6 server, radvd, and get the kernel parameters sorted out so that it will actually accept router advertisements and route packets at the same time. I eventually gave up and just run pfSense in VirtualBox, but even figuring out how to get that to work wasn't trivial. Thus, I wouldn't conclude that you don't have IPv6 until you see tcpdump fail to show any IPv6 packets after running for ten minutes.
Not that disappointed, using a HOSTS file and working with IP4 address I've a bit of sense about them, IP6 I couldn't tell you if I've seen it before or not,
Well, the good thing is, even if IPv4 disappears from the internet, it'll still exist on your LAN, and so you can continue to access computers on your LAN via IPv4. I ended up configuring the firewall on my computers to block all incoming connections via IPv6, and just use IPv4 when connecting between them via SSH. As such, I'm using IPv6 basically as an internet-only protocol, which seems to make a lot of sense: I have little IPv4 addresses for my little LAN, and big IPv6 addresses for the big internet.
These kinds of stories have been popping up on Slashdot for a while, but I note Slashdot *STILL* doesn't have an IPv6 address even though it's a site supposedly run by and for technologists. Meanwhile, Facebook, a site made for teenagers to post selfies on, has had IPv6 support for three or four years.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
So you really never had to deal with a computer program that calculated difference in years by going "take number of years in 'new date' and subtract number of years in 'old date'"?
Just to give you a hint, and NDAs be damned in this case, you have NO IDEA how many bookkeeping programs had a LOT of problems calculating annual write offs right. You just never noticed it because the programs are not real time dependent and you have a LOT of time to work with between noticing the problem (when you do your first version of your balance) and the time it becomes critical (when you have to hand in your balance to government/auditor/board).
There were other, not so "fortunate" situations where a lot of money had to be used to get it done in time. And the ever feared "what if the nukes notice they had no contact with control for a century?" doomsday was only the tip of the iceberg. You really can't even imagine half the big and small tidbits that ran on systems that had exactly the problem.
And yes, January 2038 certainly is going to be an interesting time again. It is rather unlikely, though, that it will be as big a problem since Jan 2038 is mostly an OS problem rather than an application program problem. I.e. we should see fewer and (mostly) easier to fix problems.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
One of the problems with IPv4 address exhaustion is that routing tables become very complex. Having everyone try to glom a dozen random /24s together to make their local networks will not help.
Also, this is an exponential growth situation, so stopgap measures won't buy much time anyway.
Visit the
The problem is with people not understanding probability or what a prognosis is. It's like a pack-a-day smoker whose doctor says "you're probably going to get cancer within ten years if you keep this up". Five years pass, ten years, fifteen years... nothing; clearly the doctor is an idiot and I am an immortal cancer-immune demigod. Twenty years... boom, cancer.
"Realistic prognosis"? You can't accurately predict unexpected changes. So you err on the side of urgency, because if what you predict happens sooner than expected, that's much, much worse than if you respond sooner than you actually need to.
Instead, people first ignore the warning, then see that the bad thing didn't happen on schedule, then deciding that this invalidates the entire warning.
(See also: Climate change.)
This is a solved problem. As one of the smartest and most knowledgeable computer experts in the world, Stephen Fry, has said, all they need to do is register a .uk domain to generate new IP numbers.
Waiting for IPv7, I hear its going to be much better.
Whatever you do, don't settle for IPVista.
An actual example of an IPV6 address is as follows:
2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334
That is not an actual example of an IPv6 address. Lets try with some real examples instead:
google.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:4005:801::1007
gmail.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:400f:803::1016
facebook.com has IPv6 address 2a03:2880:2110:df07:face:b00c::1
arin.net has IPv6 address 2001:500:4:13::124
arin.net has IPv6 address 2001:500:4:13::125
ripe.net has IPv6 address 2001:67c:2e8:22::c100:68b
gigabit.dk has IPv6 address 2a00:7660:0:50::2
The last one is my own website. Your IPv6 address is as long as you want it to be. Many ISPs will assign you a /48 prefix, which is just 16 bits more than your IPv4. It is literally just an area code more (two bytes). What happens with the last 80 bits is up to you. You can make them all zero if you want to. And since all zero can be shortened to "::" that all just goes away.
As to those first 48 bits there is a system in it, which makes it easier to remember. Notice how all of the above has either 2001 or 2a0x as the first block? Also the second block is the ISP and most people only deal with a few of those. So you will quickly memorize that. The third block is basically your customer id within the ISP. And everything after that is yours to decide.
It is true that if you go with auto configuration addresses on your computer, you will get horrible long addresses. But if you are doing that, you are not the kind of person to deal with IP addresses. Personally I let my computer choose any long address it want, but for my servers I am picking something sane.
It's world cup. big titted groupies and cheap beer. screw this internet shit.
You do realize that a 32 bit computer will easily do 64 bit math?
Right...I get the pro-change argument, I just (still) think it was arbitrary and jarring.
It may seem trivial, but something as simple as keeping the decimal notation would probably have gone a long way in spurring adoption of IPv6.
I know that representing numbers in hex doesn't make them different, and takes up less screen real estate, but they *look* different. I think everyone talking about reasons for low adoption vastly underestimates the psychological impact of the way addresses are represented in v6.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law