Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.