IPv4 Will Not Die In 2010 264
darthcamaro writes "A couple of years ago, the big shots at IANA (that's the people that handle internet addressing) issued a release stating that the IPv4 address space was likely to be gone by 2010. Here we are in 2010 and guess what, IPv4 with its 4.3 billion addresses will NOT be all used up this year. In fact there could be another two years worth of addresses still left at this point. 'We're at about 10.2 percent (IPv4 address space) remaining globally,' John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN said. 'At our current trend rate we've got about 625 days before we will not have new IPv4 addresses available. We're still handling IPv4 requests from ISPs, hosting companies and large users for IPv4 address space, but that's a very short time period.'"
IPv4 doesn't die (Score:3, Insightful)
IPv4 doesn't die - it just runs out of available addresses.
Panic Averted - Resume Doing Nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Another two years? Good, now we can all can put off panicking for another two years and not do anything to resolve this in the meantime.
Re:Panic Averted - Resume Doing Nothing (Score:1, Insightful)
That's the American way - if it doesn't hurt right now, it doesn't exist. Just look at Social Security, MediCare, MedicAid, the worthless dollar...
Re:Increase in domain value? (Score:1, Insightful)
A domain doesn't necessarily equate to a unique IP address. Most "little-visited domains" are on virtual hosts sharing their IP address with many others, or they're on someone's home server where the IP address is needed for that home's internet connection.
Re:What about the domain parking, tasting, sniping (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks to Apache and the miracle of Virtual Servers, one can use one IPv4 address to host thousands of domains! This depends on HTTP1.1, though, and old browsers can't handle it, but nobody cares about them.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name#Use_in_web_site_hosting [wikipedia.org]
In conclusion, your argument is invalid.
I genuinely wish they would just give it all away. (Score:3, Insightful)
We'll never be able to justify the cost of implementing IPv6 properly until it becomes something customers are demanding, and that won't happen until there is stuff on the Internet people want that to reach couldn't get hold of an IPv4 address.
Still, I suppose I just have to be patient.
Guess we'll just going to have to have... (Score:5, Insightful)
The tone of the submission is really silly. There wasn't 4.3B allocatable addresses in the first place. Out of the 256 "/8s" only 219.914
Also, it's "not the next 2 or 3 years", based on the available number of addresses 1.5 years for the IANA pool and 2,5 years are hard bars until RIRs (regional internet registries) run out.
Re:Could last another 10 years... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Could last another 10 years... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:IPv4 doesn't die (Score:3, Insightful)
IPv4 will die shortly after x86 does, which is to say: a long time from now.
STUPID (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Could last another 10 years... (Score:5, Insightful)
...if we actually went after those who currently hold "monster" /8 and even /16 blocks that aren't doing squat (pun intended) with them.
When the IPv4 addresses run out, those "monster" holders will be doing something with them. Selling them.
The "monster" holders are big IT players, and they would never give away something that they see could be a valuable asset in the future.
Go knock at HP's door, with a bowl in your hand, and say: "Please, Sir, can I have some more IPv4 addresses?"
"More? You want MORE!"
Re:Not entirely true (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Repeat after me, there is no market in IPv4 addresses. The current rule is that when a RIR requests a block from IANA that would bring the IANA pool below 5 /8s, then every RIR gets one last /8 from the "final five". Then IANA is done and the RIRs have whatever addresses they have left in their unused pool. For AfrNIC it'll last decades, for APNIC/ARIN it's curtains in about a year.
There is no market in IPv4. There never will be, because reclaiming addresses is too hard and routing can't handle it atm (routing too small blocks). Let's switch to IPv6 already, for fuck's sake, we'll have to do that anyway even if a miracle happens, technical problems get worked out and someone sets up an IPv4 market, about 6 months after.
Re:Nortel's class A? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Panic Averted - Resume Doing Nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Issues that NAT causes? Like shielding n00bs from the wilds of the internet?
NAT is a blessing. It allows people to access the net without being exposed to it.
Someone should write some software that can be put on a router that would offer the same protection without also causing all the problems that come with NAT. It would be like this large barrier that burns up any unauthorized data that tries to get by.
Hopefully a good marketing person can think up a decent name for such a thing.
Re:Could last another 10 years... (Score:2, Insightful)
Give them 5 class B's of their choice from their current class A, and reclaim the rest, then this issue will go away for a long time.
No, it won't. The equivalent of one class A net of IP addresses gets assigned every 28 days. It would buy a few months and the resources are better invested in the transition to IPv6.
Re:Could last another 10 years... (Score:2, Insightful)
Having live IP addresses is the way it should be done. NAT offers no more security than a simple firewall in this case.
Ah, no, having live IP addresses is the way it was done, back before viruses, trojans, 10,000-node botnets, and Microsoft got involved. That "simple" firewall you speak of is now absolutely mandatory for damn near any business or home today.
Trying to run the Internet "traditionally" on a 30-year old protocol is like trying to drive a Model-T on the freeway. Neither of the original designers ever envisioned what the future would bring.
And yes, I realize that IPv6 design will help eradicate NAT, and get it back to the way it "should" be from an addressing standpoint, but one can also see that just from a Security view, IPv6 is a far cry from v4.
Re:Could last another 10 years... (Score:3, Insightful)
The projector is mounted on the ceiling, and your laptop is on your desk. You wirelessly hook up the projector as an external monitor.
You're in a lab, and your media server is in your room. You hook up and start streaming music. The possibilities are endless.
All sorts of things Just Work so much better with ipv6.
Re:Panic Averted - Resume Doing Nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that if you read between the lines, this is all a subtle stab at the 2 year estimate. "A couple of years ago" we were slated to run out of addresses by 2010. Now they're estimating 2 more years.
We're bound to eventually run out, and it's probably going to be cheaper to start getting IPv6 out there now rather than at crunch time. But there's a lot that can be done to stretch out the IPv4 address space. I predict that we'll see major ISPs using NAT (and offering upgrades to real IP addresses for exhorbitant prices) before we see significant IPv6 adoption.
Re:Could last another 10 years... (Score:1, Insightful)
You do realize that NAT != Firewall, right? You can have a firewall without a NAT gateway. Your local router will do that job, just like it does now. And it will be able to do it better as it's not spending cycles dealing with address translation.
Re:IPv4 doesn't die (Score:3, Insightful)
At current trends, the 10% remaining will last less than two years. 256^3 addresses is less than half a percent. One of those huge blocks would be gone in about a month. Even if you freed up every single IP address, that would not last very long. Probably less than ten years, as demand grows.
Re:IPv4 doesn't die (Score:3, Insightful)
There are nearly 9 billion people on the planet. The problem of taking a Class A away from a company is that they would have to take years and millions of dollars to redo their address space to what you'll let them keep. We do not have that kind of time, and it's not as easy as you think to do such a thing. Getting a lawyer would be cheaper compared to the costs of changing ip addresses. There are servers out there that have ip's hard coded into them at the costs of tens of thousands of dollars to get it changed.
Re:Could last another 10 years... (Score:3, Insightful)
126 * 28 days = 3,528 days, or just over 9 years, and that's only by re-allocating wasteful Class A's currently in use.
9 years is a lot more than a few months.
That's also the problem with these extrapolations, because as the addresses become more scarce the assignment rate slows down. When IPv4 addresses were first being handed out, they were given at a rate of 5-10 Class A's a week. We're down to one a month now, in a year it will be one Class A every two months, if that.
It would buy a few months and the resources are better invested in the transition to IPv6.
You're obviously not very good at business, because with any change the conversion to a new system is never worth it until the cost to maintain the current system is as expensive or at least very close to the same cost. Right now for the Tier 1 ISPs, the backbone of the internet, it is still significantly cheaper to extend IPv4 than to make the switch to IPv6. Doing so could cost them hundreds of millions, if not billions in manpower costs (the hardware should be pretty much there already).
Re:There's plenty of addresses left. Don't panic. (Score:5, Insightful)
IPv6 is the way to go, and everyone is already heading that way. By the time IPv4 addresses run out, the biggest difficulty may be explaining to your friends how to fix their internet that is no longer working and they don't know why.
Re:Could last another 10 years... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Could last another 10 years... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, that's why this whole "peak oil" thing is bogus - because of course as we run out of oil, our rate of using it will go down!
...
You see the problem, right? At some point we're going to start feeling some pain - we'll be foregoing the use of an IP address that we could really put to productive use - but we can't because getting one is too difficult/expensive. The point is that your problems start long before you use up the absolute last bit of a valuable, scarce resource./p.
Re:IPv4 doesn't die (Score:3, Insightful)
IPv4 has almost 256^4 or around 4 billion IP's that's almost one IP per person on the planet and plenty to last a *LONG* time.
Now all we need to do is to replace all the routers on the Internet with ones that can manage 4 billion routing table entries. Wanna bet that IPv6 will be cheaper?