What Happens When IPv4 Address Space Is Gone 520
darthcamaro writes 'We all know that IPv4 address space is almost all gone — but how will we know when the exact date is? And what will happen that day? In a new report, ARIN's CIO explains exactly what will happen on that last day of IPv4 address availability: '"We will run out of IPv4 address space and the real difficult part is that there is no flag date. It's a real moving date based on demand and the amount of address space we can reclaim from organizations," Jimmerson told InternetNews.com. "If things continue they way they have, ARIN will for the very first time, sometime between the middle and end of next year, receive a request for IPv4 address space that is justified and meets the policy. However, ARIN won't have the address space. So we'll have to say no for the very first time."'
Re:The Internet is Full (Score:1, Interesting)
This is the more likely situation. The address price wont just run out but the prices will increase. Cost of one ip address is $0.5-$1 currently. IPv6 is not ready for mainstream use yet. If we ever run out of addresses, it doesn't mean they won't be available. It just means you have pay more for them.
Re:Hmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
You conveniently cut out the part of the quote that said ARIN would "receive a request for IPv4 address space that is justified and meets the policy". Have you ever applied for IPv4 space? ARIN does say no if your application does not have sufficient justification. I've had it happen, when someone decided we needed to apply for space when we hadn't really filled our existing space (it was just assigned inefficiently).
Re:Hmmm (Score:1, Interesting)
but they'll definitely consider just NATting new customers.
Trouble is, 99% of users won't even notice. If they profile the users to figure out which ones won't notice beforehand, even more.
Naw, they'll just NAT everyone and charge users that want a publically addressable IP. They will give the tier a name like "Gamer Pro" and the chart that lists differences between packages will have a new row for "Ability to host internet games" or something like that.
Re:Hmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
They never say no to anyone.
...a practice that spammers frequently take advantage of to churn through blocks of essentially disposable IP space. They do this to avoid sender-reputation based blocking techniques, which are used by pretty much all modern spam filters these days. The focus used to be on content inspection tools like SpamAssassin, but I digress.
Spammers typically start out by setting up a "grey" block of IP addressses that they use to basically filter down their lists of email addresses to remove honey pots and emails that trigger bounces/complaints. These grey blocks get banned pretty quickly so they'll then set up "white" blocks of IP's from which they send mail to the remaining addresses. When the white blocks start to get banned, they basically repeat the process with fresh IP's...and so the cycle continues over and over.
I couldn't find any statistics on how many IP blocks are continuously wasted by this practice, but I'll bet the number is pretty big. ARIN has become a bit stricter since the early days of the Internet when it was handing out class-A's and B's to any large institution who cared to ask, but it still has a long way to go.
Comcast is starting IPv6 (Score:3, Interesting)
I just relocated to Virginia and to my surprise, Comcast is providing IPv6 addresses on their residential links. I'm going to activate IPv6 on my dd-wrt router and all my PCs sometime this weekend.
A lot of unused space left (Score:2, Interesting)
Back in the day when SCO was still headquartered in Santa Cruz, I had one of their OS coders teaching a Unix class at a local college. He pointed out that SCO had ended up owning two entire /8 networks.
Wonder if selling those could fund another round of lawsuits?
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So now the question is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, let's say the IPv4 space ran out today and your ISP said you now have to run your server out of an IPv6 address.
You're now forced to move your server to another ISP that still has addresses available (probably ones that will start NATing all their non-server based clients so they can use their IPv4 allocations for server use).
If ISPs start moving non-server clients over to IPv6, then things will transition slowly, and at some point (ie. in 5 years) it will become feasible to run a server solely in the IPv6 address space as it will be accessible by the majority of users. Things progress this way until only a few dedicated IPv4 servers/clients are now safely behind translation routers.
However, instead of using IPv6, the sad thing is those ISPs will probably use IPv4 NAT to do the translation. The net effect is we push the crunch out a couple more years, but the following future is likely to develop as:
Fast forward a couple of years and now you find that all the ISPs charge a significant amount extra to run your server from an IPv4 address. You just pay more as it's just business as usual and you have no other choice. The ISPs with huge allocations are all laughing as they can leverage their allocated spaces at ever increasing dollar amounts. It's wonderful! The geeks aren't happy, because now it costs a lot more money to run their non-profit servers. Big business doesn't care, because it helps them by increasing the barrier to entry for smaller companies trying to compete with them on the internet front.
Fast forward five more years and things are now getting out of hand. Everyone is running behind NATed 10.x.x.x addresses (except large public servers), every second URL contains a port designator, port 80 web servers are now a luxury, ISPs are giving users the option of cheaper port redirects back to their own servers, and people are claiming that we've solved the problem for another 10 years.
Still the geeks are worried, but no one else cares. They now have less 'cruft' on the internet to worry about, and as long as they can still get to their Bittorrent/Porn/Facebook/YouTube they are happy as Larry.
Re:Hmmm (Score:1, Interesting)
$1/ip/year.
HP would figure out how to give them back pretty quick if it'd save them $50mil/year.
Maybe the proceeds could be spent on adding SNI support to clients that don't have them?
It's simple (Score:4, Interesting)
The Class A owners will sell off chunks of their space one B class at a time.
Maybe slashdot should go ipv6 only... (Score:4, Interesting)
...and we can watch the nerds scramble to upgrade their home and work enterprises so they can access it. :-P
I'm joking, or at least I think I am. If Slashdot did that I'm sure I would put more effort into getting an ipv6 address.
Over twenty years ago (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The Internet is Full (Score:3, Interesting)
"Control the Spice, Control the World"
Srsly though, everyone who wants to "sell unused IP space" needs to take a CCNA course and lurn up on some routing facts.
IPv4 space is divided into large blocks, /22 or larger (aka 1024 address blocks) which are listed in the Global Routing Table (several hundreds of megabytes long) and then distributed to EVERY BORDER GATEWAY on the planet, including mine.
Getting traffic routed to one IP means knowing which very large block it is in, and sending the traffic down the right path to that ISP.
Thus, you cannot just sell off small blocks of IP addresses without the Global Routing Table balooning hundreds or thousands of times, which means everyone would have to upgrade routers, which would (shock and surprise) all be IPv6 compliant at that point anyway.
Re:The Internet is Full (Score:3, Interesting)