Last Days For Central IPv4 Address Pool 376
jibjibjib writes "According to projections by APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston, IANA's central IPv4 address pool is expected to run out any day now, leaving the internet with a very limited remaining supply of addresses. APNIC will probably request two /8s (33 million addresses) within the next few weeks. This will leave five /8s available, which will be immediately distributed to the five Regional Internet Registries in accordance with IANA policy. It's expected that APNIC's own address pool will run low during 2011, making ISPs and businesses in the Asia-Pacific region the first to feel the effects of IPv4 exhaustion. The long-term solution to IP address exhaustion is provided by IPv6, the next version of the Internet Protocol. IPv6 has been an internet standard for over a decade, but is still unsupported on many networks and makes up an almost negligible fraction of Internet traffic. Unless ISPs dramatically accelerate the pace of IPv6 deployment, users in some regions will be stuck on IPv4-only connections while ISPs in other regions run out of public IPv4 addresses, leading to a fragmented Internet without the universal connectivity we've previously taken for granted."
Time to look at your own desk... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm running IPv6 via tunnels since 2001. I'm running native IPv6 since my ISP [on.net] did their first try-out via ADSL.
Come on guys, it is not that difficult. Why is slashdot.org still not accessible via IPv6?
Re:We know (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the ISPs may want ISP level NAT. It would mean an end to the p2p software that has been placing such a high demand upon their networks, a barrier to VoIP that competes with the very profitable phone service and no more people running their own servers off a domestic connection when the ISP would like such things to be restricted to the more expensive business connections. They have no reason to move to IPv6, because most of their customers wouldn't be able to make the connection between deployment of ISP level NAT and the sudden breaking of their WoW updates and internet-phone software.
Renting IP Addresses (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a very simple solution to this. We should be renting IP addresses, not handing them out. Make publicly routable IP addresses cost $1 a month. Many class A owners would be dying to give back address space that they aren't using. Isn't that the answer to a limited supply of anything? Set a value to them so they aren't wasted.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The problem (Score:5, Interesting)
IPv6 is great, but they could have solved the problem far more elegantly 10 years ago.
Add two octets to the front of v4. Solved after a firmware flash.
Any existing IP becomes 1.0.x.x.x.x
If a router encounters a x.x.x.x address, it just appends 1.0 to the front.
The old internet and the new internet would have run side by side - for the most part working fine until everyone had updated their firmware.
Sure, it's not the engineering solution v6 is, but it would have been in use long ago.
They did this. Except they added 12 octets in front of v4 and mapped existing v4 addresses to 0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.x.x.x.x.
And the old and new internet runs side by side currently and we are just waiting for everyone to update their firmware.
Re:Their fault (Score:2, Interesting)
While IPv6 has been known about for over a decade, the problem is that in order for an ISP to get a block of IPv6 addresses, they would need to give up their block of IPv4 addresses. Now, back in 2000, what ISP would be willing to give up their static block of IP addresses for something virtually no one else was using, and which would cause customer outages for MONTHS while the IPv6 stuff was tested and people figured out how to work with it?
This was the reason for not going to IPv6 early on, and it was a stupid policy. If ISPs were given a full year to migrate to IPv6 before having to give up their IPv4 addresses, then there wouldn't have been an issue. Instead, it was a "you get IPv6 addresses, you must give up your IPv4 address block NOW" type of situation.
Re:There's no such things as shortages... (Score:2, Interesting)
What I don't get is why the people who came up with IPv6 didn't make the upgrade path easier?
Because it was a hard problem to shoehorn more addresses into 32 bits. Instead of doing that they choose a 10+ year transition strategy where IPv6 could run along side IPv4. For over the last 10 years they have been saying this day is coming. Microsoft listened (XP supports IPv6), Apple listened, the Linux and *BSD developers listened as did Sun, HP, SGI. Just about any end user general purpose computer shipped in the last 10 years has supported IPv6. The big router vendors support IPv6 though it took a few years for support to make it to the silicon they have been able to move IPv6 packets for a around a decade now.
What hasn't been available is home CPE equipment and ISP's willing to offer native IPv6 connections and it is not like they didn't know this day was coming. Go read the NANOG archives.
This day was supposed to be a non-event. Most of the traffic was supposed to be on the IPv6 network by now.
The products we ship have supported IPv6 for over a decade now.
I've had IPv6 at home via. a tunnel to HE.NET for 7+ years now.
Simple way to increase IPv6 adoption by websites (Score:5, Interesting)
An easy way to promote IPv6 would be if it were know or assumed that Google assigns higher pagerank to sites using IPv6 addresses. Then it would be something that customers of hosting companies would insist on, at least.
Re:Time to look at your own desk... (Score:1, Interesting)
What tunnel providers have you looked into? I use the IPv6 Tunnel Broker [tunnelbroker.net] from Hurricane Electric and routinely am able to reach 12 Mbps speeds, which I'm pretty sure is maxing out my home broadband. If you haven't looked into them before, or if you have but ran into problems, it may be worth checking out again.
Re:Real Estate (Score:2, Interesting)
Bingo, you can own certain property rights, but actually owning the property in the US is very rare,
Black's Law Dictionary defines:
Allodium. Land held absolutely in one's own right, and not of any lord or superior; land not subject to feudal duties or burdens. An estate held by absolute ownership, without recognizing any superior to whom any duty is due on account thereof.
Allodial. Free; not holden of any lord or superior; owned without obligation of vassalage or fealty; the opposite of feudal.
Land held in allodium is called allodial. Black's says in part that allodial is the "opposite of feudal." Black's defines feud in part:
Feud. An estate in land held of a superior on condition of rendering him services. An inheritable right to the use and occupation of lands, held on condition of rendering services to the lord or proprietor, who himself retains the property in the lands. [synonymous with ...] "fief", or "fee".
So if you don't have an Allodial Land Title, you don't own it. In Hawaii if your not native Hawaiian all your going to get is a 99 year lease.
Re:Their fault (Score:3, Interesting)
Evidence....I worked for Netcom in their operations group, and that was one of the reasons for not getting an IPv6 block from what I heard at the time.