No IPv6 Doomsday In 2012

itwbennett writes "Yes, IPv4 addresses are running out, but a Y2K-style disaster/frenzy won't be coming in 2012. Instead, businesses are likely to spend the coming year preparing to upgrade to IPv6, experts say. Of course there's a chance that panic will ensue when Europe's RIPE hands out its last IPv4 addresses this summer, but 'most [businesses] understand that they can live without having to make any major investments immediately,' said IDC analyst Nav Chander. Plus, it won't be until 2013 that North America will run out of IPv4 addresses and there's no sense getting worked up before then."

Business as usual

[InterestingFella]

ISP's and hosting companies will not run out of IPs. This only means that the price per IP will start to slowly grow. Hell, every time I order server the companies still happily hand me over 5 IPs without me even asking for them. With a simple request I can also buy 256 ips for the price of $300 a year.

Business opportunity

[ccguy]

Well, anyone looking to make some big bucks in the next 1-3 year should start learning IPv6. Nothing major needed, just setup a IPv6 network at home, if you can rent an external server with IPv6 in any of the many data centers that already offer it, and play with it.

It's not a lot of effort and there will be many highly paid job offers soon.

Re:Business as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

a Y2K-style disaster/frenzy won't be coming in 2012. Instead, businesses are likely to spend the coming year preparing to upgrade to IPv6

Sounds just like a Y2K-style disaster/frenzy.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Business opportunity

[rubycodez]

I doubt much "highly paid jobs", it'll just get thrown onto the backs of IT droids with the rest of the crap they have to do (speaking as one myself)

Re:Business opportunity

[SJHillman]

I think he means you can hire yourself out as an "IPv6 Changeover Consultant", spend ten minutes coming up with an IPv6 addressing scheme and then passing it on the the IT droids while taking the credit and the money.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Way harder than a firmware update.

[Anonymous Coward]

A PC will handle layer 2 bridging just fine /w 8 ports. There really isn't a whole lot of effort involved in shoving packets around like that. Did you base your statement on actual observation or did you pull it out of your ass?

Those desktop 5 and 8 port switches from Linksys or whatever have "switch on a chip" type IC's because they're cheap, not because they're wonderfully efficient (though obviously lower power and better latency than a PCI bus)

Obviously in a datacenter, you want a real switch.. They're more efficient, lower latency, easier to manage, and have a full array of enterprise management and configuration capabilities.

It's not YOUR addresses ...

[garry_g]

... what you don't seem to get is that the problem is not when ARIN runs out, but when your business partners get IPv6 addresses you can't reach because you didn't do your f@ckin' homework and upgrade to dual-stacked ... So go ahead, stick to IPv4, and once your boss comes in and asks why you can't exchange data with your possibly largest customer, tell him: "why would we want IPv4? Arin hasn't run out yet" ... good luck on finding a new job afterwards ...
And if you believe "Hey, no problem, it's just the Chinese and Japanese and Australians, who needs them" - think again, Europe's RIPE will run out of IPv4 addresses next ...

Re:Business as usual

[Columcille]

And the good news about this is "normal people" don't have a clue what you're talking about when mentioning ipv4 or ipv6. Tell them, "We're about to run out of IP addresses!" and they'll blink at you. Tell them, "No! PANIC! IPV4 IS ALL FILLT UP!" and they will call for some friendly people to take you to a padded room. Tell them, "Oh, and we have a problem with programs that use a two digit year instead of a four digit year" and they will build disaster shelters.

Re:Bologna

[evilviper]

All the articles I've read seem to come down to "it's more convenient" for applications not to have to deal with NAT... Of course it is also more convenient for people who mean to do you harm, too, since we're back to connections to outside resources coming from the machine's actual IP address, a public NATing of the private one.

NAT doesn't provide any security. Never has, never will. No, I'm not wrong. No, I'm still not wrong.

If you have a firewall between your private network and the public Internet, then you'll have all the security you want, whether using IPv4 or IPv6, with or without NAT. If you don't, then it's trivial for bad guys to reach services you don't want them to get to. If there's NAT in-between, it'll take a couple extra specially-crafted packets, but it's pretty trivial to get around.

IPv6 addresses with a firewall? Bad guys can know the IPv6 address of your valuable systems all they want, but if your firewall is blocking incoming connections by default, they can't get a single bit through to the destination.

I don't understand why people's brains turn to jello when talking about IPv6.

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