Sales of Unused IPv4 Addresses Gaining Steam 329
netbuzz writes "A growing number of U.S. carriers and enterprises are hedging their bets on IPv6 by purchasing blocks of unused IPv4 addresses through official channels or behind-the-scenes deals. There is certainly no shortage of stock, as these address brokers have blocks available that range from 65,000 to more than a million IPv4 addresses. And it's not just large companies and institutions benefiting, as one attorney who's involved in the market says he represents a woman who came into possession of a block of IPv4 address in the early '90s and now, 'She's in her 70s, and she's going to have a windfall.''"
Exactly why we don't need IPv6 (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
You cannot own an address, you lease it.
From who? Come on boys and girls, the person you lease something from is called an... umm... what's that word? Help me out?
Sublet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Exactly why we don't need IPv6 (Score:5, Insightful)
Started out strong. I like the reference to oil. That could have been modded up funny, until that bullcrap about keeping the dot formatting. Are you really afraid of colons instead of dots? Or is it the hexidecimal numbers that frighten you? IPv6 solves more issues than just IP address exhaustion... autoconfiguration, routing, etc. It's going to happen and you'll have to crack a book. Deal with it.
sounds a bit facebooky (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, windfall now, but next month when IPv6 day [worldipv6day.org] comes and all the IPv6 sites stay lit, they'll be worth a rapidly diminishing amount.
ArsTechnica has a nice piece about IPv6 [arstechnica.com] and why it's not going to be such a disaster thing after all, add to that the IPv6-capable [netgear.com] home [dlink.com] routers [cisco.eu] that are actually being made (at last!) and the ISPs who are rolling out IPv6 networking to their customers... and it's all looking rosy.
Re:Exactly why we don't need IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe you should try DNS sometime
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
What utter and serious bullshit.
What else do you propose?
IPv4 address for regular allocation* have run out at the IANA and APNIC and will soon run out at RIPE and ARIN too.
Meanwhile IPv6 is still in it's infancy with the majority of end users not having access to the IPv6 internet. So if you want to run a public server it needs to have a v4 address.
Under these circumstances a market means that IPv4 address gradually rise in value and as that happens people will re-evalute what applications really need a public V4 address. Lack of a market means that addresses stay where they are even if they could be more lucrative elsewhere stifiling choice.
You cannot own an address, you lease it.
That is true for modern allocations, with older allocations the status is less clear.
But even for modern allocations the RIRs are coming round to the realisation that allowing some form of sales** is a good idea as part of managing the twilight years of IPv4. The alternative is that you will only be able to buy usable hosting services from providers who happen to have a pool of addresses already (most likely hosting providers who are also end-luser ISPs and so have addresses they can recover using ISP level NAT).
* There are still a few held back for special allocations.
** IIRC arin and ripe are requiring the recipiants of such sales to justify their address use to reduce hoarding.
Re:Exactly why we don't need IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh? Um, exactly what's the DHCP server on that network there? Does that DHCP server advertise a DNS server? Can you modify the DNS server?
Alternately, can turn of the DHCP server on that wireless router that only does caching recursive DNS, and install a DNS server and DHCP server on your other computer, and run that?
And then, why again do you need to run your own DNS server anyway? Won't the people who give you the /64 take requests to add records? Or use one of the dynamic DNS protocols that allows you to register your IP? And I think there's yet another answer that involves anycast and autoconf...
Or maybe I'm just completely not understanding what you mean by "join my 'home' network".
IPv6 has some pretty good autoconf out of the box. You use RADVD to just announce services, you don't need any software managing IP addresses because the nodes will do that themselves. And when you want to use some service that isn't a pure client-server-http thing, the fact that each computer has a unique IP on that other side of the firewall is helpful. And for the most part, the "OMG, that's hard" retoric is horribly overblown. Get a /64. Configure a route-announce daemon (things your ISP can do for you). IPv6! Free!
Setting up a game, I was trying to debug a connection problem someone had, and sent them to a site that tells you IP addresses. A different friend went there, and discovered he had an IPv6 address. His ISP had provided it for him, and he had literately never known. It wasn't relevant. That's the experience you should expect.
Pray, tell (Score:4, Insightful)
How, in any tangible way is she anything more than a cybersquatter? Also: 'came into possession'? What, they 'fell off the back of a truck'? Sounds as sketchy as the legal profession.
Re:IPv4 forever? (Score:5, Insightful)
Several oil rigs would have gone into shutdown had there not been an update to the timestamping of data before the change-over.
That nothing happens is not a case of 'there was no problem' it is a case of 'almost all shit got fixed'.
Re:Exactly why we don't need IPv6 (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you HONESTLY say that if someone showed you a pile of IP V6 addresses and said "One of these has a problem in either the address or the subnet" you could just pick it out on the fly?
Don't we have, like, computers, that do that kind of thing?
Re:Exactly why we don't need IPv6 (Score:2, Insightful)
So, in other words, they changed something that didn't need to be changed.