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The Internet

ARIN Is Down To the Last /8 of IPv4 Addresses 306

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the end-times dept.
An anonymous reader writes "On 3 February 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) issued the remaining five /8 address blocks, each containing 16.7 million addresses, in the global free pool equally to the five RIRs, and as such ARIN is no longer able to receive additional IPv4 resources from the IANA. After yesterday's large allocation (104.64.0.0/10) to Akamai, the address pool remaining to be assigned by ARIN is now down to the last /8. This triggers stricter allocation rules and marks the end of general availability of new IPv4 addresses in North America. ARIN thus follows the RIRs of Asia, Europe and South America into the final phase of IPv4 depletion."
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ARIN Is Down To the Last /8 of IPv4 Addresses More

ARIN Is Down To the Last /8 of IPv4 Addresses

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  • About time! (Score:4, Funny)

    by drew_92123 ( 213321 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:00AM (#46823473)

    They've been talking about this day for what seems like an eternity... Finally, we can start complaining about something else!

  • And yet Akamai deserves a /10 (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Pretty outrageous that the whole of North America has to go on a diet earlier because Akamai somehow needs a whole fucking /10.

    ARIN's behavior has made it clear: you can get all the IPs you want as long as you're a big guy paying big fees. But a small company asking for a /22? Go away, small businesses don't deserve to be able to do business.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rs79 ( 71822 )

      http://ipv4auctions.bstocksolu... [bstocksolutions.com]

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      RIR's general policy is if you can prove you require it, you can have it. Akamai clearly have the documentation to prove that they will burn through an entire /10 within a reasonable time frame (It was 3 months at the end in the RIPE region. I'm unsure about ARIN).

      Akamai are huge. They claim to provide 15-30% of all web traffic (http://www.akamai.com/html/about/facts_figures.html). Stands to reason that they will likely utilise that all fairly quickly.

      As for a company being unable to get a /22? Again, I'm n

    • Re:And yet Akamai deserves a /10 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by PRMan ( 959735 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @11:28AM (#46824681)
      Akamai is one of the few companies in the US that is actually using a large allocation they were given. They're the LAST ones you should be complaining about.

  • Sigh (Score:2, Funny)

    by koan ( 80826 )

    There's no place like ::1

  • Wasn't allocation always the problem? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GodfatherofSoul ( 174979 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:10AM (#46823587)

    Years back, my boss got a whole class C for a company with ~5 employees and network footprint nothing more than one website. Maybe they can get some of the corporations with class As to give some back? (yeah yeah I know)

    • Re:Wasn't allocation always the problem? (Score:5, Informative)

      by afidel ( 530433 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:18AM (#46823727)

      Nope, it takes longer for existing tenants to vacate space than it has been for ARIN to allocate new addresses (ie it would take MIT 5 years to re-engineer their network to free up say half of their allocation, but at the rate we've been using new addresses that space would last less than 10 days, so why should an organization put in 5 years of work to help with 10 days of usage?) so the solution is IPv6.

      • Re:Wasn't allocation always the problem? (Score:4, Funny)

        by medv4380 ( 1604309 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @11:16AM (#46824477)
        IPv6 is the re-engineer the network solution.

      • ie it would take MIT 5 years to re-engineer their network to free up say half of their allocation

        I call BS, it would only take that long if it was a low priority job. If they were told in no uncertain terms to sort it out or be kicked out of the internet I'm sure they could deal with it much quicker than that.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by DarkOx ( 621550 )

          It might be possible for HP, Apple, or Xerox to move things around that quickly but I doubt a University could get that done at any priority.

          I know people who work on university networks. They face the most bizare requirements. At Michigan for instance essentially any two ports anywhere on the entire campus have to be able to be made layer 2 adjacent upon request.

          Big research universities like MIT have odd problems like academics doing "network research" collaborating with different colleges withing the u

      • If MIT had to give up some of their IPv4 addresses, maybe we'd get IPv6 openafs this century ;)

    • The biggest problem has always been the global routing tables. Routing IPv6 is going to get ugly soon too, but we'll see how that turns out.

      • With IPv6 they are trying to allocate blocks in such a way that they almost never have to give a network a second block that is not continguous with it's initial block. So it should hopefully convege much closer to one block per multihomed network than IPv4 has.

        Still the number of multihomed networks is only going to grow over time and whatever you do each such network is going to want at least one entry in the global routing table.

    • Years back, my boss got a whole class C for a company with ~5 employees and network footprint nothing more than one website. Maybe they can get some of the corporations with class As to give some back? (yeah yeah I know)

      This comes at cost of increased route disaggregation pressure for little benefit in return.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      That is pretty common an usual pretty much the smallest direct allocation you can get. Nobody will route anything smaller than that. Lots of ISP will subnet C allocations and resell smaller ranges, but than they are not your allocation so if you change ISPs you WILL be changing ip address ( for all be a few edge cases if that is really a problem than you are doing it wrong), what sucks through is it usually becomes a pain to get pointer records in DNS updated etc; as you need to get whoever controls the z

    • We are relatively small, and trying to get our own /24. You need a /24 to do multihoming, most BGP routers won't propogate anything smaller than a /24.

  • A useful case study because it's not catastrophic (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:21AM (#46823755)

    The IPv4 address exhaustion is a useful case study in human behavior in response to resource exhaustion.

    http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html

    Relevant quote: "Remember our conclusion from the cartoon of one person per square meter; we concluded that zero population growth is going to happen. Let’s state that conclusion in other terms and say it’s obvious nature is going to choose from the right hand list and we don't have to do anything—except be prepared to live with whatever nature chooses from that right hand list. Or we can exercise the one option that’s open to us, and that option is to choose first from the right hand list. We gotta find something here we can go out and campaign for. Anyone here for promoting disease? (audience laughter)"

    In this case, fortunately, it's extremely unlikely that violence and death will occur as a result of this specific resource exhaustion, but the study of human behavior in response to the resource shortage is telling.

    We've been aware for years that zero IPv4 address availability is going to happen. It's absolutely certain. The only way to make it not happen, or not *care* that it happens, is to do something about the problem. But of course, even for such a technically manageable problem, humanity on the whole chooses to do nothing. The exact same thing will happen for fossil fuel exhaustion, arable land exhaustion, etc.

    And now nature will choose for us from the right-hand list of IPv4 exhaustion: here comes corporate greed, lawsuits, slow and inconvenient CGNs (one bad actor in your ISP's network causes you to be banned from the services you use), etc.

    Humans are hard-wired to be reactionary, not proactive -- and at that, only reactionary to immediate problems. "Oh, I can't get a new IPv4 address. What do I do?" or "Oh, I can get a new IPv4 address, but it's too expensive. What do I do?" -- These are the kinds of things we will start thinking about, and making people start to care. NOT "Oh, we better deal with this problem that is likely to happen in 5 years."

    As flawed as we are, it's probably a good thing that we won't survive long enough to leave our solar system and populate the cosmos. We don't deserve it. We're just too *dumb* as a species.

    • As flawed as we are, it's probably a good thing that we won't survive long enough to leave our solar system and populate the cosmos. We don't deserve it. We're just too *dumb* as a species.

      How is anyone supposed to take a person like this seriously?

  • It didn't matter whether it was last year or next (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gjh ( 231652 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:22AM (#46823783)

    It didn't matter whether it was last year or next...IP usage was accelerating into the wall anyway. The GOOD part about this is that now the US is out of addresses certain parts of the Internet industry are more likely to take IPv6 seriously.

    Sadly, ISPs in other parts of the world have proven adept at further avoiding the problem by downgrading consumer connections to carrier-grade NAT, so we have another 5 years of eking out of old order before people REALLY have to take notice.

    • Re:It didn't matter whether it was last year or ne (Score:5, Insightful)

      by badfish99 ( 826052 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:34AM (#46823953)

      Now that addresses have run out, they have become a valuable resource for the ISPs that own them. If those ISPs implement IPv6 then there will be no shortage of addresses, and they will lose all their value.

      So the monopolist ISPs will now do everything in their power to prevent IPv6 from being adopted.

    • Most of the ISPs I've dealt with here in Canada do not offer routable IPv6 allocations to users. They certainly don't readily offer static ones for business use like they do with IPv4.

    • so we have another 5 years of eking out of old order before people REALLY have to take notice.

      Possiblly much more than that.

      XP and andriod 2.x are dying. They aren't dead yet but in a few years time their relavence will likely have declined to the level where website operators think it reasonable to stop supporting their default browsers. Once that happens we will be able to use SNI (and tell the holdouts still on XP to "use firefox or chrome damnit")

      Once that happens it will be possible to put multiple SSL websites behind one IP reducing the IP demand on the hosting side. With end lusers put behind

  • We are not anywhere near running out of addresses. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ErikTheRed ( 162431 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:32AM (#46823931) Homepage

    We're running out of free ones. And like any freely available resource, they've been squandered. Once the free supply is exhausted, they'll simply no longer be free - meaning that actual incentive will exist to conserve them and organizations will have incentive to sell unneeded blocks. Economics 101, people.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Anrego ( 830717 ) *

      I doubt the organizations with those large blocks will sell them unless they become very expensive (which I don't think will happen for a long time). The costs of restructuring the network for a lot of these companies would far outweigh the gains.

      What I see as far more likely is ISPs implementing carrier grade NAT as the default, and potentially charging a small fee for those who need a unique IP. The vast majority of users won't care, and as long as getting an IP if you run a game server or use skype or wh

    • We're running out of free ones. And like any freely available resource, they've been squandered. Once the free supply is exhausted, they'll simply no longer be free - meaning that actual incentive will exist to conserve them and organizations will have incentive to sell unneeded blocks. Economics 101, people.

      Why would you choose that option when we have a way of bypassing it? Isn't progress generally about creating plenty? We have the ability to create plenty, and not have to deal with buying and selling IP addresses. Just because you can create a market doesn't mean you should.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kurast ( 1662819 )

        Because there is a very high one-time-only cost involved in switching to ipv6, compared to a small running continuous cost of continuing in ipv4, and for now, it is advantageous to become in ipv4. No one wants to be the one to switch first.

        Just think of all sort of problems large ISPs will have to deal in terms of support if they switch to ipv6, in terms of phone service, visits, substitution of cable modems, support for old machines running none/bogus ipv6 implementation.

        Just think of all the programs code

        • Because there is a very high one-time-only cost involved in switching to ipv6, compared to a small running continuous cost of continuing in ipv4, and for now, it is advantageous to become in ipv4. No one wants to be the one to switch first.

          Nobody is switching to IPv6 they are *adding* IPv6. IPv4 is not being turned off by anyone well into the foreseeable future.

          Most large content providers are already offering service via IPv6 and millions already have IPv6 access via their ISPs.

          Just think of all sort of problems large ISPs will have to deal in terms of support if they switch to ipv6, in terms of phone service, visits, substitution of cable modems, support for old machines running none/bogus ipv6 implementation

          The migration to IPv6 takes a while and does not involve turning off IPv4 anytime soon. There is no need to rush to replace gear. It will eventually break or become obsolete in the next few years anyway.

          Not easy as flick a switch.

          For most consumers it will be easier than a flick of a switch.

      • Why would you choose that option when we have a way of bypassing it?

        Because people will do what is individally best for them, not what is best for the community as a whole.

        If I want to run a server for the general public to access over the internet it needs to have an IPv4 address until such time as the vast majority of clients can reliablly access IPv6 servers (I would not consider teredo to be "reliable", it's overcomplicated and fights against NAT rather than working with it).

        Similarly if I want my users to be able to access resources on the public internet I need IPv4 a

    • Re:We are not anywhere near running out of address (Score:5, Funny)

      by pr0nbot ( 313417 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:42AM (#46824059)

      Clearly we should have invested years ago in finding renewable sources of IP addresses...

    • Except this still won't fix the fact that v4 is simply too small.

    • We're running out of free ones. And like any freely available resource, they've been squandered. Once the free supply is exhausted, they'll simply no longer be free - meaning that actual incentive will exist to conserve them and organizations will have incentive to sell unneeded blocks. Economics 101, people.

      There has been pressure for near two decades now in the form of allocation policy and documentation requirements where lack of plentiful IP resources has lead directly to proliferation of 1:Many NAT.

  • So let's finally move on to IPv6. ISPs, I'm looking at you.
  • Obligatory comment on Slashdot articles about IPv4 exhaustion or IPv6:

    $ host -t aaaa slashdot.org
    slashdot.org has no AAAA record

  • A large number of companies from all over the world set up shell companies in Africa.

  • 4G mobile should have been IPv6 only (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @12:09PM (#46825125) Homepage

    Newer mobile phones should have been IPv6 from the beginning. China mandated that years ago. T-Mobile is IPv6. (You can supposedly open up an end to end IPv6 connection between two T-Mobile phones). It's suprising that the cellular phone companies didn't fix this, since they have control of both network and handset.

    • The phone companies themselves don't always control the handsets. Yes, they supply phones as part of a contract package but there are also a lot of people (like me) who got a phone from elsewhere and brought it on to the network.

      That's no reason not to do IPv6 though.

  • remember, there were only 256 /8 nets. So a /8 is a lot of adresspace.

  • Think of it. Here is this scare resource, IPv4 addresses, and no more are going to be allocated in North America. I see great potential in profit, online exchanges opening up allowing the trading of IP addresses, etc. etc. To quote the Ferengi, my lobes are tingling.

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