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The Internet Canada Networking United States

America Runs Out of IPv4 Internet Addresses 435

FireFury03 writes: The BBC is reporting that the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) ran out of spare IP addresses yesterday. "Companies in North America should now accelerate their move to the latest version of the net's addressing system. Now Africa is the only region with any significant blocks of the older version 4 internet addresses available." A British networking company that supplies schools has done an analysis on how concerned IT managers should be. This comes almost exactly 3 years after Europe ran out.
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America Runs Out of IPv4 Internet Addresses

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  • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @08:43AM (#50596323)
    Out of IP addresses? Sounds like a good time to invade somewhere where they mine them!
    • by prefec2 ( 875483 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @08:59AM (#50596485)

      They already found a new source of IP addresses which could support everyone with enough IP addresses to the end of time (which was of course yesterday or the day before or tomorrow, depending on your favorite Youtube oracle). However, the old IP industry does not want the new IP stuff, it might harm their business plans.

    • Out of IP addresses? Sounds like a good time to invade somewhere where they mine them!

      I thought they pumped them out of the ground!

      Surely there's a country out there that needs some Freedom!

    • Out of IP addresses? Sounds like a good time to invade somewhere where they mine them!

      Yeah, it's so hard for the big bad imperialist neo-con USA to just announce ownership of numbers

    • Re:America! F-Yeah! (Score:5, Informative)

      by lister king of smeg ( 2481612 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @11:01AM (#50597683)

      Out of IP addresses? Sounds like a good time to invade somewhere where they mine them!

      If you want to invade somewhere with a crap ton of IPv4 address how about the DOD? They have an entire class A. They have more address than a number of continents.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      Or how about big businesses?

      IBM 9.0.0.0/8
      General electric 3.0.0.08
      HP 15.0.0.0/8 AND 16.0.0.0/8
      Apple 17.0.0.0/8
      Ford 19.0.0.0/8
      Haliburton 34.0.0.0/8
      Hell the the US postal system owns 56.0.0.08

      There are far more than enough IPv4 address to last us several more years they are just sitting in the hands of people that don't use them appropriately.
      I am not saying that we should stick with IPv4, we need IPv6 in the long run it just should not be as urgent as it is becoming.
      What IANA should do is revoke their ownership of those addresses and give them 6 months or so to restructure their internal networks before assigning there addresses to the rest of the planet.

      • by bbn ( 172659 )

        You found enough /8 blocks to distribute one or two to each region. It would be gone within the week.

        APNIC and RIPE have been out for years now and ARIN is building up a waiting list. The demand did not just stop - there is a huge unfilled demand there that will soak up any stray addresses you can find.

        But the real problem is that there is no legal framework to force these companies to stop using the addresses. How much worth is an IP address that can not be used by an Apple device?

        • Not just that, one would have to prove that the entities that need these IP addresses can't use the abundant supply of IPv6 addresses. At the client end, all the major OSs - Windows 7-10, OS-X/iOS, Android/Linux, BSD - support IPv6. The only ones that don't - Windows XP and earlier, OS/2, Amiga, and other ancient platforms. So the real pressure would be at the end of network equipment guys - the Ciscos, the Junipers, the Foundrys, the Brocades as well as the AT&Ts, T-Mobiles, Sprints to make sure th

  • And just when I finally won the internet yesterday.
  • I just looked at my open wireless router, and I think I've got all the IP addresses.

  • TLS SNI (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25, 2015 @08:51AM (#50596421)

    At this point, ISPs need to mandate that customers use SNI where possible; too many IP addresses are allocated just for an SSL certificate. I think we'll start seeing more Let's Encrypt-type Subject Alternate Name management tools, too.

    • Re:TLS SNI (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ledow ( 319597 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:08AM (#50596559) Homepage

      Agreed. If you aren't capable of using SNI, then chances are your server software, client, etc. are not fit to be on the Internet anyway.

      IE6, Firefox *1* (!), Chrome 4. If you're still using those, get something else immediately because your security of the certificate is then the LEAST of your worries.

      I'm waiting for the "Let's Encrypt" to start issuing certificates. When that happens, interesting things will happen in the SSL/TLS certificate market.

    • by gmack ( 197796 )

      At least where I work, SNI is done. The problem we have now now are sites hosted on their own virtual machine.

  • So far the day is going smoothly. I am comparing before and after photos but have detected no anomalies thus far.

    Having no ipv4 allocations available is like that very first day when the folks pumping gas at the filling station filled your tank but did not clean your windshield or check the oil. There was great deal of anxiety at first, but (thankfully) people kept arriving for gas and the country slowly adjusted to this 'new normal'.

    Then gas station attendants disappeared altogether.
    No one knows where the

  • Don't you dare touch my 192.168.0.0/16! I have claims in 169.254.0.0/16, 10.0.0.0/8 and 172.16.0.0/12 too!
    You'll have to pry them from my cold dead routers!
  • by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:02AM (#50596507)

    >> America Runs Out of IPv4 Internet Addresses

    Again?
    http://arstechnica.com/informa... [arstechnica.com]
    http://www.zdnet.com/article/n... [zdnet.com] ...

    • Re:Again? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Dagger2 ( 1177377 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @10:37AM (#50597439)

      No, not again.

      Last year, ARIN hit one /8 left (that's the second article you linked). Back in July of this year, ARIN had to make their first ever refusal for an allocation on the basis of not having the IP space for it (that's the first article). They still had some space remaining for small allocations. Now, as of yesterday, they have to refuse all allocations on that basis, because they ran out of space altogether. That's this article.

      Apparently, the idea that reaching 0% involves going through 10% and 1% first is hard to grasp...

  • Bring on the rush of IPv4 squatters now...
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by quetwo ( 1203948 )

      And there are a lot of things that are still considered "Experimental" with IPv6. Things like multicast among many others are still standards that are being worked out by the vendors.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:03AM (#50596531)

    I just checked my IP address and it's 192.168.1.102. Whew, I'm glad I got one before they ran out. No one else can have my IP address!

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:05AM (#50596541)

    No, that's just an artifact of the different policies for assigning the last addresses. RIPE (the European registry) throttled assignments by making the requirements much more strict. That change of policy was considered the point when RIPE ran out of IPv4 addresses, because the remaining addresses are not given out just for asking. Unlike the other registries, ARIN did not institute a policy to extend the availability of IPv4 addresses for transitioning purposes, so they burned through the last 16 million addresses like no tomorrow and are now truly out of IPv4 addresses to assign. They are in fact the first registry without IPv4 addresses in stock. RIPE still has almost a full /8, APNIC has two thirds of an /8, LACNIC has one seventh of an /8, and AFRINIC still has 2.3 /8 blocks.

    • by FireFury03 ( 653718 ) <<slashdot> <at> <nexusuk.org>> on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:17AM (#50596643) Homepage

      No, that's just an artifact of the different policies for assigning the last addresses. RIPE (the European registry) throttled assignments by making the requirements much more strict. That change of policy was considered the point when RIPE ran out of IPv4 addresses, because the remaining addresses are not given out just for asking. Unlike the other registries, ARIN did not institute a policy to extend the availability of IPv4 addresses for transitioning purposes, so they burned through the last 16 million addresses like no tomorrow and are now truly out of IPv4 addresses to assign. They are in fact the first registry without IPv4 addresses in stock. RIPE still has almost a full /8, APNIC has two thirds of an /8, LACNIC has one seventh of an /8, and AFRINIC still has 2.3 /8 blocks.

      Well, not really... RIPE, APNIC and APNIC reserved the last /8 for "IPv6 transition" (i.e. an extremely restrictive allocation policy). ARIN reserved the last /10 for the same purpose. So 3 years ago, RIPE hit the last /8, now ARIN have hit the last /10. They all still have addresses to hand out, but in all cases (except Afrinic) the allocation policies are now so restrictive that for practical purposes you can consider them "out".

      • Specifically, RIPE's policy is that each LIR can get one /22 from the final /8, and that's it. The idea is to make sure that new LIRs can at least get some v4 space to run NAT64/CGNAT on.

        ARIN didn't think that would be useful, for whatever reason.

        • Specifically, RIPE's policy is that each LIR can get one /22 from the final /8, and that's it. The idea is to make sure that new LIRs can at least get some v4 space to run NAT64/CGNAT on.

          ARIN didn't think that would be useful, for whatever reason.

          https://www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html#four10 [arin.net]
          ARIN's policy is that each LIR can get one network (/28 - /24) from the final /10 every 6 months for exactly the same purposes.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:08AM (#50596563)

    According to google's ipv6 stats, about 21% of its American visitors access the site via ipv6.
    https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption&tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption

    That is not as high as Belgium (almost 36%), but it is a start.

    • It is also interesting to dive into those stats and you will notice a significant uptick of availability on weekends for north america. ISPs aren't the biggest offenders, nor is your home router, it is your company's routers and network that are the worst of the bunch here.

  • by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:14AM (#50596609) Journal

    This is actually a good study in human nature. A resource exhaustion (with a solution already in place) we could see from a mile off, but will do nothing about until it becomes absurdly painful to continue. Already we see monstrosities like carrier grade NAT which breaks many applications, rather than moving to IPv6 which nearly every device supports.

    We'll see this same procrastinating with AGW, fossil fuels, everything else - we won't do anything about it until the economic damage is already being done and the pain level becomes extreme.

    • This is actually a good study in human nature. A resource exhaustion (with a solution already in place) we could see from a mile off, but will do nothing about until it becomes absurdly painful to continue. Already we see monstrosities like carrier grade NAT which breaks many applications, rather than moving to IPv6 which nearly every device supports.

      We'll see this same procrastinating with AGW, fossil fuels, everything else - we won't do anything about it until the economic damage is already being done and the pain level becomes extreme.

      It does seem very similar to climate change, and in both cases I think the bystander syndrome is probably quite strong: for both IPv6 and climate change, "what's the point in me doing anything when no one else is" is a prevalent attitude - a single person can't really change anything, so everyone stands around watching the oncoming train that's about to hit them, but does nothing.

  • Maybe no one listened last time - but this is not the first time this has been announced. http://www.theguardian.com/tec... [theguardian.com]
  • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:39AM (#50596829)

    - What are we running out again? I thought we ran out last month! They are crying wolf!
    - IP addresses are assigned by region we only just ran out.

    - NAT makes this a non issue. Just use NAT!
    - NAT is a broken concept that breaks end-to-end connectivity!

    - I won't move to IPv6 they are too hard to type.
    - Why are you typing IPv6?

    - I can't NAT on IPv6 so it breaks my firewall and its insecure.
    - NAT is not a firewall, you can firewall IPv6

    - Why don't we just steal some of HP's IP addresses? They have some spare.
    - Break the internet by splitting up routing tables even further.

    - But NAT has protected us for many years everything works on NAT.
    - Everything now needs to connect to a command server. No end-to-end connectivity and nasty workarounds in routers to make applications work.

    - But DHCP doesn't work for IPv6!
    - DHCP isn't needed, and if it is needed yes it does.

    - But we can NAT the NATTING NAT NAT!
    - Go fuck your NAT.

    • by mark-t ( 151149 )
      You can even NAT IPv6 if you really want to.... but at least you'll never *need* to because of ip shortage. Further, it is theoretically possible to design an extension to IPv6 that can route packets right through a NAT, so end-to-end connectivity is still possible, as long as the device, as well as the sender and recipient, are all configured to understand and utilize that extension. Any intermediate devices that the packets may pass through would not need to understand the specific extension at all.
      • You can even NAT IPv6

        YOU MONSTER!

        • You can even NAT IPv6

          YOU MONSTER!

          This is one place where AFAICT, ipv6 is going to be a problem.

          If you're a small company with a couple of different ISPs over a couple of telephone lines for redundancy you've probably currently got your LAN configured with 192.168.x.x or equivalent.

          Your firewall/router then NATs that traffic and forwards it out over one or other of the connections. Your users computers don't care.

          IPv6 makes this more difficult. In theory every computer on the LAN could have two different pre

          • That doesn't follow. Currently the computer is already making external routing decisions in the form of "I don't know this address I'll send it to the default gateway"

            How does that suddenly change, and how is it in any way different from companies which already have allocated world wide IP addresses in their internal networks? There's still a gateway and still a firewall.

    • What are we running out again? I thought we ran out last month! They are crying wolf!

      This one is from 2011: Last Available IPv4 Blocks Allocated [slashdot.org].

      • What are we running out again? I thought we ran out last month! They are crying wolf!

        This one is from 2011: Last Available IPv4 Blocks Allocated [slashdot.org].

        Well, except that article is all kinds of incorrect...

        Following on from APNIC's earlier assessment that they would need to request the last available /8 blocks, they have now been allocated 39/8 and 106/8, triggering ARIN's final distribution of blocks to the RIRs. According to the release, 'APNIC expects normal allocations to continue for a further three to six months.

        Lets see...
        1. ARIN doesn't, and never has "distributed blocks to the RIRs" - that's IANA's job, and that article was actually talk

      • Yes that was when the last /8 was allocated.
        Today is when the last of /24 which were allocated by ARIN to themselves for a buffer out of one of their self assigned /8 ran out.

        Both stories are technically correct. In 2011 you could not longer get a /8. Today in America you can't even get a /24 anymore.

  • I have Comcast Business as my ISP and I still only get IPv4.

  • I hate technicalities, but the RIR for Latam is LACNIC. Oh, poorly chosen demonyms.

    • I hate technicalities, but the RIR for Latam is LACNIC. Oh, poorly chosen demonyms.

      LACNIC ran out on June 10th, 2014.

      That, and if we're going to be technical ARIN covers more than Canada and the US, also covering man island nations in the Caribbean and North Atlantic.

      Yaz

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