We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing

https://www.arin.net/resources/request/ipv4_countdown.html

by samuelkadolph • 13 years ago

97 115 13 years ago

arin.net

tlb• 13 years ago

... And as the foredeck of the Titanic sinks below the water line, we enter phase 3 of deck chair rationing ...

SwellJoe• 13 years ago

The band is still playing. I think that means everything is fine, right?

unreal37• 13 years ago

Unless I'm misreading it. The rationing rules in effect during Phase 3 are exactly the same as Phase 2.

So why the distinction at all?

ars2• 13 years ago

I would guess PR.

They want to push people toward IPv6 adoption.

btilly2• 13 years ago

There is now a 60 day payment window that wasn't there before. And a review of previous procedures that could result in various minor revisions. So it is different, but not a lot different.

rgbrenner• 13 years ago

The 60 day payment window was added in phase 2

ars2• 13 years ago

There are a ton of /8 still assigned to companies that don't need them.

Ford, GE, IBM, AT&T (x2), Xerox, HP (x2), Apple, MIT, CSC, Eli Lilly, Nortel, Prudential Insurance, DuPont, Cap Debis, Merck, SITA.

All of those can return their /8. That's 18 /8 potentially available.

And does the DoD really need 12 /8's? I get that they want to network every person, gun, ship, tank, truck and plane. But none of those need to be on the public internet. (Well, maybe the people do - but 1 /8 should be enough for that.)

Afforess• 13 years ago

Rumormill at IBM is that we bought some random companies a while back just for their IPv4 blocks. You didn't hear that from me though.

jychang• 13 years ago

Doubt it, everything on IBM is natted to a 10.0.0.0/8 or is running externally to 9.0.0.0/8.

Source: I work at IBM, in a division that was another company that was bought out a few years back.

wmf5• 13 years ago

IBM is using 9/8. AT&T is one of the largest ISPs in the world. Hopefully any legacy space that isn't used will come up for sale soon.

recuter• 13 years ago

All of those can return their /8. That's 18 /8 potentially available.

If say, Apple is using at least a little bit of that /8 here and there (safe assumption, no?) its going to be hard for them to return it. I'd wager corporations that have /8s have policies that rely on the assumption that they have the whole /8.

So I wouldn't hold my breath on getting one back from them.

xxpor2• 13 years ago

Right. How much code is out there that looks like

     if(recv.ip.contains("2.") {
         //well we know that they're from X co.
     }

Dylan168072• 13 years ago

There's no reason they would have to return the entire thing. Some /16s would be fine.

swixmix• 13 years ago

This could be a fortunate investment that will make them lots of money. Give it back? I doubt it. Sell it back? Profit.

mfincham8• 13 years ago

Returning them would only delay the inevitable by a matter of months.

Deploy IPv6 today, it ain't hard.

pyre3• 13 years ago

How would end-user software deal with an IPv6 address though? Surely some of it is IPv6 capable already, but I would imagine that a lot of it makes assumptions about IPv4. If the OS were operating on a IPv6 network, would that software function correctly as long as the addresses were IPv4-compatible (i.e. within the IPv4 range, and not in IPv6 notation)?

Negitivefrags• 13 years ago

Can those companies sell their IPs on the open market when the normal pool has run out? Is that allowed?

mfincham8• 13 years ago

It depends on the policies of the RIR (Regional Internet Registry) in the region where the IPs are from.

That said, if you're willing to ignore the RIR's policies (which a lot of people do) you can usually "black market" trade IP addresses, so long as you can convince your upstreams to accept them (which they usually will).

bifrost2• 13 years ago

Short answer : no

lmm2• 13 years ago

Legally it's an allocation, not ownership. The registry could simply revoke your allocations if it caught you selling them (though whether it would is another question).

wmf5• 13 years ago

Yes, address blocks are being sold on a regular basis. The going rate is around $11/address.

Decade• 13 years ago

There are various reasons that the legacy IPv4 assignments are not returned. At the normal rate of IPv4 address assignment, circa 2011 when IANA ran out, reclaiming all those addresses would have delayed address space exhaustion by maybe 2 years at most.

All it would have cost was unpredictable, unbound man-years of work as each organization tracked down each of their publicly addressable machines, not all of which were recorded, and vacated into smaller subnets of their address space. I'm sure you know of the servers that sometimes disappear behind walls during renovations. And some of the older machines require the kernel to be recompiled and rebooted to change their IP address. Ah, those were the days.

We just have to face the fact that IPv4 was not designed to be used on a network the size of the Internet. NAT and CIDR have stretched it out amazingly, but we've stretched it out about as far as it will go. We need to switch to IPv6.

masklinn3• 13 years ago

There are a ton of /8 still assigned to companies that don't need them.

You've got no idea how they're structured internally. Some of those companies uses their blocks to make every machine in their network globally routable, they don't "need" them but they do use them and they're part of their network architecture.

300bps6• 13 years ago

They are using 16,777,214 IP addresses? I think that's quite a stretch. I work at a company that has 19,000 employees with locations all over the world. We couldn't make a dent in 16.7MM routeable IP addresses.

belorn3• 13 years ago

In the global market, returning those addresses won't help at all.

Currently, the only reason the American registry still has any IP addresses left, is because their pool was separated from the emerging markets in Asia. As such, if IANA would start extracting IP address as suggested, the global market would eat it up faster than IANA could collect them. It would only "work" if IANA gave all the addresses exclusively to the American pool, working towards a local Internet rather than global.

teddyh9• 13 years ago

See, you'd like to think so. You'd like to think that there's an easy solution not involving you, because it would mean you don't have to do anything or learn anything new.

However, as pointed out in many other comments in this thread, this (and many other knee-jerk reaction "solutions") won't actually work, or would be significantly more expensive than implementing IPv6.

It's been on the horizon for nearly 20 years. It's coming soon now. The IPv4 end is nigh. Repent!

ck22• 13 years ago

Time to go around to Fortune 100 companies and say "use it or lose it".

mfincham8• 13 years ago

Recovering additional IPv4 space at this point only prolongs the inevitable problem. The solution is IPv6.

WatchDog• 13 years ago

If the data from this study[1] is accurate, recovering address space could prolong it for a long long time. 1. http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html

ck22• 13 years ago

Yes but for now it's a case of money buys conspicuous consumption and the internet shouldn't work that way.

ipv6 will be a lot easier to adopt in 2015 vs 2013 so every year we can claw back makes life easier

bigiain2• 13 years ago

Five (or ten) years ago, NAT was "the solution" – which helped and worked for longer than the doomsayers predicted.

Today, I suspect SNI will be the important stop-gap measure. There's a whole bunch of websites out there on shared hosting with dedicated IP(v4) addresses for their vhost just so they can use SSL certs for https connections. If we can ignore Windows XP users and IE6 users, SNI allows SSL certs on shared IP addresses - if I can think of a few dozen "unnecessary" IP addresses this little web development firm consumes, I suspect big hosting companies could probably find thousands or tens of thousands of similarly used IP addresses.

(Having said that, analytics still shows a startlingly high number of WinXP and IE6 users out there. It'd be interesting to see if any of them ever "convert" in ways that'd require SSL certs? I understand why the use of pirated XP and 10 year old hardware are rampant across the 3rd world, for _my_ clients that demographic is almost certainly not likely to be ecommerce customers... That's a bit of a personally skewed perspective though, there's no good argument to be made that says wikileaks/twitter/gmail users on old hard/software shouldn't get ssl protection, but I suspect high-end bed linen online shops wouldn't be hurt at all by using SNI and thereby increasing friction for IE6/WinXP users…)

mfincham8• 13 years ago

Some good information on this from Geoff Huston: http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2012-08/EndPt2.html

p1mrx3• 13 years ago

This article looks a bit more relevant. Also, it's from the future: http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2013-08/when.html

mfincham8• 13 years ago

Awesome thanks! I hadn't read this yet :)

p1mrx3• 13 years ago

And news.ycombinator.com is still IPv4-only.

nknighthb6• 13 years ago

The main argument for migrating existing websites to IPv6 in the near-term is merely to aid the policy goal by showing "Hey! IPv6 is in actual use!".

On the technical side, there are various transition mechanisms that can ensure even "IPv6-only" clients will be able to communicate with most legacy IPv4 services for years to come. HN is not holding up progress.

teddyh9• 13 years ago

No, such a thing does not exist. At least not automatically. There are stories[1] about large corporations getting complaints from end customers in Asia about not being reachable - and it turns out the customers only have IPv6. IPv4 FAIL.

(Note: APNIC ran out of IPv4 addresses more than two years ago[2], and has had rapid internet expansion in the mean time. Asians are heavy IPv6 adopters.)

Such a thing you imagine could conceivably be implemented, but it would be an extra thing for the IPv6-only ISPs to implement, and they do not have the incentive to do so. The current companies with servers do have an incentive to be reachable by IPv6-only customers, and are the only parties who can reasonably solve the situation, by implementing IPv6.

1) https://www.iis.se/blogg/ipv6-nar-sent-inforande-kostar-peng... (Swedish)

2) https://www.apnic.net/publications/news/2011/final-8

perlgeek• 13 years ago

I have a very real other reason: One of the hosting companies I use doesn't account IPv6 traffic, so all IPv6 traffic going to some of my websites is essentially free for me.

casca• 13 years ago

There's always been a vocal group who maintains that the IP addresses that are not visible on the internet should be returned. There are a number of problems with this argument.

Firstly, there are legitimate business reasons for having assigned, non-RFC1918 addresses that are only used internally. Interconnecting private networks belonging to different organizations that have overlapping 10.x addresses is a painful process. Sure it's possible to NAT, but given that the IP addresses are effectively an asset of the organization, why not use them? I'm not implying that this is right, but it's how the system was in the past and the cost of changing internal networking and applications could be very high.

Secondly, how do you prove that an IP address is accessible on the Internet? Many IPs do not respond to pings and I can easily set up a device that will answer for all IPs behind the corporate gateways.

p1mrx3• 13 years ago

how do you prove that an IP address is accessible on the Internet?

If an address isn't announced in BGP, then for most practical purposes, it's not on The Internet.

But I'm sure that if someone acquired the authority to start reclaiming unannounced /8s, the entities holding them would figure out how to announce them quite quickly.

nwh3• 13 years ago

I'd rather just see the massive corporate reservations returned.

Why does Xerox need an entire A block, why do Apple, BMW?

ctrl_freak• 13 years ago

Why does Xerox need an entire A block, why do Apple, BMW?

They don't, but retroactively taking away their /8s would be extremely complicated and expensive for them, not to mention that there is very little benefit from prolonging exhaustion by perhaps 1-2 years at most.

kalleboo• 13 years ago

Interconnecting private networks belonging to different organizations that have overlapping 10.x addresses is a painful process

They could just use IPv6 for that

jameswyse• 13 years ago

I'd really hoped we'd have more support for IPv6 by now. It's funny, every so often there's a big "We need IPv6" push with lots of media coverage which is forgotten about shortly afterwards.

As far as I know there's only one ISP (Internode) here in Australia which offers IPv6.

rdtsc2• 13 years ago

There is some network effect in there and I've experienced it myself.

In a product we make, we can go the extra mile and start supporting IPv6 but the libraries we use, the rest of the echo system we play in, don't support it. So we feel like it would be wasted effort at best and it would break things at worst.

A good way we found to force others to configure and bother about IPv6 support is if we deliberately add extra and better features only tied to IPv6.

kazagistar• 13 years ago

Its not really so bad. Its not like end users need IP addresses. All you need is addresses for all the major servers, and then like a couple dozen for each ISP, right?

cbhl• 13 years ago

Carrier NAT has lots of bad consequences.

It means that NAT-punching may stop working (because there may be two or three levels of it).

It makes fraud detection harder.

Plus, it's error prone -- once in a while, you'll get data that happens to look like your IP address, and you'll find that you can't send that precise sequence of bits in a packet ever because it'll get mangled by the NAT.

otterley• 13 years ago

It also breaks IP-to-geography mapping.

tjgq2• 13 years ago

once in a while, you'll get data that happens to look like your IP address, and you'll find that you can't send that precise sequence of bits in a packet ever because it'll get mangled by the NAT

How so? Those bits should only matter to the NAT logic if they are found in their expected position in the IP header, not in the payload portion of the datagram.

PhantomGremlin• 13 years ago

Bah. All this IPV4 "exhaustion" stuff can be simply solved. Almost overnight. Right now, most of the space is underused and simply being hoarded.

Want to free up 90% of the IPs? Easily? Then charge for them!!!

If MIT had to pay $1/mo for each IP address ($16 million per month), it would immediately give most of them back.

If MIT had to pay $1/year for each IP address ($16 million per year), it would immediately give most of them back.

And yet for people like me, paying (in round numbers) $50 / month for Internet, $1/year or even $1/month would be "in the noise".

So how many hundreds of billions of dollars will instead be spent on the designed-by-nerds very-difficult-to-implement not-very-backward-compatible solution of IPV6?

icebraining• 13 years ago

That would still only fix the problem for a relatively short time, and then you'd still need IPv6. It's a stopgap, not a long term solution.

belorn3• 13 years ago

Such policy would lead to an explosion of fragmented patterns in routing, expanding the global routing table. That mean latency and costs would go up while throughput would go down.

If I remember right, there doesn't exist hardware for backbone networks that can handle a fully fragmented global routing table at the required speed of today. They are thus unlikely to also handle the increased speed of tomorrow without quantum computers.

devcpp2• 13 years ago

Awesome, that will push IPv6 adoption.

And big companies that need this sort of routing for millions of addresses can surely afford paying for these addresses anyway.

valisystem• 13 years ago

Making ipv4 a second class citizen working like an low performance compatibility layer for legacy seems like a great migration plan to me. Especially if performance would go down progressively.

damncabbage• 13 years ago

designed-by-nerds

I hate to break it to you, but everything you're using right now to send this information was arguably designed by nerds.

teddyh9• 13 years ago

Meanwhile, in Europe, RIPE ran out of IPv4 a year ago[1], and people have been happily implementing IPv6 ever since. In Sweden, there is a government directive[2] that all state infrastructure should implement IPv6 and DNSSEC by this year (2013) at the latest.

1) https://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/ipv4-exhaustion

2) http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/15234/a/177127

MattJ100• 13 years ago

people have been happily implementing IPv6 ever since.

Spoke to my (UK) ISP last week. They said:

"We will support IPv6 when it is in widespread use worldwide. At the moment IPv4 still has a number of fresh IP's."

Sigh.

teddyh9• 13 years ago

Found an english version of the directive (PDF):

http://www.government.se/content/1/c6/18/19/14/70f489cb.pdf

Page 40, Actions, first paragraph: “In addition, all authorities should make use of DNSSEC and be reachable with IPv6 by 2013.”

bloopletech• 13 years ago

What's the time lag until we run out of IPv4 addresses at the VPS/hosting provider and broadband ISP level?

I see the situation getting progressively more dire, and presumably these notifications are there to try and get people moving to avoid the wall; but assuming everyone keeps operating as close to the status quo as they are able, how long before we truly hit the wall?

teddyh9• 13 years ago

http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2013-08/when.html

Currently the estimate indicates September 2014.

We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing

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