ARIN allocated free IPv4 addresses almost exhausted

http://lists.si6networks.com/pipermail/ipv6hackers/2013-December/001415.html

by brohee • 13 years ago

56 65 13 years ago

lists.si6networks.com

brohee3• 13 years ago

Edit: I was wrong, most of the addresses on that page have been allocated.

This is a bit disingenuous btw, they are down to 1.5 /8 in the class A space, but have quit a few more /8 in class b and class C space.

See https://www.arin.net/knowledge/ip_blocks.html

Still, people not having a plan should really hurry...

jlgaddis6• 13 years ago

No, there are only the equivalent of 1.5 /8s altogether.

brohee3• 13 years ago

Yup, some ARIN pages are a bit unclear about what is spent and what is not, I got a bit confused by it...

darkr• 13 years ago

/8 is CIDR notation, CIDR standing for ClassLESS Inter-Domain Routing.

Classful network architecture died a couple of decades ago, I'm not sure the term still persists with people erroneously substituting class A/B/C to describe any of /24, /16, /12 or /8 IPv4 networks, sometimes as part of an RFC 1918 network, sometimes not..

sergiotapia• 13 years ago

Guys let's not vote down people who contribute to the discussion even if they're wrong. Voting a comment down should be reserved for trolls or people who just derail threads.

jlgaddis6• 13 years ago

ARIN IPv4 Countdown Plan: https://www.arin.net/resources/request/ipv4_countdown.html

wilhil4• 13 years ago

RIPE is pretty much out now, they only allocate a single /22 to new registrants, or a /24 to existing members, and that is it.

Working at a new startup ISP, and sort of seeing this from the inside, I think the whole process is a complete joke.

ANYONE who wants IPs can easily get them, average cost is about £10-£20 each, and a whole ip broker industry seems to have popped up over the last few years... Just google "Buy IP address", "IP Broker" or similar.

The guidelines state that when you are not using an IP, you simply hand it back - but - I don't think ANYONE does this, and why would they as they are both free, there is no verification/auditing, and they are now like gold dust.

Auditing is basically just a list of IPs and saying what you are using them for.

Companies approach all the time saying that they have xx IPs for sale, and the official line when you ask "why are they available" is usually, "we can reorganise our network so we no longer require them"... In reality, I am sure they apply entire ranges to bogus interfaces just to make them look in use.

It really annoys me that this side of the industry doesn't get more exposure!

thirdsight• 13 years ago

Well if it wasn't for all the heel-dragging with IPv6, this wouldn't be a problem.

wilhil4• 13 years ago

IPv6 just won't happen fully any time soon... People are just kidding themselves.

Too many "big" networks have admins who don't update their knowledge and are clueless about IPv6 - At some events where I see network admins, you can ask simple questions and judging by their body language, you know they are guessing/are clueless about IPv6.

On top of this, some really high end network equipment that is still available now from some (high end) vendors is not 100% IPv6 compliant or has weird bugs, and, if network admins have recommended this equipment, they feel uncomfortable telling people it isn't up to scratch after their companies have invested significant money... so... this just makes the whole process stall. (Personal experience, not from the current job!)

IPv6 is the future, but, being realistic, I don't see it happening any time soon.

mino3• 13 years ago

I share your pain, bro :)

Although, two corrections:

1) prices are, in my experience, lower than what you quoted: around 10-12 $/IP, depending on the subnet size.

2) RIPE is indeed encouraging the marketplace model: it is seen as a mechanism to move resources to LIRs that need them the most, with the side effect of increasing IP efficiency.

Also, to note:

4) Since some time, there is a policy proposal [1] to allow intra-RIR transfers to/from RIPE. I'm not aware on whether there is such a proposal within ARIN, which currently allows only transfers to/from APNIC (not very useful if you're american... addresses in APNIC ended a long time ago!).

5) RIPE currently operates in a "emergency policy" that allows a /22 to new registrants and a /24 to new members. ARIN will follows the same policy as soon as they remain with a single /8 left (probably around May-June 2014).

6) I always like to give a link to the very informative exhaustion graph of Geoff Huston [3] :)

[1] http://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2012-03

[2] https://www.arin.net/resources/request/transfers_8_4.html

[3] http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html

wilhil4• 13 years ago

Sorry, meant $ instead of £... I have seen a few prices much much higher from some smaller places (one Eastern European ISP trying to sell a /24 for $40 each), I guess trying to make a quick bit of cash.... but I think $10-$12 as you said is more usual for larger purchases.

rplnt• 13 years ago

The guidelines state that when you are not using an IP, you simply hand it back

Maybe that's why ISPs hand out public IP addresses like nothing?

cpach• 13 years ago

Wouldn’t it be better if IANA or the regional Internet registries directly rented out the IP addresses to the ISP:s/companies who need them? Why let a middle-man collect the profits?

wilhil4• 13 years ago

Awkward to say... These companies (at least RIPE) are non profit making - you join for a fixed fee and then you get as many IPs as you need.

It would be a good idea on one hand and a pain on the other...

I am trying to think of a counter to it in my head, but, I can't really... a small fee is easily absorbed in per user costs and so many companies use public ips for internal routing when a private ip would do a good job...

Then again, you could get big companies asking to rent out more than they need and refusing to hand back...

Even if there was fool proof way of provisioning and managing, I personally think it is far too late to do it :(

bradleyjg• 13 years ago

Yes. Best would be a formula that increased the per ip cost the more ips you had. That would have at least two advantages: first it would pressure the legacy class A holders who are collectively sitting on 100M+ not publicly used addresses; second it would make it unprofitable to hoard and resell.

The current method resembles water law in the US western states, which is just about the worst possible way to allocate access to a limited resource.

noselasd• 13 years ago

Bit to late for that, and the people that already got the IP addresses are unlikely to give them back. The internet is basically the sum of all the BGP routes sitting around on routers, it's unlikely any single organization could have much success trying to reclaim and redistribute those addresses.

gwu78• 13 years ago

"It really annoys me that this side of the industry doesn't get more exposure!"

If only more self-proclaimed "geeks" who purport to care about the future of the internet understood the value of a publicly reachable IP address.

If more folks besides the big players had these, then the potential for reaching a holy grail of "decentralization" and "end-to-end", and all the wonderful things that would make possible, would be much greater.

Instead, these "geeks" are led to believe that hyped workarounds like "the cloud", "webRTC", "IPv6", etc. will save the day.

None of these workarounds should be necessary if you "own" a small block of public IP addresses.

How does the price of these "IPs for sale" compare with what you pay AWS for an IP address you do not use?

tankenmate2• 13 years ago

And ISPs in the US will do what ISPs did elsewhere; point to their IPv6 trial as "evidence" of their IPv6 rollout and continue to consume IPv4 address space until the disaster hits. Also more and more ISPs will prefer to roll out Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT) than bother to update the firmware and configuration of their routers and more importantly due to substandard consumer home routers and other CPE; expect your games and P2P based software that doesn't support UPnP port forwarding to choke.

anonymfus• 13 years ago

Carrier Grade NAT
that doesn't support UPnP port forwarding

Wait, there are Carrier Grade NATs with UPnP support?

tankenmate2• 13 years ago

Most don't you are right, but some are toying with the idea of proxying UPnP requests to "NAT Centres" on the carriers backbone; there are a significant percentage of users who will refuse to put down their controllers and will walk to another provider.

The other way this may be solved is to form a technology solution with the console makers to have a drop in solution at the API level; obviously this will disadvantage smaller developers who can't pay to play (not that this will bother the carriers overly).

I suspect most likely in the US there will be a nuisance fee add on to your internet connection in order to play "P2P" games (x.ref current Net Nutrality battles in the courts)

devicenull• 13 years ago

Most games don't support v6 anyway, so it's not like that would help.

ay8• 13 years ago

Remember the World IPv6 day ? In 2014 a few of us (about a hundred of folks around the world at the moment) are going to do a "World IPv6 only day" (turn off IPv4) on the 06/06/2014, for ourselves. If we can't work successfully during this day using IPv6 only - then we'll take a day off (Conveniently, it's Friday).

If you are someone doing computer networking professionally - why not join us ?

We're tracking the count of those who will turn the legacy IP off for a day via an Avaaz "petition to all the computer professionals".

http://preview.tinyurl.com/noipv4

justincormack4• 13 years ago

But we won't be able to browse Hacker News! (Even though they use Cloudflare now and could just turn on the AAAA records).

ay8• 13 years ago

Yeah maybe if we all ask pg nicely, he will do it ? :)

As a backup plan - cloud-based NAT64 is a fair game for the day, search "go6 nat64".

vidarh• 13 years ago

So in other words productivity might skyrocket for the participants.

mino3• 13 years ago

We moved our whole headquarter on dual stack a while ago, and periodically I'm turning off IPv4 on my laptop to check what the "user experience" would be with IPv6-only...

...well, 9 URLs out of 10 are unreachable. It would be impossible to use for any user.

ay8• 13 years ago

Try with nat64. Not entirely clean experiment, I know (IPv4 upstream of translator). But the result is quite usable.

Ping me via mail if I can help with the setup, we did this setup several times with reasonable success.

jlgaddis6• 13 years ago

See also RFC6586: "Experiences from an IPv6-Only Network"

http://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc6586

Sami_Lehtinen• 13 years ago

It has happaned earlier for other regions (RIPE & APNIC) and nobody really cared about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#Exhaus...

davidw• 13 years ago

Economics being the study of scarce resources, this is basically something that should be viewed through that lens. As the good becomes more scarce, it stands to reason that the price will go up and 1) encourage people to use them more efficiently, and 2) encourage people to look at alternatives like ipv6. It's probably a bit more complex in some ways, but I think the basic logic makes sense.

InTheSwiss• 13 years ago

I worked at Xerox for 8 years as a Solution Architect and it annoyed me so damn much that they are sitting on 13.* yet hardly using it and I can't imagine that has changed in the few years since I left. From what I can remember they were using less than 20% of the address space they have.

Then again running out of v4 addresses is the best thing to happen really. Still it annoys me a big company can sit on so many addresses for no reason.

riobard• 13 years ago

What about adopting a subscription model? Let's say $10/IP/year. We are already doing this for an effectively infinite name space (domain names). The very limited IPv4 name space should be more expensive, right?

jlgaddis6• 13 years ago

There actually is one, although it's a bit cheaper than that:

See, e.g., https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html

exabrial2• 13 years ago

Not a big fan of ipv6... It did nothing to solve the global routing table size problem (in fact it made the problem much much worse). As a small network administrator, it adds nothing but headaches and will not increase the profitability of the company in any way.

The only incentive right now is doomsday predictions and honestly there are better things to worry about. I'm hoping ipv6 gets an update and they design a more realistically usable protocol that offers advantages to the little guys.

jlgaddis6• 13 years ago

It did nothing to solve the global routing table size problem

Well, at the time it was designed there was no "global routing table size problem".

exabrial2• 13 years ago

Good point actually...

The problem is the "Global Routing table size problem" is a problem we actually have _right meow_, whereas the impending omg-out-of-ipv4-address problems is one that will stretch on for another 40+ years.

If IPv6 actually solved the problem we have right now, people would adopt it. But IPv6 solves no current problems, it only creates new current problems.

Anyway, I know IETF pisses vinegar all over NAT, but I'm hoping a grassroots effort pops up to solve the problem IPv6 should have actually solved.

All we really need is forward-compatible extension to IPv4 that allows for easier incoming NAT traversal. A working solution would allow border routers to identify traffic belonging to an individual host on their network (in the private address space), while the client remains blissfully happy on traditional IPv4.

The goal would be, merely update your border router to speak this extension to IPv4... rather than every device on your network and oh by the way, rewrite half the software you have that parses ipv4 addresses.

iptrading• 13 years ago

We have been brokering IPv4 addresses for many years, we brokered half the bids for the watershed sale of 660,000 addresses from Nortel to Microsoft in 2011. Because of the inter-regional transfers allowed between ARIN and APNIC, we consider that a single market. ARIN/APNIC prices are right around $8US per address. RIPE has no inter-regional transfer policy, and prices in RIPE are around $10US per address. Leasing of space is also available.

ldng• 13 years ago

IMHO, nothing is going to happen upon IPv4 exhaustion. IPv4 will become a luxury good whose price will rise quickly.

Which leads me to wonder if the Internet at large isn't at a crossroad. Either IPv6 and Net Neutrality are adopted or a market (and a black market ?) is created for IPv4. Add to that the end of net neutrality and we'll enjoy the return of Compuserve/AOL and the demise of small independent entrepreneurship on the internet because of the higher cost of entry.

Granted, it's worst case scenario, yet not impossible.

ARIN allocated free IPv4 addresses almost exhausted

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