IPv4 Depletion

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

by paralelogram • 11 years ago

53 60 11 years ago

na85• 11 years ago

They really just need to set a date and say "okay guys, on 1 March 2017 we're all just going to drop IPv4 entirely, you have until then to get ready"

Yes, there will be casualties.

oasisbob• 11 years ago

Who is 'they' ?

nacs• 11 years ago

The organization from the linked site -- ARIN -- American Registry for Internet Numbers.

nothrabannosir• 11 years ago

... and then "we" say "No." "They" lose credibility and political weight. Next time a decision has to be made, "others" will try to seize power, pointing at this event to show the threat to backwards compatibility that they present.

Politics are everywhere. Don't underestimate the energy necessary to shift the direction of an oil tanker.

tedunangst2• 11 years ago

They should start by deciding when we're really out of IPv4. We exhausted IPv4 in 2011. And 2012. And 2013. And 2014. Every time somebody says "but this time we're really serious."

ay9• 11 years ago

There are multiple RIRs who exhausted in various times.

RIPE already ran on the "1024 addresses for every new member and that's it" soft-landing policy for the past couple of years.

But ARIN does not have a nice policy like RIPE does, so it will be a bit more entertaining this time.

sixdimensional• 11 years ago

Actually, you may be right, in a way. I've seen some government organizations pull a trick to motivate change - they schedule a change for a certain date... a "hard stop" and everyone has to switch. From the outside this looks like insanity, boiling the ocean... panic!!

The trick comes in, they never had any intention for the change to be complete by that date, just to motivate people with the threat of impending required change. Many will scramble or work hard to meet that deadline, but there are always those who are left behind.

Then, to make it work, nearly before the deadline, the deadline is extended for special cases by a reasonable, margin to allow those that don't convert to catch up.

In any case, the goal is to give the illusion that there is a make it or break it deadline for real, and then address the consequences as they come up after the deadline.

qnaal• 11 years ago

HP doesn't need both those Class A blocks

jsmthrowaway3• 11 years ago

Say everyone who doesn't "need" a LEGACY /8, by your estimation, gives them back. Then what do we do when those are gone?

Seriously, should we be bolting aftermarket mods on our Datsun to get it another fifty miles or should we just buy a new bus already and get it overwith? Yeah, not everyone fits in the new bus, and that's the problem, but we've been in this dire boat for a long time.

I've seen firsthand how Apple uses 17/8. Asking Apple to renumber that is completely futile. You might as well deploy IPv7, for as much effort it will take. Better to just advance the state of the art instead of squeezing another few days out of IPv4.

virtuallynathan2• 11 years ago

Apple is starting to use those for "real" purposes now with their CDN, iMessages, iCloud, etc...

wmf• 11 years ago

Fortunately there is a market where they can sell the parts they don't need. It could make for a nice quarterly bump if they ever do it.

bluedevil2k2• 11 years ago

There's a secondary market that is surprisingly lacking in interest. I have a site that brokers large blocks of IPv4 to interested parties, and the most interest I've seen is for a /21. We have a /8 and can not come anywhere close to drumming up interest for it.

http://ipv4hub.com

betaby6• 11 years ago

In fact IPv4 transfers are very common in RIPE servin region, there is official pace https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-transfers-... So companies are buying IPv4 space

porjo4• 11 years ago

There is a lot of FUD surrounding this market. Apparently Iran has been buying blocks of IPv4 from Romania, only to discover that the Romanians were continuing to advertise those same blocks after the sale!! See https://youtu.be/Jn5ztZSigHA

MertsA• 11 years ago

That's pretty egregious, why the heck did the romanian upstream peers not just drop them after they started obviously highjacking the /23? I mean you have something that is obviously not just some misconfiguration, if you know that one of your peers is intentionally hijacking some prefix why would you be complacent in being a part of their fraud?

ay9• 11 years ago

Hmm, you have an IPv4 /8 that you don't need that you want to sell ?

I'm sure with ARIN running out probably tomorrow there would surely be interest soon!

bluedevil2k2• 11 years ago

Well, if you have $250M, you can buy it for yourself

kjs32• 11 years ago

Interesting idea, but my unsubstantiated feeling is that there's probably a solid market for sub-class C to maybe /23 or /22, a small but well funded market for blocks bigger than /12 or so, and very, very little in the middle. That is, there's a lot of business use cases where owning a modest sized, routeable network is a potential win (e.g. site redundancy via BGP), a couple of business plans where having a very large numbers of addresses is important (e.g. you're a Something-aaS company, or an ISP/hosting play), but what's the business that needs just 64k addresses? Yes, I know they're out there (I've worked with many), but in my experience many of those are either a) really, really inefficient with their address space or b) are tacking on whatever space they can scrounge because they started out with a too-small allocation. YMMV.

FrankenPC• 11 years ago

What happens to the private sector end nodes? Do routers perform NAT from IPV4 to IPV6?

turnip1979• 11 years ago

No .. You'd think this was worked out before ipv6 was finalized. Nat64 and other related tech is a mess.

koffiezet2• 11 years ago

NAT and other related tech is a mess.

FTFY

betaby6• 11 years ago

There are many ways to do so, like dual stack of real IPv6 + RCF6598 for IPv4 - used by many ISPs in Europe where IPv4 space shortage is a real problem.

porjo4• 11 years ago

They continue doing IPv4. Anyone they want to reach needs to be reachable on IPv4 - at least via an IPv4 gateway/proxy

Animats• 11 years ago

Mobile should have been IPv6 from the beginning. In China, it mostly is. If we could get all the handsets on IPv6, that would free up much address space. T-Mobile has been pushing IPv6, but they had problems with Skype and WhatsApp, which apparently don't talk IPv6 properly.

betaby6• 11 years ago

Interesting, especially in the light of google reported ~2 percent IPv6 penetration in China. My personal experience in managing somewhat popular sites (dual stack) in line with Google reported numbers. https://www.google.ca/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-c...

porjo4• 11 years ago

AFAIK Google web-based services aren't that popular in China, so IPv6 metrics there are kinda irrelevant.

virtuallynathan2• 11 years ago

Verizon Wireless and T-Mo have very large amounts of IPv6 deployed. They use 464XLAT, and anything with hard-coded IPv4 literals (bad practice) works kinda poorly.

ay9• 11 years ago

I tested Skype back in January on IPv6only+NAT64, worked for me.

Anyway given this: http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2015/06/apple-..., the days of "Apps not working with IPv6" are counted.

netheril96• 11 years ago

What? As a Chinese I have never been able to access IPv6 through mobile network or WiFi. Are you sure about your statement?

contingencies2• 11 years ago

Me either, and I've used all providers historically. I think Animats was confused with Japan.

shmerl• 11 years ago

IPv6 adoption is surprisingly slow. Shouldn't it happen faster?

stephengillie• 11 years ago

A lot of SMB and even large-ish companies are in total denial mode, still. Most use IPv4 exclusively for all network connectivity. Some places disable IPv6 across the board, in other places it remains enabled by default but ignored.

contingencies2• 11 years ago

Some devices won't work, people need retraining, security with less tested stacks is a concern, addresses are harder to remember. It's a nontrivial change to push on to an established network, with a horizon for payoffs beyond the standard political term.

porjo4• 11 years ago

A recent presentation [1] at RIPE conference highlighted that only 6 of the top 30 carriers in the world (based on customer value) are doing anything visible with IPv6. I suspect the rest have some IPv6 strategy cooking on the back burner, but are in no hurry to deploy until their hand is forced.

[1] https://youtu.be/hrEh40_H4r4?t=730

api2• 11 years ago

Few of the big cloud providers -- EC2, Azure, etc. -- support IPv6. That's the big bottleneck.

Fundamentally I think IPv6 itself is fine, but the transition was utterly botched. They should have unshelved 240.0.0.0/4 and mapped IPv6 onto it, allowing IPv4 applications to access select "early adopter" regions of IPv6. That would have been a start.

betaby6• 11 years ago

IPv4 to IPv6 mapping exists for a long time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4

talideon• 11 years ago

It's a classic chicken and egg problem. IPv4 is still "good enough" as far as most people are concerned, so even with the squeeze on available addresses, there's just not quite enough need to come over the inertial against supporting IPv6. Because of that, there's no demand driving adoption from any particular side: ISPs can get away with giving people IPv4 addresses only because IPv4 space is where all the content is, hosting providers have no great impetus so long as they're not seeing much IPv6 traffic[1], their customers know IPv4 and the benefits of all the additional address space are either too abstract or too scary ('Oh, my! That IP address is huge!'), and there's still enough legacy networking equipment, both professional and home, that only supports IPv4 that it can be hard to make a business case to get rid of.

[1] Which is a pity, though not at all universal. The hosting company I work for takes pride in the fact that nearly our whole network, except for some colo boxes, some rapidly disappearing legacy boxes, and the like, is dual stack. Not all hosting providers think this way, and even when they do, they're customers often just ignore IPv6 because they know IPv4 and that's good enough for them. It doesn't help that an embarrassing number of ccTLD registries don't support IPv6 glue records.

nodesocket• 11 years ago

Is ipv4 depletion an issue for the big cloud providers (Amazon , Google, DigitalOcean, Rackspace)? How many ips do they have left?

raidan• 11 years ago

It has been an issue for some in the past[1].

[1] http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/06/ipv4-e...

betaby6• 11 years ago

They keep buying space. Microsoft for example http://www.networkworld.com/article/2228854/microsoft-subnet...

ay9• 11 years ago

The most widely known is Azure, when they had to shuffle addresses around:

http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/06/ipv4-e...

Google already started charging a nominal fee for idle IPv4 addresses: https://cloud.google.com/sql/, search for "Idle IPv4 address"

jsmthrowaway3• 11 years ago

Amazon landed the largest address transfer that I'm aware of to date (a /10) when du Pont chopped up 52/8. Reddit mentioned it, but I didn't see news on it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/2tc4ss/looks_li...

sliken• 11 years ago

Seems like IoT would have much more to offer with IPv6. Currently you buy a "internet enabled" schlage deadbolt for your front door and it connects to cloud to enable remote lock/unlock. If you could count on a visible IP address products/services could skip such things.

Again it's a chicken and egg problem, nobody does anything cool assuming IPv6 because few have it. Few have it, because you can't do anything cool with it.

steckerbrett• 11 years ago

World accessible devices is a pretty scary concept. If you have your garage door controlled by an ESP8266 it would take a single host to denial of service attack it, maybe even just one server to denial of service attack every garage door in the united states.

koffiezet2• 11 years ago

It's not because it's public addressable that it would be public accessible.

mmaunder• 11 years ago

I feel lucky to have our little /27 colo block.

We added IPv6 support to our firewall product earlier this year and it was a big deal - lots of schema and code changes to deal with 128 bit wide addresses and address math. I'd encourage any devs working on new products to bake it in from v1 if you can.

gonzo• 11 years ago

We put IPv6 in pfSense years ago.

Definitely worth all the work.

IPv4 Depletion

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