IPv4 Unallocated Addresses Exhausted by 2010 419
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica is reporting on how the unallocated IPv4 address pool could run out as soon as 2010. The IPv4 Address Report gives details on just how fast the available pool of IPv4 addresses is diminishing. Will ISPs be moving towards IPv6 any time soon? Or will IPv4 exhaustion become the next Y2K?"
it's tghe next Y2k (Score:5, Insightful)
Worse than Y2K (Score:4, Insightful)
It will be expensive to make a major shift to IPv6, which is why it's taking so long.
Until the complete exhaustion of all IPv4 addresses is an immanent threat the change will not happen, much like Y2K.
VoIp Everything (Score:5, Insightful)
IPv4 addresses are going to be going away very quickly.
Re:Increase Address Space (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Reallocate what is available (Score:3, Insightful)
Kind of reminds me of a Grandpa Simpson (skewed to be somewhat on topic): "I didn't earn it, I don't need it, but if they miss one [octal] I'll raise hell."
Re:From TFA: free pr0n! (Score:4, Insightful)
With one of the bigger 'features' of IPv6 being the possibility of assigning and tracking users individually with the huge number of addresses - I suspect it does not play into the current (sorta) anonymous surfing mindset folks have today. (Not that anyone is truly anonymous on the web) Once you have to slap down your address to access the content, I can see why people might not be interested.
Re:From TFA: free pr0n! (Score:3, Insightful)
Is IPv6 so unappealing that they've gotta bribe people with pr0n to use it?
It's not unappealing, it's totally irrelevant to end-users. There's no market out there asking for IPv6 network access. ISPs and their upstream providers thus have no increase in revenue if they deploy IPv6, but that deployment will cost them real money -- v6 capable routers need much more storage and processing, for instance -- and so there's real financial incentive to avoid IPv6. Offering free pr0n might be a way to make the difference relevant to end-users and thus provide demand and revenue, but I kind of doubt that it's enough.
When end-users are getting IPv6 or private address IPv4 to the door, and a NAT exchange at the ISP, and their VOIP/game/spyware breaks, there will be financial motive at all levels. Being able to offer a full and uncrippled Internet experience will be the value-add.
But expect a period of chaos as ISPs try to barter IPv4 addresses around, and failing that, try to steal them.
Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space (Score:5, Insightful)
Carbon Credits (Score:4, Insightful)
Companies may cut down unnecessary IP usage, or buy/rent addresses from other companies with plenty to spare.
This 'trade' could go on until such point it's either more costly to rent than move to IPv6, or when all available-and-necessary addresses have been fully utilized.
They will move when they have to (Score:5, Insightful)
ISPs won't care (Score:5, Insightful)
Heck, it's already happening in other countries. In Chile for example (a reasonably high-tech country) VTR http://www.vtr.cl/ [www.vtr.cl], the only cable ISP, will give you ONLY RFC-1918 addresses, period.
The masses won't care. They only care about their basic apps, and ISPs will use that as leverage to control more services, especially all P2P and VoIP-related ones.
Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space (Score:4, Insightful)
companies that totally don't need them would be companies like:
Ford
Boeing
GE
Re:Worse than Y2K (Score:3, Insightful)
You have an interesting concept of "easy"
Re:Worse than Y2K (Score:3, Insightful)
After all, most recent network hardware are more or less ready to make the transition, and anyone running Windows 2000 Professional or later, MacOS X variants, and more recent Linux distributions could make the jump to IPv6 either natively or by installing a patch program.
Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:From TFA: free pr0n! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:From TFA: free pr0n! (Score:3, Insightful)
Routers that have been capable of supporting IPv4/IPv6 dual stack have been available for a long time now so unless you're a tiny ISP that has no budget for life-cycle upgrades it's very likely your kit is already capable of running IPv6. Now, whether or not your engineering staff is trained in supporting IPv6 is another story. Within 5-10 years though ISPs will have very little excuse to NOT support IPv6 since they will have replaced any antiquated IPv4-only equipment as it is end-of-lifed. US Federal Government agencies have a mandate to support IPv6 by June 2008 so it has been spurring a lot of vendors to get their shit in order and either upgrade their products to support IPv6 or face not being able to sell to one of their largest customers.
Re:Use NAT liberaly (Score:3, Insightful)
NAT is a dreadful hack.
-b.
Start preparing your resume... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hopefully it *is* the new Y2K.
Re:From TFA: free pr0n! (Score:4, Insightful)
... and the environment??? (Score:2, Insightful)
- a new mobile phone for each person
- a new computer
- a new [xbox|ps2|ps3|nintendo]
- a new modem
- a new ANYTHING that contains a network interface (ip4 address)
because its more economical viable to buy some new than to fix something we already have and all the old stuff (which is in perfect working order) ends up on a rubbish dump.... off course until we realize that the temperature graph is exponential, ouch!
Supply and demand (Score:3, Insightful)
And now to ensure this gets modded as Flamebait: there just aren't enough free-market thinkers on Slashdot.
Re:Reshuffle existing IPv4 space (Score:3, Insightful)
First, apple was never an internet pioneer, they were very late in implementing the IP protocol, even microsoft beat them to it.
The people who handed out IP blocks cleanly did not expect the internet to be so popular (if they did they would have gone to ipv6 straight away).
They benefited froma mistake, now they should fxi the mistake.
If IP blocks are handed out as a reward for being an internet pioneer, how many class A blocks did they give Tim-Berners_Lee?
"best efforts of organizations like ARIN" joke (Score:3, Insightful)
I've worked at Silicon Valley companies with multiple class B allocations that could have easily put them behind NAT gateways and firewalls. The University of California campuses have many class Bs and will tell you they "can't do NAT to the dormitories because it's too difficult to track". That's 65K address per class B and there are dozens of these, and several class As, that are just waiting to be reclaimed.
What these class A and B-owning organizations are doing is holding on to vacant land as long as they can, until it becomes valuable, at which point they hope to sell it at a big profit.
ARIN is doing the same thing by failing to reclaim these allocations. They're just waiting for demand to climb like California real-estate to begin cashing-in. This is exactly what Network Solutions/Verisign did with domain names when they had a government-protected monopoly. Have we forgotten so soon, one year domain registration was free (via SRI), and the mext year it was $100 per year per domain (via Verisign), despite actual costs of $7/year. This scenario should also be familiar to those who have had to change telephone area codes, sometimes more than once, until enough people complained (of course that was when the FCC was in Democratic hands. With Republicans the Telcos have once-again been cleaning up).
So believe the hype, but remember, if you fail to look a little deeper we will soon be paying the price, in increased ISP fees, for this wholly artificial IPv4 address shortage.
auction! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:it's tghe next Y2k (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Easy way to speed IPv6 Adoption (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:From TFA: free pr0n! (Score:4, Insightful)
With v4, your router gets the address and then NATs it out to however-many devices you have. With v6, you'd get a block of addresses at the router, which it could then distribute via DHCP, or the machines could randomly assign themselves within. You're not losing anything there. Where you might gain something is in the ability to quickly switch IPs when traveling and connecting to an AP that's not yours (which is conceptually similar to performing a DHCP release-and-renew).
If you want plausible deniability, pretty much your only option is to leave your AP unsecured and hope that when the cops show up they buy it as a defense, or use some type of onion routing like Tor.
There seems to be a lot of fear and paranoia going around regarding IPv6, and I just don't get it. There's nothing you can do on IPv4 today that you can't do on IPv6, if you want to. Hell, if you're that attached to NAT, you can do it with IPv6 addresses just as readily -- it's just that it's stupid, because there's no longer any reason to since there's no address shortage, and there's really no privacy or security gained from it that you don't get by just rotating your IPv6 address.
Re:From TFA: free pr0n! (Score:3, Insightful)
What are you talking about? You have to "slap down" your address to receive content with IPv4, too - otherwise, how would a server know where to send its response? And if you're paranoid to the point that you want to break your Internet connection for the sake of not divulging internal IP addresses, then yes, you can masquerade behind a single IP address on IPv6 just as easily as you can on IPv4.
Or you could perform more complex 1:1 address masquerading, the likes of which aren't possible on consumer IPv4 connections due to said address space crisis. This could be performed at the router to obscure any autoconfigured internal addresses which might have been generated from machines' MAC addresses; or you could take Microsoft's approach, and implement such features at the operating system level.
IPv6 offers more features and a much greater address space, with no built-in cost to privacy. Fearmongering by those who are unfamiliar with the new protocol will only hurt its adoption rate, to the detriment of the entire Internet community.
Re:From TFA: free pr0n! (Score:5, Insightful)
If one were to build a proper ipv6 router, they would need to (pony up the cash to) include a proper firewall, or educate the users. Good luck with either one.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Its not addresses but routes thats the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
truly anonymous on the web (Score:3, Insightful)
Hold on, someone is at my window, 'yes officer?' * click *