IPv4 Countdown!!!!

[Omegaman]

Are we really ready for IPv6?

Amsterdam, 18 October 2010 – The Number Resource Organization (NRO) announced today that less than five percent of the world’s IPv4 addresses remain unallocated. APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia Pacific region, has been assigned two blocks of IPv4 addresses by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). This latest allocation means that the IPv4 free pool dipped below 10% in January, just nine months ago. Since then, over 200 million IPv4 addresses have been allocated from IANA to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).

As of this post, we are looking at 228 days left before the predicted exhaustion of all IPv4 addresses.  We've just passed the < 200 million IPv4 addresses left (< 5%).  You can go to Hurricane Electric who are running realtime IPv4 exhaustion counters to get an update.

ZDnet published a nice article about the impending "doomsday" of IPv4 exhaustion and the status of worldwide IPv6 migration.  The NRO seems optimistic about widespread IPv6 migration and integration, but I tend to agree with the author of the ZDnet article that we as a whole aren't ready for IPv6.  Hopefully the "wake-up" call and alarm bells will go off starting in 2011.  I guess I'll just keep my fingers crossed.

[Thomphoolery]

IPv6 will get supported as soon as middleware enables it. It's already there in every single client device in the world. We just need the infrastructure to use it, and we're there.

But, with that being a huge step, it doesn't really matter. The real "solution" until we can reach the endgame is to force people to use more subnets. There's no reason why we can't have big corporations NAT everything and throw them into yet another local network.

That, and have every swingin' dude's personal web page stop using static IPs, and do the same thing. Map them to the hosting company's IP, and translate it on demand. It's not hard to set up - people just don't like the idea of it for some reason...but I think it's because the IT world still loves to reference things by IP address instead of by hostname.

-j

[Omegaman]

I agree. I really don't think everyone is ready and willing to give up their static IPs.  If corporations would stop registering large blocks of Class C IP addresses, we probably wouldn't be in the situation we are in and could buy us more time.  254 hosts seems like overkill when they could (can) divvy up and consolidate their internal traffic as you pointed out.

[Djfurball]

Can't use name-based hosting with SSL, so ... there's a pretty good reason for not wanting to give up on your static IP's ;-)

[Thomphoolery]

Can't use name-based hosting with SSL, so ... there's a pretty good reason for not wanting to give up on your static IP's ;-)

You can, you just have to use the workaround of assigning different SSL ports on your single SSL server. Keep one static IP going for your SSL transaction, and strength reduce the protocol by having a transaction process running on a ton of unique ports.

-j