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

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

#31

Post by nwh »

casca wrote: post #23

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 p…

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

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

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

#32

Post by Decade »

ars wrote: post #4

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…

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.

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

#33

Post by Dylan16807 »

recuter wrote: post #9
ars wrote: post #4

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…

> 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.

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

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

#35

Post by ctrl_freak »

nwh wrote: post #31
casca wrote: post #23

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 p…

I'd rather just see the massive corporate reservations returned. Why does Xerox need an entire A block, why do Apple, BMW?

> 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.

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

#36

Post by duskwuff »

mfincham wrote: post #21
Negitivefrags wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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).

Many of the legacy allocations were made before RIRs existed, so no policies really apply.

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

#37

Post by rdtsc »

pyre wrote: post #18
mfincham wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Returning them would only delay the inevitable by a matter of months. Deploy IPv6 today, it ain't hard.

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)?

They had enough time. This is not a new thing. Some ISPs were more proactive, some were not. Those invested man hours and hopefully they will reap the benefits while their competitors struggle.

Same with OS and software support.

In the end some will profit from this (even the lazy ones -- "quick, pay us for a new version that enables IPv6 support) and some will lose (they'll find competitors did a better job at IPv6 support).

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

#38

Post by nwh »

ctrl_freak wrote: post #35
nwh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather just see the massive corporate reservations returned. Why does Xerox need an entire A block, why do Apple, BMW?

> 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.

They could buy the ranges back if they really desired. The results from the Carna botnet show just how sparse the usage of the allocated ranges is. It's practically empty for the entire left upper quadrant.

http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/images/hilbert_icmp_...

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

#39

Post by rdtsc »

jameswyse wrote: post #25

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.

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.

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

#40

Post by cbhl »

kazagistar wrote: post #34

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?

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.

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