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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

#81
post #59
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rumormill at IBM is that we bought some random companies a while back just for their IPv4 blocks. You didn't hear that from me though.

Doubt it, everything on IBM is natted to a 10.0.0.0/8 or is running externally to 9.0.0.0/8. Source: I work at IBM, in a division that was another company that was bought out a few years back.

I think the suggestion was that they expected those blocks could become very valuable in the future and could thus be sold for a healthy profit. I don't think GP meant that IBM wanted to actually use those addresses themselves.

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

#82
post #18

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)?

Remember Y2K?

Sometimes software simply has to be upgraded to meet changing circumstances.

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

#83
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, such a thing does not exist. At least not automatically. There are stories[1] about large corporations getting complaints from end customers in Asia about not being reachable - and it turns out the customers only have IPv6. IPv4 FAIL. (Note: APNIC ran out of IPv4 addresses more than two years ago [2], and has had rapid internet expansion in the mean time. Asians are heavy IPv6 adopters.) Such a thing you imagine…

IPv6 doesn't exist automatically, either. If an ISP is going to move their customers to it without setting up the requisite transition mechanisms, I don't see how that's any different than failing to meet the myriad requirements for provisioning a functional IPv4-only network in the modern age. Whom do you blame when an ISP forgets to configure BGP on their routers?

You might think such a scheme is "requisite", but the fact remains that there is insufficient incentive for the ISPs to do them, and they plainly don't do them, as my cited example shows.

You can assign blame however you like, but it won't help your IPv6 customers/users to reach your servers.

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

#84
post #45

Meanwhile, in Europe, RIPE ran out of IPv4 a year ago[1], and people have been happily implementing IPv6 ever since. In Sweden, there is a government directive[2] that all state infrastructure should implement IPv6 and DNSSEC by this year (2013) at the latest. 1) https://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/ipv4-exhaustion 2) http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/15234/a/177127

> people have been happily implementing IPv6 ever since.

Spoke to my (UK) ISP last week. They said:

> "We will support IPv6 when it is in widespread use worldwide. At the moment IPv4 still has a number of fresh IP's."

Sigh.

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

#85
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv6 doesn't exist automatically, either. If an ISP is going to move their customers to it without setting up the requisite transition mechanisms, I don't see how that's any different than failing to meet the myriad requirements for provisioning a functional IPv4-only network in the modern age. Whom do you blame when an ISP forgets to configure BGP on their routers?

You might think such a scheme is "requisite", but the fact remains that there is insufficient incentive for the ISPs to do them, and they plainly don't do them, as my cited example shows. You can assign blame however you like, but it won't help your IPv6 customers/users to reach your servers.

I really don't know what your example shows, because I don't read Swedish, and the Google translate version is predictably mangled and difficult to parse. To the extent it says anything, it's very vague and seems to recount a single, unique incident. This and your apparent inability to provide case studies in English leads me to the belief that the problem is rare.

I'll also add that I've been in the employ of a company that does business exclusively in Asia for years. We've as yet not encountered this problem.

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

#86
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mostly thinking about end-user applications that may just never get updated, though I can't come up with any off the top of my head.

Dual-stack, proxies, and (if absolutely necessary) actual tunnels can compensate for critical IPv4 apps. You can layer whatever you need to on top of IPv6. Non-critical applications where people aren't willing to jump through any hoops... Well, it's not exactly news that sometimes old apps get left behind in technology transitions.

Dual-stack still requires an IPv4 address.

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

#87
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dual-stack, proxies, and (if absolutely necessary) actual tunnels can compensate for critical IPv4 apps. You can layer whatever you need to on top of IPv6. Non-critical applications where people aren't willing to jump through any hoops... Well, it's not exactly news that sometimes old apps get left behind in technology transitions.

Dual-stack still requires an IPv4 address.

Of course it does, but not necessarily a publicly-routable one. Dual-stack is necessary because otherwise the IPv4 application literally won't run at all. How the packets actually traverse the public internet is a different matter addressed by things like NAT, proxies, or tunnels.

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

#88
post #72
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 How so? Those bits should only matter to the NAT logic if they are found in their expected position in the IP header, not in the payload portion of the datagram.

Some cheap NAT devices rewrites stuff that "looks like" the internal IP addresses inside the TCP payload, in a hackish attempt to "fix" things like FTP and other protocols that send addresses in the payload. A really stupid and dangerous way to do things, but it's been known to happen.

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

#89
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 a ton of /8 still assigned to companies that don't need them. You've got no idea how they're structured internally. Some of those companies uses their blocks to make every machine in their network globally routable, they don't "need" them but they do use them and they're part of their network architecture.

They are using 16,777,214 IP addresses? I think that's quite a stretch. I work at a company that has 19,000 employees with locations all over the world. We couldn't make a dent in 16.7MM routeable IP addresses.

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

#90
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Legally it's an allocation, not ownership. The registry could simply revoke your allocations if it caught you selling them (though whether it would is another question).

When I owned an ISP in 1996 I paid a larger ISP money to suballocate a range of a couple /24s to me. This happens all the time - look up any random netblock on arin.net.
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