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IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011

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21–30 of 69 posts

Re: IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011

#21
post #9

There are a lot of addresses that should be 'reclaimed' . These days, most enterprises really only need a few public addresses, and many of them are 'sitting on' large chunks of addresses they acquired in the 90s.

While I agree, reclaiming them would only delay the inevitable by a few months or a couple years, perhaps.

Re: IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011

#22
post #9

There are a lot of addresses that should be 'reclaimed' . These days, most enterprises really only need a few public addresses, and many of them are 'sitting on' large chunks of addresses they acquired in the 90s.

It would be a better use of everybody's energy to actually get to work on the IPv6 transition, rather than trying to squeeze another couple of years out of IPv4. I think it should be pretty much obvious to everyone by now that until we actually hit the wall of IPv4, no one is going to get serious about the transition. NAT is not a great solution - it's a hack, and as anybody that has had to set up a server behind a NAT knows, it can be a real pain.

Re: IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is misleading: computers (and especially printers) attached to a local network do not deplete public IP addresses A device connected to a LAN in someone's house will often just have a private IP and go through a NAT for its internet access. However many big organisations will have been allocated a large address space at some point, often the size of a Class B. Their machines internally will often use a global…

Good point. I thought that there is not much use for a public IP for a printer, but I did not think about big address allocations. But is there any convenience in this? Can't they just switch a private LAN infrastructure connected through NAT?

> Can't they just switch a private LAN infrastructure connected through NAT?

They could and given that in most organisations devices are already generally subject to restrictive firewall rules it shouldn't impact them all that much.

I think it would be better to focus efforts on making these organisations move to IPv6. This could possibly be achieved by ordering them to give back most of their IPv4 addresses. Since they will then be forced to reorganise their infrastructure anyway they could use this opportunity to switch on IPv6 across their organisation at the same time, if they haven't already.

Re: IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. I thought that there is not much use for a public IP for a printer, but I did not think about big address allocations. But is there any convenience in this? Can't they just switch a private LAN infrastructure connected through NAT?

Printing from off-site is easier with a public IP, I don't know how often that is necessary.

This would be better done with a VPN than simply allowing external access to your printers.

Re: IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011

#25
post #9

There are a lot of addresses that should be 'reclaimed' . These days, most enterprises really only need a few public addresses, and many of them are 'sitting on' large chunks of addresses they acquired in the 90s.

Please don't. This would just be another temporary solution allowing us to get even more invested in a flawed technology. We need to do the move as soon as possible so I really hope no "hero" comes in and buys us 5 more years on this.

Re: IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011

#26
post #13

I wonder if it wouldn't just be cheaper to design NAT-friendly apps. By the looks of it, the transition would last a decade and there would still be large legacy infrastructure in place after that. So why not learn to love NAT and ipv4?

Because then we're still loving NAT and IPv4 in 2050.

Re: IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011

#27

I don't think my router even supports IPv6. This is going to be -such- a fun transition. I really thought people would get serious about it 2 years ago.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-ipv6-cpe-router-... Once this is published as an RFC we can all start asking the vendors to support it.

Re: IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011

#28
I know this is going to sound silly, but it runs through my mind every time there's an IPv4/IPv6 discussion:

Consider a pair of random IPs in standard written form:

   v4: 209.85.225.147
   v6: 2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e8
From a purely aesthetic standpoint, IPv6 addresses look nasty. They vary in length, they're hard to remember, they're a little bit harder to parse and print than v4s. Much like an email address, an IPv4 address is iconic (to the right people) and immediately recognizable, whereas it would be easy to confuse a v6 for a MAC address. Is it at all possible that this is hampering adoption of IPv6?

Re: IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011

#29

I don't think my router even supports IPv6. This is going to be -such- a fun transition. I really thought people would get serious about it 2 years ago.

Most of your software doesn't support IPv6, which I think is a bigger problem. Most everything that works with sockets assumes that a network address fits in a machine int type; IPv6 addresses aren't even scalar.

Re: IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011

#30
post #9

There are a lot of addresses that should be 'reclaimed' . These days, most enterprises really only need a few public addresses, and many of them are 'sitting on' large chunks of addresses they acquired in the 90s.

It would be a better use of everybody's energy to actually get to work on the IPv6 transition, rather than trying to squeeze another couple of years out of IPv4. I think it should be pretty much obvious to everyone by now that until we actually hit the wall of IPv4, no one is going to get serious about the transition. NAT is not a great solution - it's a hack, and as anybody that has had to set up a server behind a N…

I'll wager that most residential Internet users are NAT'd, as are most corporate Internet users. The Internet works better today than it did back in 1996, when virtually nobody was NAT'd (back then, the big imposition was dynamic addresses instead of static).
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