

IANA IPv4 Addresses "Officially" Exhausted - tptacek
http://www.ipv4depletion.com/?page_id=326

======
djcapelis
iana.org still shows 7 unallocated blocks in the free pool... anything 5 or
under will indeed trigger the final blocks to go to the RIRs, but I totally
don't see any source that verifies that this happened yet.

Can someone provide a second source?

Block 39 still shows up as reserved:

    
    
      NetRange:       39.0.0.0 - 39.255.255.255 
      CIDR:           39.0.0.0/8
      OriginAS:
      NetName:        RESERVED-39A
      NetHandle:      NET-39-0-0-0-1
      Parent:
      NetType:        IANA Reserved
      RegDate:
      Updated:        2002-09-12
      Ref:            http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-39-0-0-0-1
    
      OrgName:        Internet Assigned Numbers Authority  
      OrgId:          IANA
      Address:        4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330
      City:           Marina del Rey
      StateProv:      CA
      PostalCode:     90292-6695
      Country:        US
      RegDate:
      Updated:        2004-02-24
      Ref:            http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/IANA
    

The other remaining reserved blocks that are routable should be 102, 103, 104,
106 and 179.

We are close to this event, but to my knowledge it has not yet happened.

Quote ARIN: "When the IANA IPv4 free pool has only five /8 blocks remaining,
they will be simultaneously distributed to the five RIRs in accordance with
global policy. This means that only two blocks remain to be handed out under
the normal distribution method." (From:
<https://www.arin.net/announcements/2010/20101130.html> which is dated a few
months, but I believe this policy still stands...)

~~~
jacquesm
How about 240/4, that's 2^28 addresses that are reserved for 'future use',
that's still 256M addresses.

~~~
djcapelis
IIRC the reason we can't use those is many IP stacks deployed today will
refuse to even try using the addresses in 240/4. They were for a future
_version_ of IP, not for allocation later.

As a hack, it's quite possible someone will try allocating these and ask
everyone to patch their systems over the next half a year to a year as things
get more critical and the RIRs begin to run out of /24s. (The RIRs all still
have enough /24s to last us for months after the IANA pool gets exhausted.)

We shall see. At the moment, there is no plans to use these. We could also
arguably try to steal back the multicast ranges since it's so underused. :\

~~~
jacquesm
Thanks for the explanation! I ogled the multicast ranges too but I figured
that would be even harder than using a chunk that was previously not allocated
at all.

I think we'll be seeing a resurgence of NAT but for companies to relinquish
their excessive blocks of routable IPS in return for a nice cash bonus from
the new owners, a 'market for addreses' so to speak.

We'll see if that is the way things will go, it would to me seem that that is
a logical short term solution that does not require force.

~~~
djcapelis
Right. For now everything is fine and will be for months and months. The RIRs
will start getting more stingy, some amount of reclaiming will be made
possible... but at some point market forces are going to start pushing things
around and we will either end up on IPv6 or we will end up in a place where
having real IP addresses will be a luxury.

I am hoping for the option where the end to end principle is not murdered. We
shall see.

In any case, some of the software I'm developing as part of a research project
will work even if the Internet becomes a NAT field. I hope we don't have to
resort to that.

As for the multicast block... I think some of them haven't been allocated, so
if we're going to patch all the systems to make 240/4 usable, we might as well
throw in some of the unallocated multicast space...

~~~
mgkimsal
I'm cynical enough to think we may not see widespread ipv6 (or any alternative
to ipv4) for a _long_ time. Why not?

A) The entrenched power players "have theirs" B) It will cost a lot of money
for the big players to upgrade. C) Instead of _spending_ money, the big
players can _make money_ by charging for something that is a scarce resource.

This will be looked at as pure 'market forces' by many and there will be no
major push for a long time.

It also requires a heck of a lot of coordination, or so it seems, between
major players. Why do so few (none?) retail stores carry ipv6-capable routers?
Maybe because so few ISPs support ipv6? Why don't the ISPs support it? Cause
no consumers have the hardware for it? Extreme chicken and egg, and the only
real downside for the next few years is some orgs are in control of resources
that are becoming potentially more valuable by the day. What real incentive do
they have to upgrade to ipv6 ASAP?

~~~
wmf
_A) The entrenched power players "have theirs"_

Not really; they have enough to support 1-2 years of customer growth. After
that, they have to do something.

 _C) Instead of spending money, the big players can make money by charging for
something that is a scarce resource._

If you have N million addresses and N+1 million customers, charging more per
address (i.e. raising prices) doesn't really help you; all it does is turn
away the cheapest customers. I don't think ISPs are eager to try the Oracle
business model of squeezing your existing customers harder instead of getting
new customers.

 _Why do so few (none?) retail stores carry ipv6-capable routers?_

Partly because they outsource the firmware to the lowest bidder and partly
because the standard hasn't even been finalized:
[http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-ipv6-cpe-
router-...](http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-ipv6-cpe-router-09)

~~~
nazgulnarsil
>all it does is turn away the cheapest customers.

which helps you....

------
reitzensteinm
The IPV4 depletion site, now IPV6 enabled? Did they seriously set up a website
warning about the impending doom of IPV4 address allocations initially on IPV4
only?

If that doesn't paint a picture of the sorry state of the IPV6 transition, I
don't know what does.

~~~
lvh
Making the warning page primarily accessible by the people that will actually
be affected by the problem? Makes perfect sense to me.

~~~
reitzensteinm
I think you're underestimating the importance of leading by example - assuming
of course that the purpose of the website is to do something about the
problem.

------
tptacek
Good.

First, the world continues to turn on its axis (for instance, it is not the
case that I am suddenly unable to procure a cheap Slicehost instance with a
routable /32). But now there's one less hypoxic argument about the impending
death of the Internet if we don't immediately cut over to IPv6.

Second, plenty of companies are holding on to /16s, or multiple /16s, or
(contiguously routable) /15s, or (god help us this is apparently true) /8s.
Those addresses will urgently begin to pick up a real market value. Fantastic:
IPv4 addresses always _should_ have had a monetary value commensurate with
their market value, and now some of those vanity allocations will get
liquidated.

~~~
there
there are lots of companies with /8's that can't possibly be using all of the
addresses. ibm has 9/8, xerox has 13/8, hp has 15/8 and 16/8, apple has 17/8,
mit has 18/8, ford has 19/8, csc.com has 20/8, etc.

~~~
tjarratt
Regardless of whether or not they are using all of the addresses, they
probably find it easier to continue holding onto them for future needs and
convenience than to give any of them up for short term gain.

IT Departments hate having to manage these sorts of changes. Imagine all of
the firewall rules that might have to be updated if suddenly part of a /8
range was to be considered "external".

~~~
there
i think arin/iana will have to start doing audits and make these companies
justify their continued use of their entire /8s or else have to give parts of
them back. ip addresses aren't owned, they're just leased from arin and
companies have to pay yearly fees of thousands of dollars to keep using them.

arin has gotten pretty strict on giving out additional space to ISPs asking
for further allocations due to the pool shortage. once the pool runs dry, the
only thing they'll be able to do is break up previous allocations into smaller
ones.

these companies with /8s only have them because they were given out in the mid
'80s, not because they've ever shown a need for 16 million host addresses.

~~~
djcapelis

      ip addresses aren't owned, they're just leased from arin and companies have to pay yearly fees of thousands of dollars to keep using them.
    

The legacy blocks were never owned by ARIN. It is unclear whether they have
any right to claim anything over them. IANA may have rights to claim
ownership, ARIN definitely does not. ARIN is merely one of five RIRs that ask
for addresses from IANA.

------
jchrisa
Can I configure my laptop to only speak IPv6 so I can see what happens / how
broken things are (or aren't)?

~~~
trotsky
Sure, but the simple answer is that nothing will work (unless you've
painstakingly set up public v6 already, in which case 0.1% of the internet
will work)

------
mmaunder
If IP6 doesn't save us, then perhaps a policy of forcing ISP's to use RFC1918
addresses and NAT for their subscribers would help. It's ridiculous how many
ISP's use dynamically allocated public blocks for their subscribers and then
firewall them anyway.

~~~
CountSessine
Good luck trying to play Call of Duty or any other peer to peer video game
behind a carrier NAT. ISPs are going to love the customer support calls
they'll get from people whose xboxes don't work anymore.

~~~
damncabbage
It reassures me that there is commodity hardware out there that won't work
behind a NAT.

Ten years ago I would have assumed they'd just jump to NAT; back then, setting
up cross-network PC games was still mostly the realm of geeks (besides
Battlenet-based games).

~~~
CountSessine
Something that I wish the "let's just be happy and NAT everyone" crowd would
understand is just how different your run of the mill linksys NAT is from a
centralized and managed NAT, which we already have to deal with in some places
(like some apartment flats).

Among the marginal annoyances that we run into with centralized NAT are

-there is no UPNP IGD. We don't strictly _need_ UPNP, but it's nice when it's there because it's so much more reliable than STUN.

-tenants share mapped port space so there's no guarantee that protocols that require multiple mapped ports will be able to get some number of them (think BitTorrent or 16 player peer to peer video games).

-UDP mappings might expire after some ridiculously short interval, requiring another STUN set-up.

-many of these devices allow admins to set policies for mappings. You can be sure that someone is going to be playing your 16-player game behind a NAT managed by some eager beaver who decided to limit NAT mappings to 14 per flat.

-STUN just might not work very well at all, in which case you're stuck with a special-case connection through a packet repeater.

-Some will even do evil shit like fiddling around with your packet payload. One lesson I learned was not to ever include a player's RFC1597 LAN ip address or any binary data that happens to be the same as their LAN ip address in network packets. There are actually commercial NAT routers that will peer into your packet payloads and change anything that appears to be your LAN ip address to their own WAN address, probably in a an attempt to fix a NAT-broken protocol.

Commercial NAT devices are truly evil. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that
the primary 'value-add' for the majority of network library middleware
packages in use in the video game industry today is NAT traversal for weird
commercial NATs in apartment buildings.

This is your ISP NAT future. Good luck!

------
ck2
My ISP won't do IPv6 without docsis3 cablemodem which are $40+ even if you had
a IPv6 router (DD-WRT can _if_ you have a WRT54G model with 32M)

So many end users are very unprepared, unless major ISPs are going to run
tunnels.

BTW, little known fact, Windows XP can actually support IPv6 if your equipment
can by running this command

    
    
        netsh interface ipv6 install
    

Too bad the government can't do what they did during the DTV switchover and
pay for consumer equipment upgrades by the offset of selling the freed-up
bandwidth.

------
jacquesm
[http://maps.measurement-
factory.com/gallery/Routeviews/20080...](http://maps.measurement-
factory.com/gallery/Routeviews/20080301.png)

That was in 2008, is there an updated version?

------
j_baker
It's worth noting that the date given is an estimated date of IPv4 address
exhaustion (which is probably the reason for Officially being in quotes). I
would imagine that the recession might have had an impact on how many IPs have
been bought within the last couple of years, and it doesn't seem that any of
these models take that into account.

~~~
wmf
The models are recalibrated every day with real consumption data, so they took
account of the recession long ago.

