2011-04-14

Time to PANIC, APNIC

The first RIR has run out only 10 weeks after IANA ran out.

http://www.apnic.net/community/ipv4-exhaustion/graphical-information shows one /8 left. That means they have effectively run out of IPv4 addresses as all ISPs can now get is a single last block of 1024, which for most will be next to useless. No more "normal" allocations.

This is pretty major. There are several steps to running out of IPv4 with the first being IANA in February. The next step is RIRs running out which has now started, and then after that LIRs (ISPs) running out.

APNIC running out means that no ISP can now get any normal allocations in the APNIC region. It means that ISPs will be forced to do nasty things with IPv4 NAT and make use of IPv6. We can expect the use of IPv6 only web sites and other services aimed initially at local markets where IPv6 users can access them.

When there are any significant places on the Internet that are IPv6 only (and not just www.loopsofzen.co.uk) we can finally address the head in the sand ISPs that say "We have plenty of IPv4s left". People like Virgin who seem to think it is not important for their customers to access IPv6 endpoints in the Internet will have to wake up!

It matters not how many of those old legacy IPv4 addresses you have if there are parts of the Internet you cannot reach using IPv4!!!

Digg

4 comments:

  1. I'm still shocked at how behind a lot of equipment vendors are with IPv6. it seems everybody except for the larger router vendors and especially Juniper with their great SSG firewalls just have not bothered.

    For companies supposed to be industry leaders, some of them have just shameful v6 functionality.

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  2. It will be interesting to see how quickly APNIC ISPs allocate their remaining addresses. Presumably they have allocations that cover a few months of usage at current rates. If they now tighten up, those allocations could last for some time. As they do this, the IPv4 service will of course get worse.

    Presumably you conserve IPv4 addresses by doing NAT. DSL subscribers get a routable IPv6 address and a NAT IPv4 address. Meanwhile, hosting customers get a routable IPv6 address and a shared reverse proxy that does IPv4.

    I'd actually rather people just switched to IPv6, and we got all the pain over with in one go. The reality is that this won't happen for some time. APNIC may have run out of IPv4 addresses, but loopsofzen will be unusual for quite some time, I think.

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  3. Revk I dont buy this been a disaster for websites, websites have for many years ran fine sharing ip's as the most popular web server in existance apache supports vhosts which can share ip's just fine and even works like this on SSL now. The problem will first be felt on end user connections where the norm is one end user one ip. So if anyone starts a ipv6 only site soon it will be out of choice probably to make a point rather than necessity. Plus this shortage at the top of chain will take some time to filter down. Whats not helping the situation is I dont know of a single router that natively supports ipv6, which means people cant even expirement with it.

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  4. Well, the norm is also one IP per virtual machine too.
    It will impact things sooner rather than later...

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