Hello, On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 07:33:24PM +0000, Chris Dennis wrote: > On the subject of IPV6... > > The end of IPV4 has been proclaimed for years, but it hasn't happened.
Like a lot of scarcity issues there isn't a single day where the day before there was some, and today there's not, that being the only difference. There has been a scarcity of IPv4 for years and this has affected the development of some protocols and encouraged things like NAT. If you go to RIPE today and try to obtain IPv4 addresses then it will be a lot harder than it was 5 years ago, or even last year. You should still get the IPv4 allocation you require for your needs *today*, but you'll have to be a lot more thorough with your justification. 5 years ago you could have shown you needed 256 IPs that day and claim to expect 10-fold growth in 2 years and would have immediately got what you needed for that day plus 2 years. These are coping mechanisms for a scarcity of IPv4 resource and what you will see as time goes on is not a simple, "sorry, there's none left" but ever more painful coping mechanisms. There is a terrible thing called carrier grade NAT (CGN): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Grade_NAT You can expect that an increasing number of consumer / end user Internet connections will be behind these and all users will appear to the Internet as being behind one or a small number of IPv4 addresses. The end user would need to pay more to get a globally routable IPv4 address. > Will we run out of IPV4 addresses? Yes, the global pool will be all used up by early 2011. We're using up something like 1.5 /8s per month and there's only 2 left.[1] A few companies have voluntarily returned their large early allocations that they're no longer using, but these can never be larger than /8 each and given the above consumption rate it will make little difference. It's essentially a good will / marketing gesture by these companies. This is why nobody has bothered to try to force legacy IPv4 holders to return their unused space. > Should I start learning about IPV6? It depends. End users needn't bother since the Internet is supposed to "just work", so if you're the kind of person who's never needed to know what a netmask is for example, you probably don't need to look into IPv6. In theory one day you plug in your ADSL or cable modem and it autoconfigures IPv6. If you do networking or host network services then really yes you should have been looking at this since a couple of years ago. While in the near future there isn't going to be a time where any popular service is unavailable over IPv4, the cost (money+effort) to make services available over IPv4 is going to go up and the same services will appear over IPv6 because it's easier. Cheers, Andy [1] A /8 is CIDR notation[2] for 8 bits of network, 24 bits of hosts. So a /8 is 2^24 (16,777,216) addresses, of which the 32-bit IPv4 space can contain 2^8 (256). [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIDR#Subnet_masks -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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