IP Address Space (IPv4) Shrinks to 5%, will run out in 2011

An article on TechCrunch shows a nice graph of how we are running out of IPv4 addresses very quickly. Apparently a few days ago The Number Resource Organization (NRO) announced that less than five percent of the world's IPv4 addresses remain unallocated. It apparently dipped below 10% in January of 2010, and is expected to completely run out in early 2011.





I did some quick math on this and that means with IPv4 we were able to have around 4.2 billion addresses. With IPv6 we are able to have around 3.402e+38 addresses which written out makes it clear how big this number is:



which is an insane amount of addresses that should take a very long time to deplete.

I have heard alot of talk about IPv6 recently, but never realized how close we were to actually be running out of IPv4 addresses. It will be really important in 2011 to make sure your servers, and internet applications can handle both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

My server is already running IPv9 so I'm good. Thanks for the info though.

Assneck

Alright, do I have to worry about this on my computer? I'm not so good when it comes to IT and this kind of stuff as you might already know

This will be very interesting to see how this effects old software. The first thing that comes to mind for me is older game servers.

Initially, I don't think you are going to notice any change. There are some issues with it, though and a lot of debates going on about it. This article is still a bit techy for some people but it does explain a lot of things about how IPv6 works and how it can adversely affect a home network if IPv6 addresses are dynamically assigned the same way IPv4 addresses are now.

https://jeremy.visser.name/2009/06/23/w ... -are-evil/

This is kind of stupid. I know its unavoidable, but is just dumb. Does this mean that I'm going to have to buy new network cards for my servers and buy a new router and junk? It seems like it would be a good thing for the ISPs to keep some IPv4 compatibility for us lowly little rural school districts that can barely afford to buy ink and toner, let alone brand spanking new hardware. Everybody said this was coming but now its kind of like "Suprise! I'm here!"

And what about on the LAN? On my network I'm using the 192.168.x.x network with NAT to get computers out to the world, so if I get some IPv6 addresses from my ISP can I still do NAT from the v4 LAN to the v6 WAN?

A lot of questions about IPv6 can be answered here: http://ipv6.com/

The whole reason for NAT to begin with was the lack of Address spaces available in IPv4. In fact it was one of the driving forces behind IPv6 which is explained in the pros and cons here. In essence to answer your question, if the switch to IPv6 eventually removes IPv4 then sooner or later the equipment you use will have to be IPv6 compatible. Personally I don't see this as happening next year or even the year after for that matter.

This article gives a pretty good overview of where the internet is projected to be headed.

This article discusses several transition technologies to get us from point A to point B.

In a nutshell, this is obviously not going to be an immediate switch. Plus IPv6 implementation has been in progress for some time anyway. Even my DNS server on my Windows 2003 server recognizes the IPv6 addresses of my Windows 7 machines. One of the first major implementations of it was showcased at the Beijing 2008 Olympics

Seriously before anyone panics over changing to IPv6 give some serious time to reading the information at http://ipv6.com/ You couldn't ask for a better source of information in one convenient website.

I'm thinking that my ISP would just send me a new modem if they rolled out IPV6.

What are the chances that I will be able to just get a new modem from my ISP and keep my current line->modem->router->computers setup if my host were to roll out IPV6 ?

I'm thinking my ISP could let me swap my modem out with one that talks to the ISP via IPV6 and then talks to my router via IPV4 behind the scenes.

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My thing is automation, networking frustrates me most of the time.

What I'm not understanding is "when" are we supposed to implement this? Can we do it now and have everything work? Is there a date that everybody changes?

What a pain... I'm wondering if some of my older hardware supports this...... gotta go look.

We've already been transitioning towards it since at least 2005. The US Federal agencies to the best of my knowledge all met a June 30, 2008 deadline of adopting IPv6 technology. IPv6 and IPv4 are designed to co-exist. At least initially.

Vista and Windows 7 both fully support it. Obviously so does SP2 for Windows Server 2003, because I'm looking right this moment at IPv6 addresses on my DNS server Forward lookup zone for my Windows 7 machines that were assigned by my DHCP server located on the same machine.
//added note - now that I think about it, even my netgear router at home assigns IPv6 addresses.

Remember that this is a protocol. Some older hardware can be updated to support IPv6 (via software/firmware upgrades) where some older hardware may not be able to.

I found this Oracle System Administrator guide particularly helpful trying to understand what would be involved in transitioning an entire network to IPv6
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-45 ... =en&a=view

"The only constant is change."

We host some services that have government agencies as customers as such they utilize and thus were forced to comply with IPv6 mandate. So yes, we do have a IPv6 pipe into the complexes, which is used by these government organizations. For the moment we NAT at the router back to IPv4, in order to make sue of our load balancing framework which itself does not support IPv6 yet. However, all our servers have had the capacity for IPv6 for some time, and we're told that the next version of the firmware for our load balancers will support IPv6 natively, so I suspect we'll migrate those existing IPv6 flows over.

The big question for me is when will the backbone providers be ready to offer peer networks on 6-bone.

On a whim, I just checked the network adapter on an XP Pro SP3 machine. Although it was never installed automatically, I discovered that if I chose to I could manually install the IPv6 protocol on the XP SP3 network adapter.

yeah, i check that as well as setting in up on 2003 server. pretty simple. I've got one router that i havn't been able to figure out yet. it's from 2004 so I don't know about it...... still looking.

its about time we moved to ipv6 addresses this is going to affect a lot of software and servers but its definitely for the best.

I am quite newly familiar with IP address and want to know much. I can't understand much about IPv4 and IPv6 of this thread and if IPv9 is available then why we are talking about IPv4 and IPv6? What is actually best v4, v6 or v9?