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ARIN Finally Runs Out of IPv4 Addresses
- jwatte 11y agoRequire payment of $1 per year per public IP, and suddenly wastrels like the Apple class A will be available again...
- benjojo12 11y agoHow would you go about enforcing that. and enforcing that is still covering up the issue that we really do need to move to IPv6
- tptacek 11y agoWhy would that be hard to enforce?
- tedunangst 11y agoModifying a contract usually requires the consent of both parties. If IANA/ARIN tried to claw those IPs back from Apple, and Apple sued to stop them, who do you think would win? They could enforce renting (vs owning) going forward with all new assignments, but that will probably just encourage even more hoarding of existing space.
- zokier 11y agoMy understanding is that at least ARIN holds the position that IP allocations are not property that the recipients own.
- tedunangst 11y agoSince Apple's allocation predates the existence of ARIN, is ARIN's position relevant? More to the point, the IPs were assigned to Apple by some agreement more or less akin to a perpetual lease. Under what conditions can that lease be terminated? (Actually some of the earliest allocation were apparently because "Postel says so". But probably still close enough to a handshake deal to be valid.)
- stock_toaster 11y ago> Actually some of the earliest allocation were > apparently because "Postel says so" Postel's other, lesser known, law?
- toomuchtodo 11y ago> If IANA/ARIN tried to claw those IPs back from Apple, and Apple sued to stop them, who do you think would win? IANA and ARIN, historically. You don't ever own your IPs, no more than you own your phone number.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- icedchai 11y agoThat's doesn't appear true for legacy blocks. They are, effectively, owned. ARIN can't "claw back" legacy IPs which were assigned before ARIN ever existed. I own legacy IPs. And I pay nothing, because I did not sign the ARIN registration agreement. If they could force me to pay by threatening to revoke my IPs, they would have done it already.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoNothing stops someone else from announcing those IP blocks. You would be hard pressed to prove ownership in court.
- tedunangst 11y agoYes, that's the solution. Whoever announces a block the loudest gets to use it. You may also want to look into concepts such as water rights. Nothing stops you from draining all the water out of the Colorado river upstream. Except the things that do...
- toomuchtodo 11y agoI don't have a dog in this fight, as I don't manage network edges, AS, etc anymore. I'm simply stating that if you fight against ARIN, you'll lose. You're free to try, I've got better things to do. http://www.finnegan.com/resources/articles/articlesdetail.aspx?news=6ee9d632-0f9d-4003-bebb-e72b5d876a03 http://www.finnegan.com/resources/articles/articlesdetail.as...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- zokier 11y agoTo what end? Reclaiming allocations would only prolong the painful transition to IPv6 which has already been going on for too long. For the internet at large IPv4 exhaustion is a good thing because it moves IPv6 forwards. The quicker we can get rid of IPv4 the better.
- simon_vetter 11y agoThis. Running dual stack networks is harder and more expensive to manage, secure and troubleshoot. The faster we get to single stack ipv6 only, the better.
- teacup50 11y agoSingle stack IPv6 is just not happening; there's just WAY TOO MUCH STUFF out there that only speaks IPv4.
- Retr0spectrum 11y agoWe just need to wait for all that stuff to become obsolete.
- icebraining 11y agoYeah, but you can have that only at the edges, using ipv4-to-ipv6 proxies to connect to the Internet.
- msbarnett 11y agoIANA was allocating at a rate of 2 /8s per month right before they ran out. Recovering an /8 would take staggeringly more effort than it is worth in terms of how little it fills existing demand. There is no scheme that will make IPv4 work in the long-term. The mathematics are very simple. You cannot fill demand for exponentially more than 4 billion numbers with a pool of only 4 billion numbers.
- rtpg 11y agobut do we need 4 billion numbers? I thought things like NAT make the global static IP utility less than needing every other person to have an IP address
- WorldMaker 11y agoI think a point here is that NAT isn't long term sustainable. We seem to be teetering on the point where NAT Traversal becomes almost impossible to reliably do and the concept of a single internet breaks down, one NAT black box network at a time. Already there are systems that really can only communicate via HTTP to the global internet and then only if they initiate the request. To some people that is a "feature" and the future of firewalls, but I don't want to live on an internet where you have maybe one reliable protocol and a pull-only view of that one protocol at that...
- jwatte 11y agoThere's a difference between "pull" and "initiate." NAT traversal is getting better over time, not worse. (Says data from gaming platforms) You only /really/ need more than one IP if you want to expose more than 65000 different services from a single physical place. But, instead of solving this through economics and ingenuity (which we knew could, and had to be done 10 or even 20 years ago) we let device vendors and academics run the show into IPv6. Which doesn't solve the /real/ problem we're /actually/ having: devices change connectivity every 5 minutes and move continents in a few hours. IPv6 just doesn't have an answer.
- 11y ago
- api 11y agoUnfortunately that would prolong the life of IPv4.
- astrodust 11y agoLike it or not, we're going to be stuck with it for at least twenty years.
- vinceguidry 11y agoWhat's probably going to happen is a marketplace will open up and unused IP blocks will go to those willing to pay for them. Eventually the cost of deploying IPv6 will be less than the cost of IPv4 addresses.
- detaro 11y agoThat market already exists, although not centrally organized by the RIRs.
- spydum 11y agoi am fairly certain RIRs do not allow this, though i know it was common practice for major hosting providers to buy up dinky/unprofitable companies which had larger legacy allocations purely for their address space.
- joepie91_ 11y agoStill is. Along with various other IP hoarding schemes. ColoCrossing is a notorious offender in this area, and has also been draining IPs from ARIN.
- astrodust 11y agoApple would just pay the tab. So would Google. It wouldn't change anything. If you're large enough to get allocations that huge, you're large enough to afford it. Why is Apple a "wastrel" when it's building gigantic datacenters all over the place, yet MIT, who has an equal sized allocation for a university, is somehow fine? It's not in Apple's interest to yield the block unless there's industry consensus and other companies and organizations with similar allocations are doing the same.
- Natsu 11y agoAt $1 per IP, given that Apple has a /8, that'd be almost $17M. They could probably cut quite a bit of usage if they wanted to. The real problem is that this doesn't make sense: we don't WANT IPv4 to persist. The sooner we all go to IPv6, the better. Ideally, usage will gradually wane until only obsolete items even use IPv4, then a cutoff date will come from major ISPs and such cutting off IPv4 service and we'll finally pass the last hurdle. At least, one might hope so.
- jwatte 11y ago"Like" Apple. All single company /8 are wasteful. And the holders didn't get the /8 in modern times "because they are huge" they got them in ancient times because historical reasons. The fact that we've treated those allocations as sacrosanct means that we're stupid political people, not engineers. (What else is new? :-)
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoNaww, make it $50, which is close to what we pay for domain registration renewal. Now watch everyone give up all those IPs they've been hording. Apple has 16m IPv4 addresses, that's $800m right there. They're not dropping nearly $1b annually to hoard IPv4.
- drcube 11y agoAt a rate of $1B per year, they'll be out of cash in... 300 years.
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoI don't think shareholders would be happy spending that kind of money on things they don't use and probably will never use now that v6 is on the table.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoSo a class A would cost $16M /year to hold? I think folks should just move to V6 in all its silliness and be done with it.
- RKearney 11y agoWhy single out Apple? The US Government owns: 6.0.0.0/8 7.0.0.0/8 11.0.0.0/8 21.0.0.0/8 22.0.0.0/8 26.0.0.0/8 28.0.0.0/8 29.0.0.0/8 30.0.0.0/8 33.0.0.0/8 55.0.0.0/8 56.0.0.0/8 214.0.0.0/8 215.0.0.0/8 HP also owns 2 /8's, 15.0.0.0/8 and 16.0.0.0/8
- jwatte 11y agoBecause they are easy pickings? MIT, USGOV and HP deserve equal pressure, of course!
- iridium127 11y agoAren't they allocating ipv6 IPs in a similar way though? the only difference is exponentially more addresses to a single company...
- lordnacho 11y agoIf IP addresses are scarce, why does it not seem to cost me anything to get one? I've had a bunch of online servers that came with a static IP, and an ISP service that came with one, at various times. It seldom seemed to be explicitly priced, and when it was the price was not really something worth considering.
- organsnyder 11y agoStatic or dynamic, the cost to the ISP is basically the same (perhaps a bit more for static if it's harder for them to manage the allocation); therefore, it's already built in to the cost of the service. Have you tried getting additional IP addresses? One ISP charges me 50 cents/month per address for my colo box, while Comcast Business charges around $2/month (IIRC).
- lordnacho 11y ago>Have you tried getting additional IP addresses? Yeah. The price doesn't suggest scarcity. I guess the thing with the routing tables makes sense. I wonder if there's a way to rationalize that without it getting too messy. IIRC ipv6 thought of this and split up its address space in a roughly geographical way.
- vidarh 11y agoThe price doesn't yet suggest scarcity because most ISPs have not yet had to start buying IP addresses because going to e.g. ARIN has been an option, and so they've not been pricing in acquisition costs. It will rise, in proportion to the pain people experience in reducing their usage and/or switching to IPv6.
- msbarnett 11y agoBecause address allocation is inefficient and it is impractical to address this inefficiency in IPv4. ARIN is out but your ISP has extras. Why doesn't your ISP sell its extras, since a scarce resource should have monetary value? Routing tables. Selling individual IPs off piecemeal isn't practical because routers simply do not have enough RAM to handle the enormous routing tables that would resultantly be necessary in order for packets to find their destinations.
- 0xCMP 11y agoFor the normal users out there. What are the implications? Is this simply IPs being reserved for servers on the internet?
- ju-st 11y agoOne implication is that you may not get a real IPv4 address anymore. So your cable/DSL connection will be behind a Carrier grade NAT ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT ) which breaks applications and causes problems for your internet provider (technical complexity), for software developers (implementation of workarounds for CGNs) and for you, because you suffer the consequences. Also, more expensive IP addresses raise the barrier to entry for new competitiors, so your internet connection may get more expensive.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jwatte 11y agoThe cost of entry argument is specious because everyone has the same variable cost. The real cause of lack of competition is the cost of physical access.
- marquis 11y agoCurrently in the mobile space everyone is behind at least one double-NAT at least, and you can order business level access for your wireless data account and get an IPv4 address allocated to you. AT&T does this for a single $500 fee for example, Sprint as a monthly $3 fee. I imagine this will become common with ISPs - you'll need to upgrade to a gaming/business class in order to make use of port-forwarding etc and for everyone else, some programs will cease to work or not connect as quickly/easily.
- 0xCMP 11y agoAnd we can't switch to IPv6 ourselves? This this problem need to accelerate user switching (even if just the advanced users) or switching at the ISP level?
- ck2 11y agoThere are at least a million IPv4 not in use here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks#List_of_assigned_.2F8_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre... Possibly 100+ million. What the frack does Halliburton need with 16 million IP addresses? On that note, US Department of Defense apparently does not just consume most of the US budget, it also consumes over 210 MILLION ip addresses. There are also a quarter billion ip addresses in the E block, which is probably easier to reprogram all routers than get all consumer devices to support ipv6 properly.
- ju-st 11y agoThe problem with this is that you will get X million "new" IP addresses. But in Y years you will have the same problems as we have now again, because the X million IPs are again consumed. So it is much better to focus on the implementation of IPv6. The E block is a lost cause: http://packetlife.net/blog/2010/oct/14/ipv4-exhaustion-what-about-class-e-addresses/ http://packetlife.net/blog/2010/oct/14/ipv4-exhaustion-what-...
- dragonwriter 11y ago> But in Y years you will have the same problems as we have now again, Note that Y in this case is significantly less than 1.
- mrbill 11y agoI was a sysadmin for a division of Halliburton for over a decade (until this past January) and word came down the pipe that they were going to retire/give-back 134.132.x (owned by Landmark Graphics subsidiary) and work on moving off 10.x in the next few years. Keep in mind that a lot of these allocations were made in the 80s and 90s when nobody worried about running out of IPv4 addresses; in addition I saw what we paid to ARIN every year just to "have" 10.x and it was an insane amount (I remember it being more than my yearly salary).
- swinglock 11y agoYou paid for using 10.0.0.0/8? Am I reading this correctly?
- nwilkens 11y agohttps://www.arin.net/resources/request/ipv4_countdown.html https://www.arin.net/resources/request/ipv4_countdown.html Looks like 9 /24's remain
- astrodust 11y agoConsidering there were once hundreds of millions kicking around and being handed out like candy, having about two thousand left is basically nothing. It's like saying the grocery store isn't cleaned out, there's still a single jar of peanut butter left.
- XorNot 11y agoMy current company has maybe 100 left to sell virtual server hosting with. Sometime in the next year this fact will reach management and we'll be going on a harvesting spree to reclaim them from elsewhere. All of which is ridiculous.
- km3k 11y agoIt's empty now.
- Fizzadar 11y agoWhile it's sad that there are so many large and unused blocks (Apple, DoD, etc), whats worse is the disgraceful adoption of IPv6 by ISP's.
- wlesieutre 11y agoDespite all the hate that Comcast (deservedly) gets, they do bring IPv6 to my apartment. Good on them for being on the ball.
- Fizzadar 11y agoNot bad that! Here (UK) we have yet to see a major ISP embrace IPv6 properly.
- nadams 11y ago> Despite all the hate that Comcast (deservedly) gets, they do bring IPv6 to my apartment. Good on them for being on the ball. Which would be great if everyone was running IPv6 - however my experiences is that some IPv6->IPv4 tunnels break some protocols (like T-Mobile's IPv6->IPv4 tunnel - I have to use IPv4 because their tunnel appears to break SIP connections. I'm not sure if they did that on purpose for suspect reasons. And of course - they don't make this easy...).
- MichaelGG 11y agoNo, SIP is a terrible protocol so things will often break unintentionally. A lot of NATs also try to "fixup" the breakage and make it worse.
- nadams 11y ago> No, SIP is a terrible protocol so things will often break unintentionally. I use Asterisk and I've never had random problems with SIP. All my problems have been due to network (such as firewalls or network disconnected) or client implementations. I've found this article which makes me laugh [1]: > The solution is remarkably easy! If it's so easy - why doesn't he create an RFC proposal for a SIP 2.0? SIP isn't the only protocol that isn't flawless. FTP and VPN comes to mind. But here is an article that states exactly what I said and experienced [2]: > SIP works fine in either an IPv4-only or IPv6-only environment, but issues arise in a mixed environment. [1] http://www.talkingpointz.com/why-sip-sucks http://www.talkingpointz.com/why-sip-sucks [2] http://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/can-sip-and-ipv6-co-exist/d/d-id/1233831 http://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/can-sip-and-ipv6-...?
- jcranmer 11y agoIt's worth noting that APNIC, LACNIC, and RIPE all ran out of IPv4 addresses years ago (2011, 2014, 2012, respectively). Although, by the definition of exhaustion those organizations used (roughly "someone requested a block that we couldn't fulfill), ARIN ran out seweral months ago. What this announcement really amounts to is "we cannot give out anymore IPv4 addresses." ARIN lists just 9 /24 blocks. By contrast, RIPE bottomed out at about .8 of a /8--about 6000 times the current ARIN IPv4 address pool. RIPE, for example, hit its . By contrast, ARIN is at 9 /24s.
- burtonator 11y agoWe just did an internal migration to some ipv6 for some of our internal code so we could communicate with sites that use ipv6... Long story short, it was hard. Required custom lib recompilations, etc. I don't have all the details but it was significantly harder than I originally thought.