Not really, I just love sensational titles! So there’s allot of noise being made recently about the IPv6 changeover; when it should happen, how, etc. and the consensus is that we’ve already waited too long and we are pretty much boned. That is to say, we don’t have enough time to make the IPv4 to IPv6 transition go smoothly.
For those of you unfamiliar with how ip addressing and the internet works, more specifically how the numbers are handled. that job falls to the NRO (Number Resource Organization) which was formed by the RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) to “protect the unallocated Number Resource pool, to promote and protect the bottom-up policy development process, and to act as a focal point for Internet community input into the RIR system” which basically means, they’re the guys who release IP blocks and addresses to the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) who then hands these over to the RIRs, who will distribute them to the LIR (Local Internet Registries – usually an ISP), who then gives you the end user your ip address.
Sounds like a big mess but each step is very important for managing our addressing space. So here’s the bad news. The NRO warns that only 10% of the IPv4 addressing space is unused. Meaning, there’s very very little room for more addressing under our current system. DOOMED!!!!!
Well not entirely. IPv6 is here to save the intarwebs! It allows for a possible 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addressed. So we will not have any issues like this anymore. The next problem will be the conversion. Which if you’re reading this you probably have no control over; this is a job for the big guys to sort out: the ISPS and backbone folk. But one thing is for sure, the transition should already be underway if it was going to go unnoticed. It’s going to be a bumpy road, but by 2012 you should have a whole new IP address to memorize!
Some more pretty IPv4 useage history and IPv6 info can be found here
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Well my thoughts are that we have wasted many addresses that could be used. For example here at TAMU we have many workstations that have internet routable IPs that really don’t need them. I can just imagine the number of organizations that take this same approach to IP assignment and can see that we are just wasteful with the address we currently have. Maybe if this became an internet shortage you may see large organizations donate back parts of their IP blocks so the internet can live on. Or we could just switch to IPv6….
Yeah the internet would be much safer and IPv4 would last longer if we all used NAT.