The IPcalypse

[bascule]

http://twitter.com/ipv4countdown

So the Internet is running out of allocatable IPv4 addresses. Sure, there's a lot of wasted IPs that can be reclaimed, and people who might be interested in selling blocks of them, but demand for IP addresses is still very high with over a million IPs being allocated every day.

Once this happens, short of bartering for the existing lot the Internet needs to move to IPv6, which future-proofs the fuck out of the IP address space with absurd 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 addresses.

The only problem is that a lot of the existing infrastructure isn't ready to route ipv6 yet.

[DjDamyard]

Re: The IPcalypse

Sure, there's a lot of wasted IPs that can be reclaimed, and people who might be interested in selling blocks of them, but demand for IP addresses is still very high with over a million IPs being allocated every day.

I've been keeping a close eye on this topic to be honest.

Yes, the IANA could potentially reclaim all of these wasted IPs and reissue them. But this is expensive and time consuming, and time is something which is of the essence in the coming months. There is also a possibility of legal conflicts too, so this is probably unlikely to happen. But, on the off-chance it does happen, this will only postpone the date of the 'IPclaypse'.

But yeah, it will be intriguing to see when the day comes that IPv4 addresses are completely exhausted and how IPv6 will be completely implemented. I mean, will it be similar to the NCP to TCP/IP transition (just with hundreds of millions more nodes and applications on the network)?

[velderia]

Re: The IPcalypse

Edit: Nvm, dumb comment.

[The Dark Tangent]

Re: The IPcalypse

Once our ISP supports native v6 routing with no stange encapsulation I will be setting up a web server for DEF CON to see how it goes. After talking with Joe Klein I have no illusions about how difficult the transition will be.

[bascule]

Re: The IPcalypse

Vint Cerf provides an excellent synopsis of the problem of IPv4 address space exhaustion and what it's ramifications will be

[klone]

IPv6

Well the IPv6 does support 2^128 Internet. It Utilizes 128-bit Internet addresses. I think we will be fine. Look at all the people who freaked on the Y2K problem, My Linux professor was part of that whole program who fixed that issue. I thought of it as just another bump in the road that needed to be patched, and so will this one.