Last blocks about to be distributed to the regional registries
APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre) has requested and is receiving two large blocks of IPv4 addresses, which is triggering the release of the final five blocks to the five regional Internet registries (RIRs).
What this means is the thing we’ve been hearing about for years – the depletion of IPv4 addresses – is upon us.
How this works: ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) allocates IP addresses to the regional registries, which in turn, fulfill requests by ISPs and other customers in their regions for smaller blocks of addresses. After the IANA hands out the last of its so-called “/8” blocks, each of which contains about 16 million addresses, the RIRs will have no additional supply to turn to after they have fulfilled their customers’ requests.
This doesn’t mean that you suddenly can’t get a new public IPv4 address. Not only are these remaining blocks held by the RIRs, there are some addresses left in older blocks assigned before the RIRs were established, which the RIRs have split up among themselves. However, given the fast adoption of new addresses in some parts of the world, those resources may be used up soon. One reason for this is because organizations are concerned the addresses will run out, so they are applying for them in advance – to get them while they can.
IPv4, instituted in 1983, allows for only about 4.3 billion addresses, and due to the nature of its octet design, never had a particularly efficient algorithm for distribution. IPv6 has a much larger address space, allowing for an almost limitless number of unique addresses.
The interesting thing is that once we have to start relying on IPv6 addresses only, older equipment and software built only for IPv4 will quickly become obsolete – or at a minimum, take additional effort to work with IPv6.
One example of this is Windows XP, which was not written to include IPv6 support. IPv6 was added in SP2, but it is not enabled by default – it has to be installed and enabled manually using the netsh command. XP does not happen to integrate DHCPv6 functionality, although there is external software to do so. Microsoft also released an IPv6 Technology Preview for Windows 2000 in 2008.
For those of you who had fun getting the MCSE certification, which included learning the math behind the IPv4 address scheme, I guess that’s one skillset going by the wayside. And for those with the older operating systems – if you haven’t implemented the workarounds for IPv6, its probably time to start thinking about it. Don’t forget that if you have systems management software you can automate that implementation!
