IPv4 Exhaustion - the Endgame begins

[Jay Ashworth]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Fairlight" <fairlite at fairlite.com>

> Confusious (Jay Ashworth) say:
> > IANA -- or what's left of it -- issued it's last 5 reserved /8 IP
> > address
> > blocks to the 5 regional Internet Registries; there are no more
> > unassigned
> > class A blocks.
> 
> Maybe if they revoked Mercedes-Benz's (or was it BMW's?) class A,
> they'd have more. I'm sure there are more out there that ARIN didn't revoke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks

DoD has 10, HP 2, no one else has more than one.  Let the horse trading
begin.


> > If you maintain any filePro apps which store IP addresses as decimal
> > dotted-quads, remember that you'll shortly need to expand those to
> > accept hex-and-colons IPv6 addresses as well.
> 
> I wonder how well fP Sockets deals with IPv6 issues... Is it going to be
> able to handle things properly, or is it going to become outmoded like the
> HTML stuff did when the standard evolved?

This will likely be worse.

> > If you maintain any filePro apps *accessed* from the Internet,
> > remember
> > that IPv4 is about to commence it's long, slow slide into obscurity;
> > you'll need to make those apps accessible by IPv6 fairly soon.
> 
> What are you on about? Anything on the IPv4 segment of the net should be
> able to reach any other part of the IPv4 segment of the net. Anything with
> an IPv6-enabled stack -should- be transparently able to deal with inbound
> IPv6 traffic in terms of gethostbyaddr() calls and the like.

There will come a time when you won't be able to get new IPv4 space if you
need it, and a time further out than that when the majority of your
potential customers are native v6.

I didn't say either of those times would be soon.  :-)
 
> Are you seeing something to change in terms of a current IPv4 web server
> application, other than making sure IPv6 is enabled in the TCP/IP stack?

If the app logs IP address, either X-Forwarded-For or direct connect,
then it will have to care whether the webserver in front of it has had
v6 turned on or not.  Otherwise, no, it's the webserver's issue.

Who's doing your session authentication?

> > Comcast is, for example, about to roll out native IPv6 to cablemodem
> > customers.
> 
> I was told by a network engineer a week and a half ago that the day to
> watch is something like June 18th or 21st...can't remember, somewhere
> right around there, all the carriers are supposed to take IPv6 "live".

Well, the backbone's mostly been carrying it for some time; Comcast is 
the only eyeball network I'm hearing about short-term, though.

Cheers,
- jra