IPocalypse Now?

MLL Telecom - 9 February 2011

Monday 31st January 2011 was an important day for the Internet. You probably didn't notice, and you could hardly be blamed. The rather prosaic announcement came from APNIC (The Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre):

"Two /8s allocated to APNIC from IANA (39/8 and 106/8)" [1]

IANA (The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) dishes out IP addresses to the world's Regional Registries. It's now run out of usable IPv4 addresses.

When IPv4 was first deployed in 1983 its 4,294,967,296 shiny new addresses sounded like plenty. You wonder, then, why we ran out in under 30 years. Well, it doesn't help that 288 million addresses are reserved for multicast and private networks. Address block allocations were squandered in the dotcom era. The justification was often little more than "I think I might start an ISP, can I have some IP space please?". At the current depletion rate due to Asia-Pacific growth APNIC will use up its last 16.7 million addresses in about six months. How will we move to IPv6? Why haven't we started?

It's not for want of trying. Engineers have tried to push it to the businesses. The vendors have implemented it. The journals and forums have warned about it. Even my mum asked if we were "running out of space on the Internet". But beyond a few test networks there's not been much adoption. Does your home broadband support it, for example?

Because of this industry apathy the campaign to promote IPv6 changed their approach last year from "When are you going to implement IPv6?" to "Ask your vendor/ISP when they intend to implement IPv6". This seems to have helped. Engineers are now being asked questions about "transition strategies" and "IPv6 adoption". All we need now is a memorable deadline like Y2K.

From a technical standpoint it's important not to try to use NAT (Network Address Translation) as a long-term solution. The effort involved in implementing your NAT gated community would be better spent working out how to implement a proper IPv6 transition. Consider the bugs you'll find, the systems you'll have to redevelop, the training, new designs, convincing the customers to come along. Join operator forums like LINX, RIPE, UKNOF and NANOG. Find out how other people are dealing with bugs and slow vendors. IPv4 is exhausted in more ways than one.

The vendors have responded, it's time to turn it on and wait 'til the boss drops in for a chat about strategies. This is a big move for us all , make sure you don't get left behind.

Blogger: Ben Ward - Senior NOC Engineer

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