People keep saying blah about how IPv4 can go on even if there are no free addresses, they'll just be traded on a free market.
So. I don't think so.
Either, the blocks to be traded will primarily be large (the kind commonly routed today), or primarily be small (the kind commonly handed to end-users). I'll argue each separately.
Large blocks (say /23 and larger) are generally owned by ISPs and other organisations who tend to need more addresses over time, not fewer. Some surely will have spare addresses, but many? At this time, IPv4 usage grows by a half-million addresses per day, that's 10,000 /23 blocks. If large-block trading is to cover 10% of that, a thousand organizations need to sell parts of their address space per day. After a few months, almost everyone who owns more than a single /23 must have sold one of their blocks, or else trading stops for lack of supply.
Small blocks can be freed up for sale much more easily (even I could easily free up eight addresses if I really wanted to), but the routing system couldn't handle the resulting growth.
Right now there are 320,000 routes in the global routing table, and it grows at 1% per month. If 10% of the added addresses added daily are to be traded as small blocks (say an equal mix of /26, /27, /28 and /29) that's about 3,000 trades per day, so after a month, the routing system is at 400,000 routes. By that time, the ISPs of the world have noticed that their routers are running out of RAM, add more route filtering, and so the traded addresses become unreachable from most of the world.
This doesn't imply that there will be no trading. Just that there will be very little. Most of the people who need a new address will have to make do with IPv6 only, so IPv6 will quickly become the common case when a new system is set up. For good or bad.
I enable IPv4. Temporarily at least. (more…)
If you can read this sentence, you have IPv6 support, either directly or via a web proxy. (more…)
Bad news: Opera lost IPv6 ability in version 10.10. Opera cannot connect to this site, even if it's running on a host with IPv6 ability.
No news: The search engines still don't support IPv6. The (other) browsers still support IPv6.
Good news: Today I saw a torrent swarm with more than 20% IPv6 peers. Not a special swarm in any way: I download my old LPs whenever I play them, so I'll be able to play them in the kitchen or office too next time. It was the torrent swarm for one of them.
Googlebot, msnbot and Yahoo Slurp have all seen links to rant.gulbrandsen; none of them followed the links.
On one hand, a blog which can't be indexed by the major search engines is pointless. On the other, this particular blog is really a CMS/publishing tool for my writings and ramblings about udoc and literate programming, and until I'm done with that subject, it doesn't matter much whether anyone can read the site, oops, the blog. So I'll leave it 6-only until that writing is more or less done, then reconsider the matter.
Mikrotik makes a series of small, neat routers. I have a 433UAH (with indoor case), which has a VPN tunnel to OpenVPN running on a rented server at vollmar.net. This describes how to build an IPv4 and IPv6 VPN tunnel between a Mikrotik router with a dynamic IP address and a Linux server running OpenVPN with fixed IP addresses. (more…)
New IPv4 addresses are being allocated at a rate of 6-7 per second and there aren't very many left. In a while, we're going to run out. What then?
I think that when it happens, some people will try to buy other people's IPv4 addresses, but frankly I doubt that there'll be enough willing sellers to supply 6-7 addresses per second, so at least some people will have to make do with only IPv6 addresses. That's going to be painful.
That period will be less painful if a few people put web sites and other services on only IPv6 now, so that the transition starts sooner, with fewer victims, and ramps up later.
I'm not willing to do all that much. But this blog is unimportant, so I put that on IPv6. I could have used a name-based virtual host or used one of my free IPv4 addresses, but someone has to make a start.
Later, maybe I can put something other than a web site on IPv6.
