Re^3: Coping with changes

The IPv4 pool really is shrinking, but then again entire ip blocks were handed away willy nilly in the early days to organizations that didn't need even a 100th of the IPs they were given. If some of those unused blocks were re-assigned according to need, the pool would start expanding rather than shrinking.

I'm a network admin for a small ISP, well I was anyway until I took leave to work on another project. We don't have a shortage of IPv4 IPs for the foreseeable future. The blocks we have are continuously re-shuffled to free up larger blocks of IPs as we change out equipment. There's a constant push from vendors to buy new hugely expensive, excessive capacity IPv6 equipment complete with bleeding edge IPv4 <-> IPv6 translation hardware. The sales pitch is always the same: IPv4 is going to run out. I think they just ran out of buyers for IPv4 equipment in a market that's saturated with cheap off the shelf equipment.

Nearly every organization runs some sort of NATed internal network. From homes, to schools to small businesses and large organizations. There's a virtually unlimited number of internal IPs you can assign without ever having to touch the shrinking IPv4 pool. Really, how many computer systems would even be safe on the internet were it not for the fact that they had an internal NATed IP that wasn't directly addressable from the outside world.

Sure there are problems and difficulties with NATed IPs. It involves translation of addresses, forwarding of packets, wrappers within wrappers that add overhead and processing costs (and expense). It makes it difficult to get access to your devices away from home. But these same things also make you anonymous on the net. My tinfoil hat tells me that the real push for IPv6 is coming from the intellectual property giants who want to control every aspect of every byte between you and them. With IPv6 there's no need for NAT any more and company X has a direct line of communication to your device Y. From manufacture to sale (and resale) any where in the world, any time you plug it into a network. Did you renew your license to use that shiny new IPv6 network card? Zap, sorry it will start working again when you buy a new subscription.

Comment on Re^3: Coping with changes

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Re^4: Coping with changes by Anonymous Monk on Jul 29, 2010 at 13:42 UTC
Indeed! Network access should be on a need-to-know basis. Visit my webserver any time, and connect to my multiplayer game only when I give you the password. The rest of the house is off limits.	[reply]
Re^4: Coping with changes by Argel (Prior) on Jul 29, 2010 at 20:45 UTC
My only point was we are more likely to run into IPv6 today then even a year ago. But I agree that a lot of people will be able to avoid it. But it doesn't hurt to know a little bit about it these days. Though that probably applies more to people doing network and system administrators type work (like I do). It's also easier to brush up on it at least a little bit (assuming you know a thing or two about IPv4). As for Cisco, etc. pushing IPv6, the $$$ sparkling in their sales reps eyes are blindingly bright. Elda Taluta; Sarks Sark; Ark Arks	[reply]