Reminder: this is a link to LWN, one of the few places on the internet that I know of where the comments are consistently more knowledgeable and more insightful than hacker news, in my opinion.<p>So read the original article, but more importantly, read the comments.
This reminds me of how geopoliticians wrote about the closure of uncolonized spaces around the turn of the last century. The Turner thesis looked at the effect of the open frontier on America and speculated in the political and economic consequences of the exhaustion of 'free' land. Halford Mackinder noted the closure of the final pieces of colonizable land and argued that conflicts between major powers would increase now that the safety valve of expansion was lost.<p>Now that 'cyberspace' is facing the closure of free 'space' we are seeing similar arguments being put forward about the economic changes that we will face in the new political-economy of a closed Internet.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Thesis" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Thesis</a>
<p><pre><code> But we're going to have to live with the consequences, which include running dual stacks for a transition period that, he thinks, could easily take ten years.
</code></pre>
I have a hard time imagining that happen. What I think would happen in such a situation is that some $newcoolsite will for some reason or an other run only on IPv6 and all the cool kids in the block will make sure to upgrade their equipment to be able to use it or even pressuring their ISPs if they're not IPv6-ready.<p>After all, even windows XP supports IPv6 with the right service pack, if I recall correctly. I think all the equipment I own is IPv6-ready, if not yet IPv6-enabled.<p>As for the domestic routers that only support IPv4, aren't most of those only there to do NAT in the first place?<p>10 years is a hell of a long time in internet time.
> [An ISP-level] NAT router will have to handle large numbers of connections simultaneously, to the point that it will run out of port numbers. Ports numbers are only 16 bits, after all.<p>That's only if you track NAT by <my_port> only; just use <my_addr>,<my_port>,<remote_host> instead (Windows tracks ports only, but everything else seems to get it right).<p>Of course, big routers are still expensive, and the other issues are quite real.
I'm a developer, tech support for my extended family, and admin for a bunch of web stack boxes. Is there a guide on what I (or everyone else) should be doing to mitigate this? Or are the steps that need to be / can be taken immediately only at the ISP level?<p>From the comments on the article it seemed like there was even still some disagreement on quite what to do.