The Ripe NCC Has Run Out of IPv4 Addresses

I’m in the ARIN region. Two things:<p>1. My home has Verizon fiber. No native IPv6. I have a tunnel for this, but such solutions aren’t going to work for the masses. The other in-region residential provider, Comcast, has great native IPv6 service, but had layer 2 performance issues versus price.<p>2. At $dayjob I just ordered a circuit from Level3&#x2F;Centurylink for a branch site. No IP justification form was required if I needed only IPv4 &#x2F;30. But for dual IPv4 &#x2F;30 + IPv6 &#x2F;126, I was required to provide written justification. Shouldn’t this be the other way around? Unencumbered IPv6 for all, with paperwork for IPv4?<p>EDIT: these are not site allocations, just point-to-point link addresses, hence the &#x2F;126. Still, I’m being asked to justify IPv6 but not IPv4.

There are five regional internet registries (RIRs), and Ripe NCC is one of them. Here&#x27;s a map of which services what region[0]<p>Does this mean we&#x27;ve finally run out of new allocatable IPv4 addresses with the RIRs?<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Regional_Internet_registry#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:Regional_Internet_Registries_world_map.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Regional_Internet_registry#&#x2F;me...</a>

And yet my ISP still doesn&#x27;t support IPv6...<p>Until something forces the transition nothing is going to change.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_assigned_&#x2F;8_IPv4_address_blocks" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_assigned_&#x2F;8_IPv4_addre...</a><p>Honestly stupid that USDoD controls at least 13&#x2F;256 of all IPv4 addresses.<p>It seems some entities, e.g. IBM and MIT, have returned (sold?) their &#x2F;8s to their RIRs though.

Unbelievably, github.com and reddit.com _still_ don&#x27;t have ipv6 addresses.

We ran out of IPv4 addresses again. How many times has this happened this past decade?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2174992" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2174992</a> 9y<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4480532" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4480532</a> 7y<p>Looking forward to the next time we run out of IPv4 addresses.

Ripe NCC has run out of address it will give for almost nothing.<p>I checked, and IPv4 address price is somewhere between $20 and $30[0]. It&#x27;s not so bad given it&#x27;s a one-time buy - and using cloud services de facto creates a situation where the buying is in bulk.<p>The real shortage will start be when prices reach $170 I guess? Should take a few years...<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ipv4marketgroup.com&#x2F;broker-services&#x2F;buy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ipv4marketgroup.com&#x2F;broker-services&#x2F;buy&#x2F;</a>

My ISP-provided router supports IPv6, but I&#x27;ve disabled it because I don&#x27;t feel like setting up a firewall for all those poor devices on my network.<p>Are there any guides for how to properly secure a home network so that I can re-enable IPv6 with a clear conscience?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ipv4.potaroo.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ipv4.potaroo.net&#x2F;</a>

I hope all home provision moves to CGNAT IPv4; IPV6 are too easy to track, and every ISP that I&#x27;ve seen ties the prefix to the customer.<p>Who cares about cookies, 1st party or 3rd party, when you have a unique ~60 bit per customer identifier?<p>My ISP gives un-natted IPv4, but I get a different one each time I reboot the modem, which I do every now and then.

I wished IPv6 could be memorized. I can rattle the addresses of all the devices in my home network off with ease, but have trouble remembering a single IPv6. The &quot;just use DNS&quot; answer isn&#x27;t a good one; stuff sometimes breaks, and it&#x27;s much harder to fix when I&#x27;ve got to look everything up.

I&#x27;m in Slovakia. The IPv6 adoption is below 1% and the ISPs don&#x27;t plan IPv6 rollout because &quot;We have enough IPv4 addresses.&quot;. Nowhere I ever had native IPv6 available on home connection, it is option only to business clients.

Using SRV records would eliminate a huge number of IPv4 problems.

Is it even possible to have a webserver that is IPv6 only? How many people wouldn&#x27;t be able to use it?

This will lead to ipv6-only services pretty soon. As the cost of ipv4 space gets higher and higher you&#x27;ll see things like VPSes and cloud hosting stop offering a free IP with their services, and eventually businesses will stop using it too.

Carrier-grade NAT has a much bigger impact than IPv6 will.

Why have successors to IPv4 been designed with variable-length addresses as in earlier versions?

How many ipv4 are in poss2of the US Gov and military? Do they really need all of those?<p>With all these elastic search instances running open to the public I have the feeling that with IPv6 this will get worse as NAT no longer protects you.

Typical of humanity&#x27;s poor prioritization algorithm, I submitted on this 88 days ago … and got zero comments &lt;whomp_whaa&gt;.<p>But, now that <i>it&#x27;s happened</i> … it shoots to the top story.<p>For anyone interested, the blog post from RIPE that I submitted is still up, here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ripe.net&#x2F;publications&#x2F;news&#x2F;about-ripe-ncc-and-ripe&#x2F;getting-ready-for-ipv4-run-out" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ripe.net&#x2F;publications&#x2F;news&#x2F;about-ripe-ncc-and-ri...</a>

Time to shut down the Internet and go outside.<p>So why are IPv4 addresses so valuable? Mostly because IPv6 is overly-complicated and a pain to work with. We should have first added a new range where 5 of the 8 hextets were 0000. And found a simple way to write it without ::<p>Why wasn&#x27;t that done?

Technical arguments aside; IPv6 is just &quot;advanced&quot; enough to allow corporations to fuck over the last bastions of free internet and turn it into nothing but tightly controlled broadcast TV 2.0.<p>The road to hell is paved with good intentions so I guess I will see you all in hell.

Is IPv4 shortage really going to be a problem?<p>For client use, carrier-grade NATs allows to have 1000 IPs per customer, giving 6 million addresses.<p>For server use, TLS SNI allows to have one IP per datacenter, which are estimated to be around 10 million in the world.<p>Non-TLS inbound usage is probably relatively rare, so overall around 100 million addresses should be fundamentally enough even accounting growth.<p>Of course there&#x27;s a lot of inefficiencies, but the fundamentals seem to say that the IPv4 address space is enough.