What ever happened to pushing on the traditional class A owners to free up their address space? I can't help but think that the issue has always been mis management of the early assigned address blocks. Look at Nortel's block for instance... How many addresses are actually reachable directly from the internet? /22 subnets as a standard block with 100 addresses assigned.... They MAY have had an argument 8 years ago when they had 120K employees, but at 25K now, its a bit ridiculous. Hundreds of addresses per employee? How many other blocks are unallocated? V6 is a nice idea, but it only deals with the symptoms, not the cause. ----- Original Message ----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu <owner-nanog@merit.edu> To: nanog@merit.edu <nanog@merit.edu> Sent: Wed Oct 17 18:41:39 2007 Subject: RE: 240/4
the other point as was mentioned later in the thread is that this buys you very little in terms of time before v4 is gone.
On average, it buys everybody very little time. But that assumes that 240/4 is being released as a general solution for everybody. This is not the case. We want to release 240/4 as a solution for those organizations that are in a position to control enough variables to make it useful. For those organizations, 240/4 space could buy a LOT of time, maybe even years. And for the rest of us, the IPv4 addresses that are NOT used by those organizations, do indeed buy only a little extra time. But the point is that we are not gods. We cannot foresee all the variables. We cannot engineer a set of solutions that will work for everybody. Therefore, even if 240/4 only gives us a few extra months before IPv4 is exhausted, it is still worthwhile because it is likely to help some more organizations get their IPv6 transition completed before hitting the brick wall. Since the value of the Internet, IPv4 or IPv6, is in the near universality of access, it is to the benefit of everyone's bottom line for more organizations to complete the transition to IPv6 before IPv4 runs out. We cannot cop out on releasing 240/4 just because it is no magic bullet. How would you feel if your arguments against 240/4 and other half-measures resulted in them not being carried out. And then we hit the brick wall of IPv4 exhaustion and some businesses start to lose serious money? --Michael Dillon P.S. and how will you feel if those businesses trawl the record on the Internet to discover that you, and employee of one of their competitors, caused 240/4 to not be released and thereby harmed their businesses. You will be explaining in front of a judge. We should do everything we can to remove roadblocks which would cause IPv4 to run out sooner, or would cause some people to delay IPv6 deployment.
On 18-okt-2007, at 3:46, BELLEVILLE Ray wrote:
What ever happened to pushing on the traditional class A owners to free up their address space?
The ARIN lawyers say it can't be done. I don't find that a compelling argument, but unless something happens very soon in this area, it will be too late anyway.
I can't help but think that the issue has always been mis management of the early assigned address blocks. Look at Nortel's block for instance... How many addresses are actually reachable directly from the internet? /22 subnets as a standard block with 100 addresses assigned.... They MAY have had an argument 8 years ago when they had 120K employees, but at 25K now, its a bit ridiculous. Hundreds of addresses per employee? How many other blocks are unallocated?
Haha, that's a good one, posting from an Alcatel-Lucent email address! I'm not sure what Nortel address space you're talking about, though. Their name is not in the list of class A holders. But replace "Nortel" with "HP" and your argument becomes twice as strong, they hold nets 15 and 16, for a total of more than 33 million addresses or almost a percent of the usable IPv4 address space. (The US government holds about 5%, though, and they don't seem to be willing to give any of it back.) However, people who think that better managing the existing IPv4 address space is a solution should acquaint themselves with the toothpaste doctrine. A tube of toothpaste is never really empty: if you squeeze really hard, something will come out. But at some point, all the squeezing becomes tiresome and it's easier to buy a new tube and throw away the old one. RFC 3194 observes that in the past, networks generally expanded their address space when around 87% of the address bits was used up. Upto a HD ratio ( = log(addresses used) / log(possible addresses)) of 80% there are no problems. But past that, the cost of managing the address space quickly increases. Not sure what the latest domain survey figures for the number of IP hosts are ( http://www.isc.org/ds/ but I'm working offline right now), but we should be well above a HD ratio of 90% for IPv4 right now. And that's with more than a billion IPv4 addresses unused, so the HD ratio for the allocated RIR space is a lot higher than that. As John Klensin says: for all intents and purposes we're already out of IPv4 addresses. They're already too hard to get for many purposes.
V6 is a nice idea, but it only deals with the symptoms, not the cause.
IPv6 is not perfect but it has a lot of nice features. With IPv4 I need to make sure that my OSPF routers have IPv4 addresses in the same subnet prefix or they won't talk to each other. OSPFv3 and other IPv6 routing protocols simply use link local addresses and this limitation is gone. No need to think about subnet sizes: one size really does fit all. Automatic VRRP-like operation when multiple IPv6 routers are present. But none of these features is worth modifying everything that touches an IPv4 address, from code to ASICs to configs to human brains. The ability to connect new users for years to come is, however, so hopefully we'll find a way to get from where we are today (IPv4) to where we need to be in the future (IPv6) although so far we haven't. What is the cause, by the way?
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BELLEVILLE Ray -
Iljitsch van Beijnum