Less than a year until internet addresses run dry

[tabatha]

In less than a year, the world will run out of internet addresses and inaction by internet providers could lead to broken applications and more expensive net connections, experts warn.

The protocol underpinning the net, known as IPv4, provides only about 4 billion IP addresses - not website domain names, but the unique sequence of numbers assigned to each computer, website or other internet-connected device.

The explosion in the number of people, devices and web services on the internet means there are only about 232 million left. This allocation is set to be exhausted in about 340 days.
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"When the IPv4 protocol was developed 30 years ago, it seemed to be a reasonable attempt at providing enough addresses, bearing in mind that at that point personal computers didn't really exist. The idea that mobile phones might want an IP address hadn't occurred to anybody because mobile phones hadn't been invented the idea that airconditioners and refrigerators might want them was utterly ludicrous," said John Lindsay, carrier relations manager at internet service provider (ISP) Internode.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/less-than-a-year-until-internet-addresses-run-dry-20100726-10r83.html

[patrick t. cakes]

1. Y2K!

[tabatha]

2. I hope it's a false alarm.

But the number 4 billion is the limit, and IPs will have to be reset.

[Subdivisions]

3. This from a country that has begun censoring the Internet just as China does. n/t

[BlueJazz]

4. Couldn't Manufacturers just put all their addresses in to a separate intra-net

...or submask. ????

[Edweird]

5. IPv6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6

[Recursion]

8. Still a solution in search of a problem

Though the privacy extensions are interesting.

Irritatingly, the resolver of a stock OpenBSD 4.6 installation will request IN6 addresses because hosts(5) has ::1 for localhost, which makes the resolver think it is connected to an IPv6 network.

[tabatha]

10. I am just about to set up

a localhost on a new computer with Apache, MySQL, PHP.

Have never used OpenBSD.

(Have used localhost with PHP before)

[Make7]

6. It seems Al Gore didn't think ahead quite far enough. ( n/t )

j/k

[SpiralHawk]

15. Actually, he did. But republicon FAIL & obstruction thwarted the problem solving

as usual.

[Recursion]

7. They've been saying that for years; there are plenty of class A's to break up still

The US Army alone has an entire class A that it uses about 0.5% of, same with IBM and Xerox (which owned PARC back when these assignments were being made; Xerox isn't even using 0.001% of its class A).

Furthermore, the class E's (240.0.0.0/4, ie first octet 240 to 255*) remain completely unallocated -- these contain 260,435,424 addresses total.

xkcd has a map: http://xkcd.com/195/

Also, it's still pretty ludicrous for an air conditioner or refrigerator to want a publicly-routable IP address.

* yes, the netblock 255.0.0.0/8 could be a valid network assignment, with a caveat about its own broadcast address.

[tabatha]

9. Thanks for that map.

[htuttle]

11. Look at all the corporations that have their own class A's

I was looking at the xkcd map, and there are about a dozen or more multinationals that own their own class C addresses. Ford? Boeing? Apple? How many servers does the public internet need to contact at any corporation? I'm sure most of them are inaccessible from outside for security reasons, anyway.

[Recursion]

12. At the time these were the guys doing all the routing

And it was assumed they would find something useful to do with all of those addresses (mangling and NAT hadn't been invented yet for the most part, so if Dilbert's computer was going to connect to the PARC network it needed a "real" IP address).

The problem with IP4 isn't the number of addresses, it's convincing the beneficiaries of early allocation to let their vast tracts of unused addresses go. (I'm a hypocrite about this, since at my last sysadmin job we had 6 class C's, four of them contiguous, and we only needed like 16 addresses total. Again, the company got in on things fairly early.)

[LiberalFighter]

13. They use some as ghosts to confuse hackers??

[Erose999]

16. About fridges and air conditioners not needing IP addresses...

Everything has internet nowadays. The time will come when you'll want to turn your icemaker on or adjust your thermostat while you're travelling.

Which is pretty cool potentially because you can turn off your climate control off when you leave and then turn it back on when you are on the way back and not have to come home to a hot/cold house.

[Recursion]

17. I'm aware of that, but the fridge itself won't need a publicly-routable IP address

Your cable modem will have the one IP address your house needs, and it will operate a web and/or messaging and/or whatever-new-killer-protocol-is-discovered gateway to multiplex that IP address to your appliances. Your fridge will have an IP address, but it will be on one of the reusable Reserved Local netblocks (eg, your fridge and your neighbor's fridge will both be 192.168.2.7).

[Historic NY]

14. someone could corner the market.