Those of us who subscribe to technical magazines and websites will no doubt have heard about the impending depletion of IPV4 addresses and those of us who subscribe to the general press have probably no doubt by now read something about how the Internet is running out of addresses. So what is all this about? This post is an attempt to gather some information about the upcoming shortage of Internet addresses (using the old addressing mechanism) and also to explain the addressing mechanism that we will be moving to (some have already moved) in the future.
When we use the Internet to access websites we usually use the site’s domain name (eg www.google.com) however what this name really is, is a kind of alias for a numeric address (eg http://66.102.11.104/). Computers understand the numeric address while we can understand and remember the alias. The addressing system that has been used to support the Internet is known as IPv4. It is this addressing system that is running out of available addresses. Back in January, I blogged about this and at that time, there was about 10% of the total address space still available. At the time of this post, we are down to about 5%. You can see a running counter here. There are a few models but this one by Geoff Huston is perhaps the best known.
A number of strategies have been put in place to overcome this impending shortage. Most are simply mechanisms to make more efficient use of the existing address space but ultimately we will be moving to a new addressing system known as IPv6.
So what does this mean for us? Well, for most of us, we will just continue to use the Internet and the changes will likely take place without us having to really do anything. The devices we use will support the new system and the networks we access will be upgraded, the software that we use which has to run over those networks and understand them will also be upgraded.
Some of us though, are responsible for large implementations of ICT infrastructure and work with hardware, software and network vendors. These people will need to understand IPv6 and how it is to be deployed in the environments that they are responsible for.
This is not or at least should not be a new problem for these people. IPv6 has been around for some time and the depletion of IPv4 addresses has also been known about and worked on for quite a long time - its just that the actual depletion of those addresses is now just around the corner.
There are quite a lot of resources on the Web about IPv6. Much of this is aimed at networking specialists however there are a number of resources that are a bit more digestible for those of us that aren’t telecommunications network experts. Below is a sample of such resources:
IPV6.org has one of the better FAQs available here.
Some Youtube videos:
Nice video put together by a school student putting the size of the address spaces into context:
ARIN is one of five regional Internet address registries (RIRs). These organisations are responsible for allocating Internet addresses within their parts of the world. ARIN essentially looks after North America. Addresses are allocated to RIRs by IANA. The RIR that looks after our region is APNIC. ARIN has a number of useful educational resources about IPv6 including this powerpoint presentation.
APNIC has a collection of resources here.
