> From: "Fleischman, Eric W" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> A few questions for the list:
> 1) If we effectively ran out of addresses when RFC 1597 was
> published, has running out of addresses hurt us in any way?
I think, as Brian pointed out today,
draft-carpenter-transparency-04.txt argues that it has.
> 2) Originally we had anticipated using IPv6 to save us from IPv4
> address depletion. What's the status of IPv6? How does IPv6 traffic
> compare in volume with IPv4 traffic? Do non-IPv6-supporting vendors
> (e.g., Microsoft) have plans to eventually support IPv6?
I used to work (and not as a manager, system administrator, salesperson,
or other less technical job) for a UNIX vendor that had been working on
IPv6 for a matter of years when I left. Shipping support for IPv6 in the
same sense as shipping support for IPv4 is not as trivial as it sounds to
managers, network administrators, salespeople, and standards committee
go-ers. It would be merely a major pain if all anyone cared about was
sending IPv6 packets, but there are other things, such as naming, routing,
and the reason for the exercise, applications. And no, while the changes
to applications are generally conceptually trivial, in practice finding
and making the required changes is not. If nothing else, the size of the
bloated IPv6 address has painful, time consuming implications for
applications, standards committee choruses not withstanding.
> 3) Given the current situation of corporations using private
> addresses internally and a smaller set of global IPv4 addresses on
> their periphery, and a global IPv4 internet, one should theoretically
> be able to say how many public IPv4 addresses have been assigned
> and therefore how many remain unassigned and by so doing estimate
> how long until consumption. Why is this not possible in practice?
The number of public IPv4 addresses that have been assigned can be known;
simply ask ARIN &co. However, I don't see how past assignments imply
anything useful about the future. The vast majority of currently assigned
IPv4 addresses could be reassigned for varying costs. At one extreme, it
would be almost free to reassign many of old class-C's that are not
currently routed. In the middle, you could force corporations that own
A's and B's to reassign to RFC 1597 numbers in their internal networks
and yield their blocks. At the other extreme, you could force routed
networks to be compressed.
In other words, the question is meaningless unless you also somehow
specify how much pain you can or will impose or tolerate until the end
and what you consider the end.
Regardless of one's beliefs in the futures of IPv4 and IPv6 and
whether you agree with Brian's apparent personal conclusion,
draft-carpenter-transparency-04.txt lists many of the relevant issues.
Vernon Schryver [EMAIL PROTECTED]
