IPv6 Act Now

Owen DeLong is an IPv6 Evangelist and Director of Professional Services at Hurricane Electric, a large provider of IPv6-native Internet backbone and colocation services.

Most data center operators know that a failure to transition to IPv6 will eventually restrict access to connected resources and degrade communications efficiency. But one lesson of World IPv6 Day (held June 8, 2011) is that IPv6 adoption can bring immediate benefits in the form of improved network topologies and security today.

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The Number Resource Organization (NRO) announced today that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses is now fully depleted. On Monday, January 31, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated two blocks of IPv4 address space to APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region, which triggered a global policy to allocate the remaining IANA pool equally between the five RIRs. Today IANA allocated those blocks. This means that there are no longer any IPv4 addresses available for allocation from the IANA to the five RIRs.

IANA assigns IPv4 addresses to the RIRs in blocks that equate to 1/256th of the entire IPv4 address space. Each block is referred to as a “/8” or “slash-8”. A global policy agreed on by all five RIR communities and ratified in 2009 by ICANN, the international body responsible for the IANA function, dictated that when the IANA IPv4 free pool reached five remaining /8 blocks, these blocks were to be simultaneously and equally distributed to the five RIRs.

“This is an historic day in the history of the Internet, and one we have been anticipating for quite some time,” states Raúl Echeberría, Chairman of the Number Resource Organization (NRO), the official representative of the five RIRs. “The future of the Internet is in IPv6. All Internet stakeholders must now take definitive action to deploy IPv6.”

“This is truly a major turning point in the on-going development of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “Nobody was caught off guard by this, the Internet technical community has been planning for IPv4 depletion for quite some time. But it means the adoption of IPv6 is now of paramount importance, since it will allow the Internet to continue its amazing growth and foster the global innovation we’ve all come to expect.”

IPv6 is the “next generation” of the Internet Protocol, providing a hugely expanded address space and allowing the Internet to grow into the future. “Billions of people world wide use the Internet for everything from sending tweets to paying bills. The transition to IPv6 from IPv4 represents an opportunity for even more innovative applications without the fear of running out of essential Internet IP addresses,” said Vice President of IANA Elise Gerich.

Adoption of IPv6 is now vital for all Internet stakeholders. The RIRs have been working with network operators at the local, regional, and global level for more than a decade to offer training and advice on IPv6 adoption and ensure that everyone is prepared for the exhaustion of IPv4.

“Each RIR will have its final full /8 from IANA, plus any existing IP address holdings to distribute. Depending on address space requests received, this could last each RIR anywhere from a few weeks to many months. It’s only a matter of time before the RIRs and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must start denying requests for IPv4 address space. Deploying IPv6 is now a requirement, not an option,” added Echeberría. IPv6 address space has been available since 1999. Visit http://www.nro.net/ipv6/ for more information on IPv6, or your local RIR for information on how to get address space.

There are now only seven blocks of IPv4 addresses left in the global pool, and five are already allocated.

Last night, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) doled out two blocks each to a pair of regional internet registries (RIRs) – the American Registry for Internet Numbers and RIPE NCC, which manages Europe and the Middle East – leaving only seven blocks, called /8s, of IPv4 addresses remaining.

More from PC Pro…

I attended the RIPE 61 meeting this month, and, not unexpectedly for a group that has some interest in IP addresses, the topic of IPv4 address exhaustion, and the related topic of the transition of the network to IPv6 has captured a lot of attention throughout the meeting. One session I found particularly interesting was one on the transition to IPv6, where folk related their experiences and perspectives on the forthcoming transition to IPv6.

I found the session interesting, as it exposed some commonly held beliefs about the transition to IPv6, so I’d like to share them here, and discuss a little about why I find them somewhat fanciful.

Read more on CircleID…

Have you learned to think and dream in hex yet? That is what you are going to have to look forward to as we transition to using IPv6. Because we will be working in hexadecimal numbers we may need a little assistance converting hex to something more visual when creating our IPv6 addressing plans. That is why IPv6 subnet calculators may be useful. However, there are few subnet calculators that can handle IPv6 addresses.

More on NetworkWorld…

Internet policymakers and industry leaders are hailing the Obama Administration’s plan to upgrade all federal Web sites and e-government services over the next two years to support IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol. More at Computerworld…

The RIPE NCC has posted a second article on IPv6 “ripeness” on the RIPE Labs website. Following on from the initial study (which focused on LIR’s IPv6 readiness by country), the new article looks at the IPv6 readiness of LIRs in the RIPE NCC service region, based on age, size and industry sector.

Read more on RIPE Labs…

The last remaining stocks disappear from the shelves more quickly than ever before . . . IPv4 addresses that is.

As the ARIN met in Toronto in April, an inordinate amount of time was spent yet again debating proposals on how to handle the dwindling stock of IPv4 addresses. I get the distinct impression that some people will still be tabling proposals and discuss the issue long after the last IPv4 block has been allocated by IANA and even the RIR’s themselves.

More from Circle ID…

The internet is running out of big blocks of addresses to give out! IP addresses define the route data takes when it travels through the net and reaches the right person at the right time. Experts estimate that 9 September 2011 is the day when the last of these addresses will be given out for use.

More from The Buzz Blog…

In its 2008 action plan for the deployment of the Future Internet Protocol in Europe, the European Commission is calling for the inclusion of relevant technology knowledge in retraining curricula and in higher education computer and network engineering courses. To support this action, the European Commission, Directorate F – Information Society and Media Unit F4, has just launched a new study aimed at evaluating the current landscape (needs and offer) in the field of the Future Internet Protocols training.

If you are in an organisation providing training and courses in the field of Information Technologies or if you are an organisation making use of IT in its daily activity, you are invited to take the TRICE survey. By answering the survey questions, you will be contributing to the definition of recommendations aimed at developing a European landscape for IT training in line with your needs.

More info