No more free ranges

IANA has run out of ivp4 ranges

[dstiles]

Over the past year-ish IANA has allocated the last few ipv4 /8 ranges. Everything between and including 1/8 and 223/8 has been allocated, leaving only multicast and "future use" unallocated at the top of the range.

At the current rate of usage it will be a while - possibly three or four years - before these have been used up. We are then looking at ipv6, which is going to be a nightmare to block: for one thing there will be 65000 times as many IP ranges to check and maybe block.

Just thought I'd mention it. The new allocations came to my notice today with a brand new server farm to block. :(

Think I'll retire soon. :)

[wilderness]

There is such an abuse with the current ipv4 range assignments in North America to companies and networks.

I'd almost wager they could collect half of the existing IP's and reallocate to new customers with more severe restrictions.

Whose in charge ;)

[g1smd]

IBM has more IP addreses than China!

[dstiles]

I agree that a LOT of IPs are allocated either to ARIN directly or controlled by ARIN in some way. And yes, a LOT of IPs seem to be wasted. Every tin-pot uni or school in US has at least one block of 65,000 IPs - are there really that many real users in every uni or edu?

GE, Xerox, Ford, Prudential are other companies with full /8 delegations.

[lucy24]

Every tin-pot uni or school in US has at least one block of 65,000 IPs - are there really that many real users in every uni or edu?

Same issue as with US telephone prefixes just a few years back, isn't it? They're all in multiples of 10,000 so the prefixes get used up even if three-quarters of the numerical space is empty.

GE, Xerox, Ford, Prudential are other companies with full /8 delegations.

I think MIT has four. 16.0.0.0/6 Not exactly "tin-pot" ;)

The 6-digit format must have been in the wind for a while, because I remember something from my hosting company about it. Don't remember what they said or why it mattered to most of us; maybe it was just a "We want you to know that we know that..."

Oh, ###. Does that mean if your htaccess currently says

1.202

then one of these years you'll have to go back and fill in all the missing bits so they'll know whether you mean

1.202.ccc.ddd
or
1.202.ggg.hhh.iii.kkk

?

[dstiles]

ipv6 has been in use for some time, just not generally. My linux machine specifies a few IPs in that format in the hosts file...

fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

No real idea what it means. I know very little about ipv6 apart from it's going to cause problems when the switch is finally thrown, partly because not all internet tools can handle it but mainly because, like me, a lot of internet users don't know much about it. :(