IPv4 Endgame

I checked out the IPv4 Report website today (Monday, Dec. 06, 2010), and here’s what I saw:

• Projected IANA Unallocated Address Pool Exhaustion: 03-Mar-2011

• Projected RIR Unallocated Address Pool Exhaustion: 02-Dec-2011

That means IANA will run out of unallocated IPv4 addresses to hand out to RIRs in less than three months. In just under a year, the RIRs themselves will be out of unallocated IPv4 addresses. In other words, if you need a new IPv4 address a year from now, you are out of luck. In fact, you may not be able to get one a whole lot sonner than that.

The well-known IPv4 Exhaustion Counter developed by Takashi Arano of Intec NetCore (http://inetcore.com/project/ipv4ec/) shows this:

IPv4 Exhaustion Counter by Takashi Arano (Intec NetCore), as of December 06, 2010 (17:17 hours)

The Second Internet, based on IPv6, isn’t only knocking on our doors. It will come crashing through next year whether we like it or not.

The good news, of course,  is that there really is no reason not to like IPv6.

IPv6 restores the end-to-end nature of the Internet, which has been compromised by the wideapread use of NAT (Network Address Translation). It also provides a nearly inexhaustible number of globally unique and routable IP addresses. In addition, it has built-in IPSEC, new features such as multicast, support for QoS (Quality of Service), and a flat addressing model which is great for P2P applications, VoIP, IPTV, and other neat things.

IPv6: coming to your neighborhood — very soon!

IPv6 at Home!

What’s this?

That’s part of the output from the ifconfig command, which is used (among other things) to show the status of my computer’s network interfaces. This little bit here describes the IPv6 tunnel I managed to get running on my home PC. I’ve blanked out the IP address, of course , so don’t get any funny ideas, hackers.

The tunnel was createed using the Gogo6 client (you can get it from Gogo6.net) and a free IPv6 tunnel account on Freenet6. Linux users will have to compile the client software from the source code. This is easy if you have the all your development tools and libraries installed (I didn’t so I had to do some major updating). The only configuration you have to do is choose your installation directory and edit the file gogoc.conf to enter your Freenet6 credentials and make sure you use an authenticated login. In my case, I chose a non-standard installation directory and had to do a bit of debugging to make sure the client software found all the necessary files.

Not everything is rosy, of course. The tunnel seems to drop every few minutes (its brought up again automatically). I can’t seem to get IPv6 DNS working even though I’ve entered the nameserver in my resolver file (/etc/resolv.conf). That means I can’t ping IPv6-enabled sites using their names. I can, however, ping an IPv6 address.

I guess that means I have to do some more tinkering. Second Internet, here I come!

IPv6 Book: The Second Internet

The founder and Chief Technology Officer of Cebu-based InfoWeapons Corporation, Lawrence Hughes, has written a new book on IPv6 entitled The Second Internet: Reinventing Computer Networking with IPv6. Published in digital format by InfoWeapons, the book has gained critical acclaim from IPv6 and networking experts around the world.

Hughes began InfoWeapons in 2004 to develop and market secure, IPv6-capable network appliances. The company’s research and development facility is in Cebu City.

“I felt that the existing books did not go into enough detail,” Hughes said as he explained his reasons for writing his book. “I tried to help engineers build a bridge from what they know (IPv4) to the new concepts (IPv6). The two main chapters (one on IPv4, one on IPv6) use the same subchapter numbering sequences. So an IPv4 concept might be in section 3.1.2, while the corresponding IPv6 concept would be in section 5.1.2. Kind of like ‘how do I say this in IPv6?’”

“I also created a series of very detailed and complete labs that can be done with generic PCs and open source software, to create a full featured IPv6 testbed network,” he continued. “All labs are done first with just IPv4, then migrated to dual stack (IPv4 + IPv6)… Anyone going through the book together with the hands-on labs will have a fairly complete knowledge of IPv6.”

Although it contains a great deal of technical material, Hughes explained that it will still appeal to a wider audience. “Parts of the book would be suitable for management types that don’t need or want the bits and bytes, but may need to understand timing, transition issues, how to identify products certified to be compliant, and the role of various organizations involved in IPv6,” he said.